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.title {text-wrap:balance;} #content > p:first-child {text-wrap:balance;} .gallery { display:flex; justify-content:center; } figure a:link, figure a:visited, figure a:hover, figure a:active {color:inherit; text-decoration: underline;} Netbooks are dead, but the Chuwi Minibook X scratches the same itch. The Minibook X is a 10.5″ x86_64 sub-ultrabook with 16GB RAM, a 512GB NVMe drive, and only one majorly annyoing Linux quirk. I needed a knock-around laptop, so I bought myself a Minibook for my birthday last year. The more I tote it around, the more fun I’m having with this ridiculous little computer. Chuwi Minibook X Quick specs Much like the netbooks of yore, the Minibook is a budget machine. But it’s 2026, so even budget machines pack more oomph than I need from a utility laptop. CPU 4-core/4-thread 3.6GHz Intel N150 Twin Lake 16 GB RAM – LPDDR5-6400 – soldered 😿 512GB NVMe – upgradable 10.51” IPS 2K 16:10 screen 28.88Wh Li-Ion battery Weight: 911g Ports: 2×USB-C (1×PD charging) Cost: $350 Chuwi Minibook Guts One oddity is that the Minibook comes bundled with a 12V/2A USB-C charger. I chucked the charger; I worried I’d fry some 5V SoC someday. The Minibook works fine with a PD charger. Minibook X using a PD Charger at 20V I’d assume the 12V charger was a cost-saving choice, but it also creates some weird possibilities for DC/off-grid setups. Linux and weirdness: sideways panels and kernel parameters Charlie Stross, a favorite SciFi author, talks up the Chuwi Minibook X on Mastodon The fediverse told me that Minibook runs Linux “boringly well,” which was almost true. I tried Debian, then jumped to NixOS for kicks. What works: Camera/Microphone/Speakers Touchscreen Sleep/Suspend Hibernate Keyboard backlight USB-C HDMI Bluetooth (non-free blobs – Intel) Wi-Fi 6 (non-free blobs – Intel) But on first boot, the screen orientation is 270° clockwise: Linux setup screen rotated 270°. The Chuwi’s screen is a panel from a cheap tablet; the screen rotation issue is a hardware problem (the screen is mounted sideways). To fix the screen’s rotation, I had to tweak screen orientation at every software layer. Fixing this problem was a journey: Bootloader – Switched from systemd-boot to grub, carrying some unmerged GRUB rotation patches on top. Initrd – Tell the Intel display driver about the panel orientation via a kernel parameter, and force the Intel driver to load in the initramfs. On NixOS: boot.kernelParams = ["video=DSI-1:panel_orientation=right_side_up"]; and boot.initrd.kernelModules = ["i915"]; (see Kernel docs for modedb default video mode support) Desktop environment – For X11, good ole xrandr --output DSI-1 --rotate right. Wayland picked this up from the DRM connector. This one was easy. Framebuffer – Ensure all TTYs have the proper orientation by adding fbcon=rotate:1 to kernel parameters boot.kernelParams = ["fbcon=rotate:1"]; (see Kernel docs for framebuffer console boot options) Behold, the final result in all its glory: Non-rotated system boot. Zero Cool's bootscreen courtesy of mainframed/Hackers-Plymouth Size, weight, and build This computer is mind-bogglingly small. The build is sturdy and totable; it’ll hold up to a backpack jostling. Chuwi Minibook X with "banana" for scale The laptop’s case is MacBook-esque: aluminum and good-looking. The MacBook Air’s dimensions dwarf the Chuwi’s, but the two laptops are about the same thickness. Chuwi Minibook X alongside the Macbook Air Chuwi Minibook atop the Macbook Air A notebook that weighs more than a kilo is simply not a good thing – Linus Torvalds The Minibook weighs in just shy of a kilo at 912 grams. My Minibook X weighs 912g Perf, thermals, and power tl;dr: you get what you pay for. But battery life and cooling are better than I’d have guessed. The Minibook X was never going to compile the Linux kernel in record time. But the performance matches the specs, it stays cool, and it has enough battery life to run a movie marathon. Numbers: Geekbench6 (a fun side-quest to get running on NixOS), better than I expected. Single-core: 1295 Multi-core: 3332 Wi-Fi 6 speed: 424 Mbps, more than enough to stream a 4K movie. Power Idle: 3.8W During benchmark: ~15W Battery: When I left the 1995 classic film “Hackers” looping in VLC, the battery lasted about 6 hours. Heat: Running stress-ng for 10 minutes, the hottest part of the laptop chassis remained below 90°F (32°C): Thermal camera view of Chuwi Minibook X running stress-ng What I dislike There’s so much to dislike about this laptop: Screen is terrible – 2K? 50Hz refresh rate? Why!? Keyboard is terrible – it only registers keystrokes when you hit the exact center of each key. Touchpad is terrible – It’s a diving board-style, without physical buttons. Sound is meh – I can hear the tinny laptop speaker fine, but it’s underwhelming. I’ve never tried tweaking it in Pipewire, though; it’s possible it could be better. But “terrible” is in comparison to the nicest modern laptops in existence. Everything I listed here works fine. I’m honestly blown away when I tune my expectations to the sub-$400 laptop range. Verdict In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote, “new ideas require old buildings”: cheap spaces let people try risky ideas. The Chuwi Minibook X is an old building. I can brick the Minibook and have a normal Monday on my serious work laptop. Nothing has to work, which makes it perfect to try out new Linux desktop stuff: NixOS – I’ve been using Debian for 15 years+, figured I’d try joining the NixOS cult for a while. RiverWM – I’m on a quest to find the Wayland version of XMonad; River is pretty close. KDE Plasma – I’ve used a tiling window manager for over a decade. What’s it like to use a desktop that Just Works™? Steam – Never been much into games, but I decided to give Steam a try since, well, why not? Cheap, weird computers like the Chuwi make it safe to play. And playing with computers is still fun. Playing Melatonin on Steam on the Chuwi
.title {text-wrap:balance;} #content > p:first-child {text-wrap:balance;} Hackers are pwning packages at an exhausting clip. But the hacks are hackneyed. What’s new is the doom cycle: Code that steals keys to publish code to steal more keys. A zombie army of infected code. And AI is making it worse. GitHub Actions are a trap Trivy is an open-source security scanner. But if you used Trivy in late March, you had a bad time. On March 19th, hackers pushed a version of Trivy that tried to smuggle secrets from anywhere it ran. Trivy cited a “misconfiguration” in their continuous integration (CI) system, GitHub Actions. But the exploit was less a misconfiguration and more a GitHub Actions trap. Admiral Ackbar warning about the trap in GitHub Actions Here’s a simplified version of how Trivy got pwnd1: # INSECURE. DO NOT USE. on: pull_request_target jobs: check: steps: - uses: action/checkout@deadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeef with: ref: refs/pull/${{ github.event.pull_request.number }}/merge - uses: ./.github/actions/setup-go - uses: some/go-static-analysis@c0ffeec0ffeec0ffeec0ffeec0ffeec0ffeec0ff At first glance, this code looks fine: No secrets referenced. Third-party actions pinned to an immutable hash. Check out a pull request. Perform some static analysis. But this code is a verbatim antipattern from a 2021 GitHub blog post titled “preventing pwn requests”: if the pull_request_target workflow only […] runs untrusted code but doesn’t reference any secrets, is it still vulnerable? Yes it is – GitHub Security Lab The problem is pull_request_target: pull_request_target – plunks a nice, juicy GITHUB_TOKEN into the environment. actions/checkout – takes an optional parameter persist-credentials, which removes secrets if set to false. But the default for the parameter is true. Setting the persist-credentials parameter to false has been an open issue in GitHub Actions since 2021. Your $HOME is a crime scene Once hackers had Trivy’s keys, they published a new version of Trivy to steal more keys. LiteLLM used Trivy in their CI. The same CI they used to publish code to PyPI, the Python software registry. When LiteLLM’s CI ran the compromised Trivy, hackers nabbed their publishing key. And on March 24th, when Callum McMahon fired up his IDE, his MacBook froze. And that’s how he discovered the LiteLLM hijack. McMahon’s MacBook was flailing at bad code that hackers snuck into LiteLLM. And the bad code trying to steal credentials: ~/.netrc ~/.aws/credentials ~/.config/gcloud ~/.config/gh ~/.azure ~/.docker/config.json ~/.npmrc ~/.git-credentials ~/.kube/ Files that are typically strewn around $HOME directories, full of tokens and keys, often unencrypted. AI and the supply chain doom spiral We’ve dealt with problems like unencrypted credentials, unpinned dependencies, and CI footguns forever. But AI has accelerated everything, including repeating security mistakes. On the day of the Trivy compromise, I asked Claude, “how do I scan docker registry images for security vulnerabilities?” The reply, in part: CI/CD Integration Example (GitHub Actions with Trivy) - name: Scan image for vulnerabilities uses: aquasecurity/trivy-action@master Broken in two ways: Unpinned references – master is a reference that changes all the time. If hackers zombify the repo, I’d be the first victim. Active vulnerability – No mention whatsoever of the CVE posted that day. I never asked, so Claude never checked. Meanwhile, Vercel’s CEO has attributed his company’s recent data breach to a hacker that was “accelerated by AI.” And Anthropic’s latest hype tour includes briefing the US Federal Reserve Chair about vulnerabilities unearthed by their frontier model. Bad guys with LLMs get superpowers. Good guys with LLMs fall prey to mid-2010’s CI problems. And the same tool that can root out 27-year-old security problems in OpenBSD, will still tell you to pin your GitHub actions to @master. My GitHub Actions example is a simpler verison of the action removed in aquasecurity/trivy #10259.↩︎
.title {text-wrap:balance;} #content > p:first-child {text-wrap:balance;} If Git had a nemesis, it’d be large files. Large files bloat Git’s storage, slow down git clone, and wreak havoc on Git forges. In 2015, GitHub released Git LFS—a Git extension that hacked around problems with large files. But Git LFS added new complications and storage costs. Meanwhile, the Git project has been quietly working on large files. And while LFS ain’t dead yet, the latest Git release shows the path towards a future where LFS is, finally, obsolete. What you can do today: replace Git LFS with Git partial clone Git LFS works by storing large files outside your repo. When you clone a project via LFS, you get the repo’s history and small files, but skip large files. Instead, Git LFS downloads only the large files you need for your working copy. In 2017, the Git project introduced partial clones that provide the same benefits as Git LFS: Partial clone allows us to avoid downloading [large binary assets] in advance during clone and fetch operations and thereby reduce download times and disk usage. – Partial Clone Design Notes, git-scm.com Git’s partial clone and LFS both make for: Small checkouts – On clone, you get the latest copy of big files instead of every copy. Fast clones – Because you avoid downloading large files, each clone is fast. Quick setup – Unlike shallow clones, you get the entire history of the project—you can get to work right away. What is a partial clone? A Git partial clone is a clone with a --filter. For example, to avoid downloading files bigger than 100KB, you’d use: git clone --filter='blobs:size=100k' <repo> Later, Git will lazily download any files over 100KB you need for your checkout. By default, if I git clone a repo with many revisions of a noisome 25 MB PNG file, then cloning is slow and the checkout is obnoxiously large: $ time git clone https://github.com/thcipriani/noise-over-git Cloning into '/tmp/noise-over-git'... ... Receiving objects: 100% (153/153), 1.19 GiB real 3m49.052s Almost four minutes to check out a single 25MB file! $ du --max-depth=0 --human-readable noise-over-git/. 1.3G noise-over-git/. $ ^ 🤬 And 50 revisions of that single 25MB file eat 1.3GB of space. But a partial clone side-steps these problems: $ git config --global alias.pclone 'clone --filter=blob:limit=100k' $ time git pclone https://github.com/thcipriani/noise-over-git Cloning into '/tmp/noise-over-git'... ... Receiving objects: 100% (1/1), 24.03 MiB real 0m6.132s $ du --max-depth=0 --human-readable noise-over-git/. 49M noise-over-git/ $ ^ 😻 (the same size as a git lfs checkout) My filter made cloning 97% faster (3m 49s → 6s), and it reduced my checkout size by 96% (1.3GB → 49M)! But there are still some caveats here. If you run a command that needs data you filtered out, Git will need to make a trip to the server to get it. So, commands like git diff, git blame, and git checkout will require a trip to your Git host to run. But, for large files, this is the same behavior as Git LFS. Plus, I can’t remember the last time I ran git blame on a PNG 🙃. Why go to the trouble? What’s wrong with Git LFS? Git LFS foists Git’s problems with large files onto users. And the problems are significant: 🖕 High vendor lock-in – When GitHub wrote Git LFS, the other large file systems—Git Fat, Git Annex, and Git Media—were agnostic about the server-side. But GitHub locked users to their proprietary server implementation and charged folks to use it.1 💸 Costly – GitHub won because it let users host repositories for free. But Git LFS started as a paid product. Nowadays, there’s a free tier, but you’re dependent on the whims of GitHub to set pricing. Today, a 50GB repo on GitHub will cost $40/year for storage. In contrast, storing 50GB on Amazon’s S3 standard storage is $13/year. 😰 Hard to undo – Once you’ve moved to Git LFS, it’s impossible to undo the move without rewriting history. 🌀 Ongoing set-up costs – All your collaborators need to install Git LFS. Without Git LFS installed, your collaborators will get confusing, metadata-filled text files instead of the large files they expect. The future: Git large object promisors Large files create problems for Git forges, too. GitHub and GitLab put limits on file size2 because big files cost more money to host. Git LFS keeps server-side costs low by offloading large files to CDNs. But the Git project has a new solution. Earlier this year, Git merged a new feature: large object promisers. Large object promisors aim to provide the same server-side benefits as LFS, minus the hassle to users. This effort aims to especially improve things on the server side, and especially for large blobs that are already compressed in a binary format. This effort aims to provide an alternative to Git LFS – Large Object Promisors, git-scm.com What is a large object promisor? Large object promisors are special Git remotes that only house large files. In the bright, shiny future, large object promisors will work like this: You push a large file to your Git host. In the background, your Git host offloads that large file to a large object promisor. When you clone, the Git host tells your Git client about the promisor. Your client will clone from the Git host, and automagically nab large files from the promisor remote. But we’re still a ways off from that bright, shiny future. Git large object promisors are still a work in progress. Pieces of large object promisors merged to Git in March of 2025. But there’s more to do and open questions yet to answer. And so, for today, you’re stuck with Git LFS for giant files. But once large object promisors see broad adoption, maybe GitHub will let you push files bigger than 100MB. The future of large files in Git is Git. The Git project is thinking hard about large files, so you don’t have to. Today, we’re stuck with Git LFS. But soon, the only obstacle for large files in Git will be your half-remembered, ominous hunch that it’s a bad idea to stow your MP3 library in Git. Edited by Refactoring English Later, other Git forges made their own LFS servers. Today, you can push to multiple Git forges or use an LFS transfer agent, but all this makes set up harder for contributors. You’re pretty much locked-in unless you put in extra effort to get unlocked.↩︎ File size limits: 100MB for GitHub, 100MB for GitLab.com↩︎
Any code of your own that you haven’t looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else. – Eagleson’s Law After scouring git history, I found the correct config file, but someone removed it. Their full commit message read: Remove config. Don't bring it back. Very. helpful. But I get it; it’s hard to care about commit messages when you’re making a quick change. Git commit templates can help. Commit templates provide a scaffold for your commit messages, reminding you to answer questions like: What problem are you solving? Why is this the solution? What alternatives did you consider? Where can I read more? What is a git commit template? When you type git commit, git pops open your text editor1. Git can pre-fill your editor with a commit template—a form that reminds you of everything it’s easy to forget when writing a commit. Creating a commit template is simple. Create a plaintext file – mine lives at ~/.config/git/message.txt Tell git to use it: git config --global \ commit.template '~/.config/git/message.txt' My template packs everything I know about writing a commit. Project-specific templates Large projects, such as Linux kernel, git, and MediaWiki, have their own commit guidelines. Git templates can remind you about these per-project requirements if you add a commit template to a project’s .git/config file. Another way to do this is git’s includeIf configuration setting. includeIf lets you override git config settings when you’re working under directories you define. For example, all my Wikimedia work lives in ~/Projects/Wikimedia and at the bottom of my ~/.config/git/config I have: [includeIf "gitdir:~/Projects/Wikimedia/**"] path = ~/.config/git/config.wikimedia In config.wikimedia, I point to my Wikimedia-specific commit template (along with other necessary git settings: my user.email, core.hooksPath, and a pushInsteadOf url to push to ssh even when I clone via https). Forge-specific templates Personal git commit templates lead to better commits, which make for a better history. The forge-specific pull-request templates are a band-aid, the cheap kind that falls off in the shower. There’s no incentive for GitHub to make git history better: the worse your commit history, the more you rely on GitHub. Still, all the major pull-request-style forges let you foist a pull-request template on your contributors. As a contributor, I dislike filling those out—they add unnecessary friction. Commit message contents Your commit template allows you do the hard thinking upfront. Then, when you make a commit, you simply follow the template. My template asks questions I answer with my commit message: 72ch. wide -------------------------------------------------------- BODY # | # - Why should this change be made? | # - What problem are you solving? | # - Why this solution? | # - What's wrong with the current code? | # - Are there other ways to do it? | # - How can the reviewer confirm it works? | # | # ---------------------------------------------------------------- /BODY But other clever folks cooked up conventions you could incorporate: Conventional commits – how do your commits relate to semantic versioning? This makes it easier for SRE and downstream users. Problem/Solution format – first pioneered by ZeroMQ2, this format anticipates the questions of future developers and reviewers. Gitmoji – developed for the GitHub crowd, this format defines an emoji shorthand that makes it easy to spot changes of a particular type. Commit message formatting How you format text affects how people read it. My template also deals with text formatting rules3: Subject – 50 characters or less, capitalized, no end punctuation. Body – Wrap at 72 characters with a blank line separating it from the subject. Trailers – Standard formats with a blank line separating them from the body. People will read your commit in different contexts: git log, git shortlog, and git rebase. But git’s pager has no line wrapping by default. I hard wrap at 72 characters because that makes text easier to read in wide terminals.4 Finally, my template addresses trailers, reminding me about standard trailers supported in the projects I’m working on. Git can interpret trailers, which can be useful later. For example, if I wanted a tab-separated list of commits and their related tasks I could find that with git log: $ TAB=%x09 $ BUG_TRAILER='%(trailers:key=Bug,valueonly=true,separator=%x2C )' $ SHORT_HASH=%h $ SUBJ=%s $ FORMAT="${SHORT_HASH}${TAB}${BUG_TRAILER}${TAB}${GIT_SUBJ}" $ git log --topo-order --no-merges \ --format="$FORMAT" d2b09deb12f T359762 Rewrite Kurdish (ku) Latin to Arabic converter 28123a6a262 T332865 tests: Remove non-static fallback in HookRunnerTestBase 4e919a307a4 T328919 tests: Remove unused argument from data provider in PageUpdaterTest bedd0f685f9 objectcache: Improve `RESTBagOStuff::handleError()` 2182a0c4490 T393219 tests: Remove two data provider in RestStructureTest Git commit templates free your brain from remembering what you should write, allowing you to focus on the story you should tell. Your future self will thank you for the effort. Starting with core.editor in your git config, $VISUAL or $EDITOR in your shell, finally falling back to vi.↩︎ I think…↩︎ All cribbed from Tim Pope↩︎ Another story I’ve heard: a standard terminal allows 80 characters per line. git log indents commit messages with 4 spaces. A 72-character-per-line commit centers text on an 80-character-per-line terminal. To me, readability in modern terminals is a better reason to wrap than kowtowing to antiquated terminals.↩︎
[The] Linux kernel uses GPLv2, and if you distribute GPLv2 code, you have to provide a copy of the source (and modifications) once someone asks for it. And now I’m asking nicely for you to do so 🙂 – Joga, bbs.onyx-international.com Boox in split screen, typewriter mode In January, I bought a Boox Go 10.3—a 10.3-inch, 300-ppi, e-ink Android tablet. After two months, I use the Boox daily—it’s replaced my planner, notebook, countless PDF print-offs, and the good parts of my phone. But Boox’s parent company, Onyx, is sketchy. I’m conflicted. The Boox Go is a beautiful, capable tablet that I use every day, but I recommend avoiding as long as Onyx continues to disregard the rights of its users. How I’m using my Boox My e-ink floor desk Each morning, I plop down in front of my MagicHold laptop stand and journal on my Boox with Obsidian. I use Syncthing to back up my planner and sync my Zotero library between my Boox and laptop. In the evening, I review my PDF planner and plot for tomorrow. I use these apps: Obsidian – a markdown editor that syncs between all my devices with no fuss for $8/mo. Syncthing – I love Syncthing—it’s an encrypted, continuous file sync-er without a centralized server. Meditation apps1 – Guided meditation away from the blue light glow of my phone or computer is better. Before buying the Boox, I considered a reMarkable. The reMarkable Paper Pro has a beautiful color screen with a frontlight, a nice pen, and a “type folio,” plus it’s certified by the Calm Tech Institute. But the reMarkable is a distraction-free e-ink tablet. Meanwhile, I need distraction-lite. What I like Calm(ish) technology – The Boox is an intentional device. Browsing the internet, reading emails, and watching videos is hard, but that’s good. Apps – Google Play works out of the box. I can install F-Droid and change my launcher without difficulty. Split screen – The built-in launcher has a split screen feature. I use it to open a PDF side-by-side with a notes doc. Reading – The screen is a 300ppi Carta 1200, making text crisp and clear. What I dislike I filmed myself typing at 240fps, each frame is 4.17ms. Boox’s typing latency is between 150ms and 275ms at the fastest refresh rate inside Obsidian. Typing – Typing latency is noticeable. At Boox’s highest refresh rate, after hitting a key, text takes between 150ms to 275ms to appear. I can still type, though it’s distracting at times. The horror of the default pen Accessories Pen – The default pen looks like a child’s whiteboard marker and feels cheap. I replaced it with the Kindle Scribe Premium pen, and the writing experience is vastly improved. Cover – It’s impossible to find a nice cover. I’m using a $15 cover that I’m encasing in stickers. Tool switching – Swapping between apps is slow and clunky. I blame Android and the current limitations of e-ink more than Boox. No frontlight – The Boox’s lack of frontlight prevents me from reading more with it. I knew this when I bought my Boox, but devices with frontlights seem to make other compromises. Onyx The Chinese company behind Boox, Onyx International, Inc., runs the servers where Boox shuttles tracking information. I block this traffic with Pi-Hole2. pihole-ing whatever telemetry Boox collects I inspected this traffic via Mitm proxy—most traffic was benign, though I never opted into sending any telemetry (nor am I logged in to a Boox account). But it’s also an Android device, so it’s feeding telemetry into Google’s gaping maw, too. Worse, Onyx is flouting the terms of the GNU Public License, declining to release Linux kernel modifications to users. This is anathema to me—GPL violations are tantamount to theft. Onyx’s disregard for user rights makes me regret buying the Boox. Verdict I’ll continue to use the Boox and feel bad about it. I hope my digging in this post will help the next person. Unfortunately, the e-ink tablet market is too niche to support the kind of solarpunk future I’d always imagined. But there’s an opportunity for an open, Linux-based tablet to dominate e-ink. Linux is playing catch-up on phones with PostmarketOS. Meanwhile, the best e-ink tablets have to offer are old, unupdateable versions of Android, like the OS on the Boox. In the future, I’d love to pay a license- and privacy-respecting company for beautiful, calm technology and recommend their product to everyone. But today is not the future. I go back and forth between “Waking Up” and “Calm”↩︎ Using github.com/JordanEJ/Onyx-Boox-Blocklist↩︎
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Today we are releasing the version 1.0 of Lexxy. Lexxy is a rich text editor for Rails built on Lexical. It already powers Basecamp, Fizzy and many others, and it will become the default editor in Rails. I recently presented it in Rails World (slides, video coming soon). This is the article version of my talk. Trix hit a wall Trix has been our editor since 2015, and every Rails app’s editor since Action Text shipped in Rails 6. It’s small and reliable, and it has served millions of people for a decade. But in the last few years our customers kept asking for features like tables or code highlighting, and we kept struggling to deliver them. The reason is the Trix document model. A Trix document is a flat list of blocks. A block is a line of text with some labels attached, like quote, bullet list, bullet. There is no tree, and a block can never contain another block. Nesting is an illusion: at render time, adjacent blocks with the same labels get wrapped together. A flat list of blocks with very limited extensibility options That design bought a lot of simplicity, but you can’t express something like a table with it. Two cells next to each other would carry exactly the same labels, so Trix would merge them into one. The model can say “this bullet is one level deeper”. It cannot say “this cell is different from the cell next to it”. A tables issue has been opened since 2015! The model just can’t do it. The second problem was maintenance. An editor built on contenteditable behaves differently in every browser and even changes from time with operating system releases. In 2024, three iOS releases in a row broke typing, dictation or the caret in Trix, and each one cost us real effort to work around. Check this one as an example. Why Lexical This was a conversation we had at 37signals for years: 2022. We started a project to add tables to Trix. We gave up after a week. The document model can’t represent two-dimensional things. 2023. I built a proof of concept with Tiptap inside HEY. We liked it, but we never started a serious project with it. 2024. We built House, our own Markdown editor, for Writebook. Not WYSIWYG, but WYSIWYM: what you see is what you mean. A wonderful editor for long-form writing like books or technical documentation. 2025. We tried House in another product, and it didn’t fit. For most apps, WYSIWYG was just the right answer. 2025. We had the discussion again, and this time we looked at the whole field. Four years of the same conversation David ruled out Tiptap, CKEditor and the other commercial editors: an open source core with features kept proprietary, and a sales team behind them. We didn’t want our editor to depend on somebody else’s licensing decisions. Then we found Lexical: MIT, from Meta, and very powerful. I spent two weeks evaluating it, and in May we made the call to go with it. A tiny core. Pick the rest. Lexical’s core has zero dependencies and weighs forty-two kilobytes. In a way, it validates the approach that Trix pioneered. The document is an immutable state you never mutate directly, you just get new snapshots when performing updates; contenteditable is an input device and a rendering surface, never the source of truth. It has a DOM reconciler to update the actual DOM very efficiently, and other primitives to deal with handling commands and node transformations. Everything else, from lists to tables to markdown, is a package in the orbit. Lexxy uses thirteen of them. Lexical solved the maintenance problem too. Meta’s products like Facebook or Instagram use Lexical and their user count is in the hundreds of millions. This means that even small issues with new keyboards and devices are fixed fast by the dedicated Meta team that maintains it. Furthermore, Meta’s business is the products, not the editor. We much rather liked this structure of incentives for the long-term investment an editor represents. The iceberg The plan was simple. Pick Lexical, wire it up to Action Text, add a toolbar and ship it. Well, it didn’t go exactly like that. What you envision, and what's under the water Lexxy today is thirteen thousand lines of vanilla JavaScript on top of Lexical. A great editing experience is very hard to get right. An editor is a machine where the user can change the state in a thousand different ways. For example. you have two images one after the other and want to put the cursor between them, but there is nothing there to put a cursor in. Or somebody pastes from Google Docs, and you have to turn a pile of inline styles and empty spans into clean markup. And then Safari, and Android keyboards, and the clipboard, and undo, and… From the first pull request to Basecamp 5 The first pull request landed in May 2025. Fizzy launched with Lexxy in December, and Basecamp 5 in May this year. Basecamp was the real test: twenty years of content written with Trix, and people who use the editor all day, every day. Zoltán Hosszú and Samuel Péchèr were the key people who made this happen. The took a very green version of Lexxy, added a ton of features (including Tables) and polish, and they fixed countless bugs. They also pulled off a remarkable milestone: seamlessly switching millions of Basecamp users from Trix to Lexxy. What’s included? We didn’t want a to build Trix with tables. We had Lexical and we had agents to help, so we wanted to be ambitious here. We went for the whole package. Features In terms of major features: A color highlighter, built in instead of this being a custom Basecamp extension, as it was with Trix. Tables, with an interface we worked hard to keep simple and accessible. Markdown. You type it, you get rich text. Code blocks with syntax highlighting as you type, in more than twenty languages. Image galleries you can navigate and reorder with the keyboard. Prompts. Type a character, get a menu: mentions, emoji, or whatever your app needs. Links by pasting a URL over selected text. Previews of attachments like videos and PDFs, rendered as your app renders them. Action Text Native Lexxy is also Action Text native. Action Text stores attachments in a canonical format that Trix doesn’t speak, so it translates on save and again on render. We taught Lexxy to emit exactly that markup. What you see in the editor is what gets saved, and what gets saved is what your app renders. Your existing content, attachments and views keep working. That opened another door. Action Text now talks to an editor adapter, with an implementation for Trix and one for Lexxy, so switching is one line: config.action_text.editor = :lexxy. Here the credit goes to Sean Doyle, who started that pull request before Lexxy existed and took it to the finish line with our input. It ships with Rails 8.2, and we hope other editors will use it too. Extensibility And you can extend Lexxy. Extensions are built on Lexical’s own mechanism, and this is not a second-class API: Lexxy itself is thirteen extensions, tables included, and Basecamp has nine more. class MyExtension extends Lexxy.Extension { get enabled() { … } get allowedElements() { … } get lexicalExtension() { return this.defineExtension({ name: "my-extension", nodes: [ … ], register(editor) { … } }) } initializeToolbar(toolbar) { … } dispose() { … } } Lexxy.configure({ global: { extensions: [ MyExtension ] } }) My favorite of how extensible is Lexxy are voice notes in Basecamp: you record, you see the waveform while you talk, and it becomes a player inside the document. About a thousand lines, without forking or patching anything. Performance Lexxy is fast, because Lexical is fast. In a ten thousand word document, Trix takes thirty-eight milliseconds to process a keystroke. Lexxy takes four. Above fifty milliseconds, the editor starts feeling sluggish. Compared to Trix, Lexxy brought a whole new performance regime. Milliseconds per keystroke by document size Accessibility Accessibility in Trix was not great. In general, building accessible experiences for rich text editors built on top of contenteditable is quite hard. We had a dream team to help with Lexxy accessibility. Bruno Prieto worked with Michael Berger, our accessibility champion at 37signals, to bring the bar to where we wanted it to be. Bruno is an outstanding programmer who happens to be blind, so he knows one thing or two about accessibility, and he delivered. As a result, in Lexxy everything is reachable with the keyboard. The editor announces itself properly to screen readers, and it gets a thousand details right so that the editing experience using a screen reader is fantastic. You can learn more about accessibility in our docs. Security The latest AI models have resulted in an unprecedented explosion of vulnerabilities found, and we took this thread quite seriously. Lexxy counted with programmers of the caliber of Jeremy Daer and Mike Dalessio helping to make it more secure. We have put a lot of attention to sanitizing the editor contents, validating attachment URLs and making sure that the types of attachments and nodes the editor support are allow-listed. Lexxy also comes with preliminary Trusted Types support, to offer CSP-level control over certain DOM manipulation APIs. The trusted types policy is there, but we are not enforcing it everywhere yet. Agents We started Lexxy using Claude since day one. A main lesson was that an agent needs to drive the editor like a user does. The best decision we made in this project was moving the system tests from Capybara to Playwright: three browsers instead of one, a suite that runs in seconds, and a much more faithful clipboard, keyboard and focus. This represented a tremendous improvement in how agents could close the loop by themselves. Write a test, see it fail, fix it, see it pass. We have more than six hundred browser tests today. Moving the suite to Playwright changed how fast we could write tests With a solid testing foundation in place, we could start fixing bugs in large batches. As mentioned, getting a text editor right implies a ton of work, and the kind of backlog we got at some point would have have buried us in pre-agent times. We also used agents to validate the fixes: an agent reproduces the bug in the public Lexxy sandbox, checks that it’s gone with the branch applied, and labels the pull request. Agents were essential to get Lexxy done with the people and the deadlines we had: we are a small company, and the same people were shipping two products in parallel. 275 cards closed The new Rails default We believe Lexxy is the best rich text editor out there right now, and we are going to make it the default editor in Rails next. If you’re starting a Rails application today, use Lexxy. If you’re using Action Text with a standard configuration, switch. It’s one line, and we’ve worked hard to make it seamless.
Reading my recent computing retrospective, I realised there was a big section missing: the people in my life that made an impact and helped shape my career. Outside my immediate family, one person made an outsized contribution, and I’m fairly certain that without his influence my life would have taken a very different path. The fact that I’m still here in 2026, still writing code and being fortunate enough to have a career in something I love is testament to him. So I’d like to take a few moments to talk about my old secondary school teacher, George Dryden. Denied Back in 1995, I had a problem. I knew I wanted to study computing at university and build a career out of my passion, but there was a snag. For those unfamiliar with the UK schooling system, when you’re 15-16 you take a set of GCSE exams in a broad range of subjects. After that, you pick around 3 subjects to really focus on over a period of 2 years. These are called A Levels, and they are a big step up and are meant to prepare you for a degree-level course at university. Admission to university is also governed by these results - if you want to study computing, you’re going to need a computing A-Level, and most universities will only accept you (or “make an offer”) if you achieve a certain grade. And whilst I had taken computing at a GCSE level, my school did not offer a computing A-Level course. I instead had to settle on “Design & Technology”, which just didn’t inspire me. Instead of working on my portfolio and projects, I spent most of my time daydreaming and writing code on the Acorn Archimedes computers that were the staple of every 90s UK school. No disrespect to the teachers - they were all awesome - but it just wasn’t for me. I was miserable, and by the end of my first year, I was well on my way to failing outright with my entire future plans seemingly going up in smoke. Someone noticed That’s when George stepped in. He’d taught me computing right the way through my GCSEs, and with no A-Level course on offer, that was officially where his involvement was supposed to have ended. It didn’t. He had noticed my constant presence in the computing labs - before and after school, during lunch breaks, free “study” periods - working on some little pet project or digging into RISC OS internals. I remember him as warm, with a wicked, dry sense of humour, and a refreshingly spiky attitude to authority - I always got the sense he’d worked out for himself which rules were worth taking seriously and which ones weren’t. And he always had time for me. I spent years pestering him with questions that had nothing to do with anything on the syllabus, and he’d always find a way to answer them that actually made sense. He was just as supportive of my odd little obsessions. At one point I’d got deep into the BBS scene, which I thought was the coolest thing ever, and decided what the school really needed was an internal BBS running on its own network. So I wrote one. It was deeply cringeworthy, obviously - but George helped me put posters up around the school advertising it, and even gave it a mention in assembly one morning. I think about five people in total ever checked it out. It didn’t matter: a teacher had stood up in front of the entire school and treated my weird little project like it was worth something, and that was a hugely validating moment for me. Off the books He recognised the passion, and eventually he made a suggestion: What if I quit the Design and Technology course, and instead attempt the A-level course myself? Personally, I also suspect he was enjoying himself. There was some internal school politics behind why computing wasn’t offered at A-Level in the first place - I never knew the details - and I think the prospect of one of his students simply going out and getting the qualification anyway appealed to him on two separate levels. It would get me where I wanted to go, and it would wind up exactly the right people. It wouldn’t be easy, he warned. The school would be against it, plus it was a two-year course which I’d have to cram into one year. I’d have to do it all myself - studying, lesson planning, coursework - he couldn’t help me in an official capacity, but he said he’d advocate for me and help where he could. If I had assignments, he’d send them off to be graded and would give feedback in his own time. He’d enter me in for the exams and also gave me a set of keys to the computer lab so I could use it whenever I needed. It was the first time anybody outside my own family had really shown faith in my abilities and encouraged me to take a stand. It was a pivotal moment for me - I realised if I wanted something badly enough I would have to fight for it, but I could still make it happen. I didn’t have to take “NO” for an answer - a lesson I think I picked up from watching him as much as from anything he ever actually said to me. After a few weeks of dithering, I took the jump. I remember a few awkward meetings with the school administration but thanks to his behind-the-scenes work, I was soon following my dream. An intense year And yes, it was bloody hard work. I had to condense an entire two year course into under a year, be disciplined enough to produce my own study plan, and be critical enough of my own shortcomings that I could focus my study where it was needed. I pretty much lived and breathed it for months straight and was more-or-less a permanent fixture in the labs or school library poring over my course books. I’d make lists of questions and chat to George over lunch, and he’d provide guidance and encouragement. It was a lonely way to learn with no classmates to compare notes with, no lessons to turn up to, and right up until the end I had no real idea whether any of it was good enough - but bit by bit, it started to feel like something I could actually pull off. And sure enough, in the late spring of 1996, I sat down in an exam hall with my fellow students, the only one with an A-Level computing question paper in front of me. The final exam went by in a blur - I can only remember a few of the questions now (and a peculiar obsession with the Pascal language) - but I do remember the euphoria as the invigilator called “time’s up, pens down, close your papers NOW”. I had done it. A few nerve-wracking months later, my Mum drove me into school to pick up my results. I ripped open the envelope and saw it - I’d passed with an A grade! I literally ran up the stairs to George’s office next to the computing labs to thank him personally. I’d taken my camera into school to take a few last photos for memory’s sake and snapped this photo of him before I walked out the school gates for the last time: A different path Because of him, I managed to get into my university of choice, studying computing with a focus on networks. Because of that, I landed my first job working as a “webmaster”, and my career since has been one of the highlights of my life. All these years later, it’s a real privilege to be able to get up each morning and actively look forward to working in an industry I love. Without George stepping up for me and encouraging me to believe in myself, none of that would have happened. I wouldn’t have had the career I have, and I wouldn’t be where I am now. I met my wife when we both worked at a software company - she sat at the desk behind me - so even my home and family life can be traced back to that spring of 1996. And the A-Level itself was only half of what I took away from that year. The qualification opened the door to university, but the lesson that came with it was every bit as important: that a “no” isn’t always the end of it, and that sometimes the answer can be argued with. I’m so proud of what I managed to achieve all those years ago, and even more thankful to have had someone like George in my life to put me on the right track. Mr. Dryden I did see him again after I left. He drank in one of my local pubs - a pub I’d been going to for a good while before I was technically old enough to be in it - and I’d say hello if I spotted him in there, mostly in the months before I moved away to university. After that it was only a handful of times. For years I’d find myself scanning the room whenever I was back home and in for a pint, half expecting him to be at the bar. At some point I stopped seeing him altogether and eventually moved across the country. The trouble was I never really knew how to talk to him outside of school. He was always Mr. Dryden, or just “Sir”, I don’t think I ever once called him George to his face! I was (and still am if I’m honest) fairly socially awkward, and I never worked out how to phrase the thing I actually wanted to say: that he had changed the entire direction of my life, and I wasn’t sure he knew it. So instead I’d say hello, and ask how he was, talk about nothing much, and go back to my friends. Epilogue Sadly, 3 years ago now, I opened the latest issue of my old school alumni newsletter to read that he’d passed away. The photo at the start of this article was taken from his obituary article and I read that he’d had a long illness and had suffered from dementia at the end. I did write to him years ago by email - I don’t know if he ever got it, or was in any capacity to understand what he’d done for me, but I hope so. There’s an old saying by one of my favourite authors (Terry Pratchett) that “no one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away”. In one of his books, a character keeps the memory of his son alive by passing his name along a series of telegraph towers. It’s in that spirit that I’m writing this post - I debated it for many years as it’s very personal to me and I also have no contact with any of George’s family so I have no idea what they would make of it all. But even though it’s 30+ years ago now, I will never forget him or what he did for me - and at least now, if someone searches his name it’ll be recorded here for as long as I’m alive and running this site. Thank you, Sir. George Dryden 1942-2023
Let’s step inside the kernel and understand how it implements copy-on-write and what are its implications for the performance of user-space systems
Yesterday, I received this email as a response to You Can't Vibe Code Love. It's such a remarkable and powerful statement that I asked permission to share it here, in its entirety, with personal information redacted: Hey Jeff, Hope you and your family are doing well.
A frustrated Reddit post about being a condom between an AI and production made the rounds in our team. Here is why I think the opposite is true and what it means for how we review code, plan work and think.
