Karl Bartel's Website

I prefer Djot over Markdown Why Djot?

Can We Make Simpler Software With LLMs?

Raising Notifications From Terminal When executing long-running jobs in the terminal, it’s useful to get notified when they complete so you can do other things while waiting.

Stack Traces are Underrated I Love Stack Traces When something goes wrong in a program, many languages will spit out a stack trace with lots of useful information.

Easily Entering Umlauts With a US Keyboard Layout As a software developer, a US keyboard layout is great for entering all the special characters you need while coding and for using certain applications like vim.

Consistent Handling of Git Repositories With Different Default Branches Why Do I Care About Default Branches?

Simple Testing with git diff Automatic tests are great, but creating and maintaining them is time consuming and sometimes really complicated.

make as a Static Site Generator Static site generators are in fashion for good reasons.

When Is Complexity OK?

Formatting Numbers of Unknown Order of Magnitude Sometimes, I write programs that need to display numbers where I don’t know how big or small they will be.

Adding Gemini Support With Just a Few Lines of Code The Gemini protocol nicely matches my preference for simplicity, so I want to start providing content for it to show my support.

Tcl as a Shell Scripting Replacement Summary: I got interested in the old scripting language Tcl, rewrote my blog generator in it as an exercise and compare it to shell scripting.

My Simple Custom Blog Software The pages on this site are generated by my own primitive blog engine.

Hacking on “smu”, a Minimal Markdown Parser Introduction I wanted to get my hands dirty and improve a suckless related program.

Suckless Software on My Desktop I took a look at which simple programs I could use as a desktop environment instead of Gnome and picked out the following ones st as a terminal dwm as a window manager, along with slstatus slock for screen locking Initial I…

Exercises in Simplicity The more time I spent on software development, the more I come to appreciate simplicity.