I'm not sure if this commit breaks everything in my monorepo. I think it
will.
Why am I doing this? Perhaps it's a bad idea. I don't fully understand how
readTree works. My ignorance is costing me hours of time spent debugging. In an
effort to better understand readTree, I'm removing the default values for my Nix
expression parameters, which I believe have preventing errors from surfacing.
After working with fish for a few weeks, I've decided that I prefer aliases to
abbreviations.
Why? When I reverse search through my command history, I search for the
what I typed and not what it expanded to. Some of my aliases wrap existing
tools encoding my preference for tool A if tool B isn't available. For example I
alias vim to neovim. When nvim isn't available on $PATH, typing vim will
expand to nvim, which will in turn fail.
Renaming my mono-repo briefcase.
I first introduced this commit in master, but it introduced a bug where one of
two things would happen:
1. Emacs wouldn't start and would crash X.
2. Emacs would start but my keyboard wouldn't work.
I learned some valuable debugging skills in the process. Here are some of them:
When my keyboard was broken, I wanted to control my computer using my
laptop. Thankfully this is possible by using `x2x`, which forward X events from
the SSH client to the SSH host.
```shell
> # I'm unsure if this is the *exact* command
> ssh -X desktop x2x -west :0.0
```
Git commit-local bisecting. I didn't need to do a `git bisect` because I knew
which commit introduced the bug; it was HEAD, master. But -- as you can see from
the size of this commit -- there are many changes involved. I wanted to binary
search through the changes, so I did the following workflow using `magit`:
- git reset --soft HEAD^
- git stash 1/2 of the files changed
- re-run `nix-env -f ~/briefcase/emacs -i`
- restart X session
- If the problem persists, the bug exists in the non-stashed files. Repeat the
process until you find the bug.
In my case, the bug was pretty benign. Calling `(exwm/switch "Dotfiles")` at the
bottom of `window-manager.el` was failing because "Dotfiles" is the name of a
non-existent workspace; it should've been `(exwm/switch "Briefcase")`.
There may have been more problems. I changed a few other things along the way,
including exposing the env vars BRIEFCASE to `wpcarros-emacs` inside of
`emacs/default.nix`.
The important part is that this was a valuable learning opportunity, and I'm
glad that I'm walking away from the two days of "lost productivity" feeling
actually productive.
