^ The Show

v The Tell

The Fetch

On the left pane, I issued

for i in (brl list | egrep -v bedrock) ; echo $i | toilet -f future -t $argv | lolcat ; strat -r $i neofetch ; end

(That's fish btw.)

(And yes, neofetch, because I don't yet know how to get fastfetch to respect the strata.)

IIRC, the details on this, a couple years old system since last reinstall of the OS: Hijacked MX, imported AntiX and Artix, fetched the gentoo, devuans and void... package counts not too misleading about what's getting used most, once looking past which came with a fatload preinstalled (MX & AntiX), and which split their packages more causing a bigger number (all the ones based on debians and devuans). Void's my first go-to for any package. Gentoo for when I want to get fussy (e.g. for Gimp or Emacs), the devuans generally for stability, and for what I can't get from void or gentoo. And artix just for the AUR... which I'm currently on pause from using, after being extra careful to gut out anything that could even be remotely afflicted by the recent several bursts of malware attacks. But, besides there being more devuan than gentoo this time (only the one active gentoo stratum? :O), this is a fairly typical daily driver setup for me... Frankly, it has not changed much for about a decade or more. I've got it dialled in, how I like it. With my 4 cornerstones. Void, Gentoo, Devuan, Artix.

The Font

And, before anyone has a [love, or hate] fit about the font (~ 6pixel in st, just for the screenshot to fit it all in ~ my eyes are not that good any more, bigger (12pix I think) in the date, top right), it's called nztt, and is my fave one of many I made a while ago, as part of what had became known as dbtfc ("Digit's Big Tiny Font Collection"). Maybe there are a silent indifferent majority, but most of what I hear are the reactions at the extremes, to nztt. It's genuinely my daily driver, most places. ... Not on web pages though... nztt's designed to maximise vertical space while still being comfortably readable (at least to my own peculiarity of dyslexia), and thus breaks the layout of a lot of websites expecting letters twice as tall with 10 times the vertical space wasted. It's ttf, not a true pixel font, but it is designed to best fit at 6, 12, 18, etc pixels size. Largely inspired by "clean" font, old 80s screen fonts, and my other explorations into tiny fonts.

The Rest

I'm still in XFCE on this T495 Thinkpad. I had intended to switch to using my wminizer script, populated with a standard 2 wmrotate scripts, the first populated with just xmonad, dwm, and herbstluftwm, and the other, the same, but also with openbox.

But I've always had things on here, never found a nice moment to interrupt things. ... The irony. This would be a non-issue with wminizer. But I've not yet done the first restart of X11 to get it running wminizer. So [even though I've already changed the config, ready to go] I'm stuck in that predicament that I wrote wminizer to be able to solve. XD

[PS, I'm burned out and left my repos in a terrible janky way, even by my scruffy standard... like the tagline on my codeberg profile says: "My stuff's scruffy. Don't use it."... ... though, if you don't mind fiddling around past my jank... wminizer is availing a very cool ability to have: Can change your wm without restarting X11, keeping everything running, and, can change the list of which wm you can switch to, too, keeping everything running uninterupted, without restarting X11.]

Nothing much fancy done to the XFCE. Didn't intend to stay. Made the bar nice and tight, how I like it. Only in recent days, (after months... years(!??) lingering in XFCE), I moved it to the top, to try, to see if that would be less annoying, fewer times of its pop ups from mouse overs on the taskbar buttons getting in the way of the things i want to click (e.g. active erc buffers listed in my mode-line in emacs). Should be fewer things up top that I'd want to be clicking where it shows. Mostly just the window bar there.

The Nothing To See Here.

And so, that's why there's nothing much to see here. In the typical eye-candy unix porn sense. But... the eagle eye'd may have spotted the one tid-bit of show-and-tell that may excite some, perhaps as much as 1-10% as much as it excites me, highlighted in the right pane. ... two things in a way. 1st, there's bpt! And 2nd (the main excitement for me), in bpt, there's the htop fork, with the stratum column!

A few years back (I forget when... 2019?) I had been musing various ways (in my own janky limited-abilities-and-knowledge way) to get strata info on various system info tools [[[(see doodle drop down example)]]], and mentioning my own fledgling flailing failing efforts. And then paradigm surprised me one day, (iirc) simply saying "Happy Christmas", and presented a link to a version of htop (that he had made) that now had the stratum column. :) After a while, my continued use of it became contingent on me maintaining its old deps manually (~ and certainly, any efforts of mine to maintain patching for newer htop and deps, failed early fast and hard). And eventually, I failed managing to even maintain it... and so, for a few months or so, I'd become without htop with a stratum column. And so went back to trying to hack up my own solutions...

::: spoiler llm doodled another thing like that recently in the interim without it

function psbr2
    # 1. Snapshot the entire output exactly once
    set -l ps_data (ps aux)

    # 2. Print header with the new column
    echo "$ps_data[1] STRATUM"

    # 3. Process each process line
    for line in $ps_data[2..-1]
        # Split by whitespace, automatically collapsing multiple spaces
        set -l fields (string split -n ' ' $line)
        set -l pid $fields[2]
	# Resolve stratum for this specific PID
        set -l strat (brl which $pid 2>/dev/null || echo "-")
	# Append the stratum to the original line

    echo -n "$line" ; set_color red ; echo " $strat" ; set_color normal 
    end
end

Though, true to my ways of janky code, that runs slow.

[Actually... If I'd put my mind to it more, I'd have done better than the llm there, I see now, looking at that again. Jeez they do silly things. ... anyways... moving on... no spoons to mend it now. Code's spoon expensive. Rambling this drivel's fine. I am obeying burnout recovery protocol with this. Honest.]

Anyway, that's just to give the gist, of some system info tool getting strata info added to it.

:::

and then came paradigm again, now in 2026, with bpt this time, populated with... htop! (and 9 other packages, but meh, the htop with stratum column's the real highlight among the libs and other standard boring things).

So if your system is stratified, that may be handy for you. :)

That's the highlight here for me, main reason (besides boredom (while supposed to be resting from burnout)?) for posting:

htop with stratum column is back!

(But shshsh. Still linux's best kept secret. Hehe. You know what I mean if you know. If not [(or even if in the know, back to)]... ooh, look at the novel autumnal colour theme for the terminal, and, either "That font is base/sick/thegoat/wild/cool/snappy" or "Yeurgh. Do you actually use that font!? What's wrong with you!".)

Though this [intentionally buried lede] is exciting to me, it probably isn't exciting for anyone else, certainly not the majority... but isn't that the greatest glory of unix porn? Each their own.

... I better stop proof reading this before I keep adding more so much that it gets long. :3