BSP Tree (with custom nodes).

With a vanilla BSP-tree you can accomplish your diagram. Simply reordering your splits can do it by making the footer and main content areas first. Better approach is to support splits on non-leaf nodes. In the example below just split the root where all its children go to the new top node and a new bottom bar leaf node is created.

Root (split: vertical, ratio: 0.6)
├── Left child (Window A)
└── Right child (split: horizontal, ratio: 0.5)
    ├── Top child (Window B)
    └── Bottom child (Window C)

To access neighbors you’ll need your nodes to track their parents (double linked). Then you can traverse until all edges are found. Worst case its O(height+num neighbors that exist) if I am remembering.

Depending on how efficient you want it to be, there are speed ups. It has been awhile, but I do remember keeping the tree as balanced as possible makes the search around log(n). Each split node keeping an index of all children in its sub-tree also reduces how much traversing is needed when you need all children after a split.

Can get a little complicated but it is doable. That said, how many splits will a TUI have? This may be preemptive to do.

Custom nodes is where you support some patterns that could use further optimizations. Tables that will always be a grid. Tab bars that are a 1xn grid could be a further specialized node.

This is all about layout. Fixed/Dynamic width/height windows, padding and margins, borders, are all render processing and don’t effect the layout (unless you want reactivity). By that I mean you have windows that will split differently when the viewport is portrait or landscape and it dynamically adjusts to the window size. Sometimes with different “steps” like a square viewport may be different from both portrait or landscape or 4:3 could be treated different from 16:9.

TUIs are not my day job but I’ve made a few in my day. Above are just my opinions from experiences. There is no “right” answer but hopefully some of this helps your journey.

TypeScript is my day job and using a custom JSX Factory makes it pretty easy to define HTML-like interfaces for devs that can support mixing layout, render attributes, content, and app logic.

Explicit BSP splits:

<Split type="vertical" ratio={0.6}>
  <WidgetA />
  <Split type="horizontal" ratio={0.5}>
    <WidgetB />
    <WidgetC />
  </Split>
</Split>

Custom nodes:

<Container>
  <TabBar>
    <Tab>Tab 1</Tab>
    <Tab>Tab 2</Tab>
  </TabBar>
  <StatusBar />
</Container>

Not sure your stack but throwing it out there as something I’ve used successfully.

If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.

Toooo real. Its like companies have taken the worst of everything and just call it agile. List out every task and estimate them so we have timelines, but don’t actually architect anything as that’s waterfall. Fake waterfall, with fake dates, but fingers will be pointed like they were real commitments, and spend a month doing it for this executive power point instead of fucking off so devs can build the damn thing.

I assume you mean Keyboard Video Mouse (KVM) Switch and not Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)?

I just use SSH…

Our sysadmin swears by Dell’s iDRAC, which I don’t think is technically a KVM and may only work for Dell PowerEdge Servers. I think I used it once to get into the BIOS remotely.

Most data centers I’ve been in have a floating monitor and peripherals.

I’ve used Tripp-Lite terminal servers, who sells KVMs, but I cannot comment if they are any good.

As a final thought, why is protection from malicious apps from the play store being performed on the phone instead of in the store?

In addition, why is known spyware on the top of the recommended list if I were to open the play store: temu, snapchat.

Or getting pissy if I use an ad blocker when their platform has served malicious ads.

I ended up just building a box after looking for the perfect NAS and finding it didn’t exist. The software is usually just crap or the hardware is underwhelming. Got a Node 804 case to slap in plenty of HDD space. Running NixOS so I’m in control of the software. In retrospect I wish I had gotten a rackmount type case. Tossed in an Arc GPU for better transcoding shortly after the initial setup.

Not tried it myself: https://disroot.org/en

Same. Just don’t become too good at it. Now I have to write whitepapers and participate in speaker panels at conferences. Ugh.

Is there any issue with this sort of design

I was answering this question. No, no issue. A HoC is just an enhancement to reuse the layout. See my self reply with more info on file splitting by single export convention. It is just for ease of navigating a repo and human-readability. Is it needed for a small project? No. My personal preference is to be consistent so I usually follow the same conventions regardless of project size.

In addition, one advantage of still splitting Header and Footer, even with a Layout, is you can make them optional props to App with what you have as the defaults so they can be overriden.

It could still be the same file, but the typical convention is one exported component per file where the filename matches the component name. This is just a style guide for recommended best practices and readability.

No. I usually have a Layout.tsx that looks like this. Then I make App a higher-order component (hoc), so I can reuse the layout on every page by just passing in a content component.

No. Its all text file config. You wouldn’t use live CD mode. You define your own how you want it to work.

Its a steep learning curve so if looking for off the shelf solutions, don’t use nix. If you need something custom but through a single config paradigm, nix is awesome.

Soap boxing here but I feel these kinds of use cases is what NixOS is built for.

Declarative config to setup the system, users, and apps.

Declarative and customizable impermanence exactly how you want it.

I use Tails as well but NixOS is my daily driver. Anything not marked explicitly to persist is dropped each reboot. I’m the only user so I keep the last 30 days of non persisted data for like a power outage but that’s something I had to go out of my to setup for my use case.

This is why we trust but verify. Thanks mom for teaching me that cruel lesson of unplugging the phone cord to get me to bed (dial up days). It lasted about a week before I caught on you always came up from the basement before bed.

I’m so glad you never noticed I swapped my line with the guest bedroom. Also glad that ancient block in the basement could be hand wired.

For our lower environments we use rsync like the author but skip the pipeline altogether. The servers have a watch script to restart when files are rsynced. We then have a local watch script that rsyncs on file changes.

Relatively instant deploy (2-5s) whenever a file is saved.

Good call on a simulated failure. When I first set it up, it was LVM/BTRFS or ZFS as my top choices. It was a coin toss at the time because I hadn’t built this sort of setup before.

I use immutable nixos installs. Everything to redeploy my OS is tracked in git including most app configurations. The one exception are some GUI apps I’d have to do manually on reinstall.

I have a persistence volume for things like:

• Rollbacks
• Personal files
• Git repos
• Logs
• Caches / Games

I have 30 days (or last 5 minimum) of system rollbacks using BTRFS volumes.

The personal files are backed up hourly to a local server which then backs up nightly to B2 Backblaze using rclone in an encrypted volume using my private keys. The local server has a mishmash of drives in a mirrored LVM setup. While it works well for having mixed drives, I’ll warn I haven’t had a drive failure yet so I’m not sure the difficulty of replacing a drive.

My phone uses the same flow with RoundSync (rclone + GUI).

Git repos are backed up in git.

Logs aren’t backed up. I just persist them for debugging and don’t want them lost after every reboot.

Caches/Games are persisted but not backed up. Nixos uses symlinks and BTRFS to be immutable. That paradigm doesn’t work well for this case. The one exception is a couple game folders are part of my personal files. WoW plugin folder, EvE online layouts, etc.

I used to use Dropbox (with rclone to encrypt). It was $20/mo for 2Tb. It is cheaper on paper. I don’t backup nearly that much. Backblaze started at $1/mo for what I use. I’m now up to $2/mo. It will be a few years before I need to clean up my backups for cost reasons.

The local server is a PC in a case with 8 drive bays plus some NVME drives for fast storage. It has a couple older drives and for the last couple years I typically buy a pair of drives on sale (black Friday, prime day, etc). I have a little over 30TB mirrored, so slightly over 60TB in total. NVME is not counted in that. One NVME is for the system, the others are a caching layer (monero node) or temp storage (transcoding as it also my media server).

I like the case, but if I were to do it again, I’d probably get a rack mountable case.

Could be VRAM which is likely shared with the system’s RAM for an integrated GPU.

I don’t follow Apple’s architecture much and I suppose you’d have to have hardware accelerated transcoding on, so I could be full of shit.

I had similar issues on my NAS before I built a streaming box with a dedicated GPU.

For the networking I found some repos with Nix and Gluetun (OCI containers). I don’t see them in my bookmarks, so it was probably a day project when I set up and didn’t keep the references.

That part is still in docker / podman. So any docker network guide just needs to be translated to nix.