Technology

i3 window manager – a week later

A week ago I blogged about i3 window manager and my attempt to use it instead of MATE. So, how am I am doing so far?

The long story short: I love i3. It’s awesome. But I still switch back to MATE once in a while.

What’s good about i3? It’s super fast. Even faster than a pretty fast MATE. It’s keyboard navigated, and it only takes about a day to get used to enough keyboard shortcuts to feel comfortable and productive. It’s super efficient. Until I tried i3 I didn’t recognize how much time I spend moving windows around. It is unexcusable amount of time spent needlessly.

What’s bad about i3? It’s low level. In order to make it work right with multiple screens, one need to get really familiar with xrandr, the tool I last used years ago. If you are on a laptop, with a dynamic setup for the second screen (one monitor at the office, one at home, and an occasionally different project at client’s premises), you’ll need a bunch of helper scripts to assist you in quick change between these setups.

And then there is an issue of flickering desktop. The web is full of questions about how to solve a variety of flickering issues when using i3. The one that I see most often is the screen going black once in a while. Sometimes it takes a second to come back, sometimes a few seconds, and sometimes and it doesn’t come back at all. The more windows I have, spread across more workspaces, with more connected monitors – the more often I see the issues. It’s annoying, and it’s difficult to troubleshoot or even report, as I haven’t found a pattern yet, or how to reproduce the problem.

With that said though, I am now about 80% time using i3. I like the simplicity and efficiency of it. It’s so good, that I work better even without a second monitor. But when I do need a second monitor (paired programming, demos, etc), or when I have a projector connected, I switch to MATE. That’s about 20% of my time.

WordPress.vim – Vim Plugin for WordPress Development

If Vim is your editor of choice, and WordPress is something you work with on a regular basis, then check out WordPress.vim – a Vim plugin for WordPress development.

Some of the features are:

Auto-Completion for the WordPress API
WordPress Hooks Integration
WP-CLI Integration
Jump to Definition in WordPress Core
UltiSnips Snippets
Syntax Highlighting for WordPress PHP files.
Markdown Syntax Highlighting for readme.txt
PHPCS Syntax Checker integrated with WordPress Coding Standards
Search in Codex
Integration with WpSeek API.
Readme.txt Auto Validation.

GitHub starts the Open Source Guides

GitHub blog is “Announcing Open Source Guides“:

we’re launching the Open Source Guides, a collection of resources for individuals, communities, and companies who want to learn how to run and contribute to open source.

[…]

Open Source Guides are a series of short, approachable guides to help you participate more effectively in open source, whether it’s:

Finding users for your project

Making your first contribution

Managing large open source communities

Improving the workflow of your project

These guides aim to reflect the voice of the community and their years of wisdom and practice. We’ve focused on the topics we’ve heard about most, and curated stories from open source contributors across the web.

I think it’s a great idea and I really like the execution too. Most of what I know about Open Source comes from years of participation, and from reading old books, manuals and licenses – not something that is easy to share with people who are just getting their feet wet.

GitHub’s Open Source Guides are very simple, concise and specific. And they cover a variety of subjects, not just the legal or technical side of things, but also communications, support, marketing, etc.

Fixing outdated Let’s Encrypt (zope.interface error)

I’ve started using Let’s Encrypt for the SSL certificates a while back. I installed it on all the web servers, irrelevant of the need for SSL, just to have it there, when I need it (thanks to this Ansible role). One of those old web servers needed an SSL certificate recently, so I thought it’d be no problem to generate one.

But I was wrong. The letsencrypt-auto tool got outdated and was failing to execute, throwing some Python exception about missing zope.interface module. A quick Google search brought this StackOverflow discussion, with the exact issue I was having.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/root/.local/share/letsencrypt/bin/letsencrypt", line 7, in <module>
    from certbot.main import main
  File "/root/.local/share/letsencrypt/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/certbot/main.py", line 12, in <module>
    import zope.component
  File "/root/.local/share/letsencrypt/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/zope/component/__init__.py", line 16, in <module>
    from zope.interface import Interface
ImportError: No module named interface

However, the solution didn’t fix the problem for me:

unset PYTHON_INSTALL_LAYOUT
/opt/letsencrypt/letsencrypt-auto -v

Even pulling the updated version from the GitHub repository didn’t solve it.

After poking around for a while more, I found this bug report from the last year, which solved my problem.

I recommend:

Running rm -rf /root/.local/share/letsencrypt. This removes your installation of letsencrypt, but keeps all configuration files, certificates, logs, etc.

Make sure you have an up to date copy of letsencrypt-auto. It can be found here.

Run letsencrypt-auto again.

If you get the same behavior, you can try installing zope.interface manually by running:

/root/.local/share/letsencrypt/bin/pip install zope.interface

Hopefully, next time I’ll remember to search my blog’s archives …

Update (May 31, 2017): check out my brother’s follow up post with even better way of fixing this issue.