Peter's DevLog

Building an epaper laptop: Dithering

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 20:34:46 GMT

Epaper screens come in many variants. The classic one that most people think about is only black and white. However most newer panels are at least capable of greyscale, and the best in class are colour. But the colour and greyscale isn’t “true” colour and greyscale, but rather they have…

Writing tests for Nim libraries with Nimble and unittest

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 13:24:05 GMT

Most developers will agree that having automatic tests is a good thing. With good tests we can make changes to our code and test whether these changes causes old bugs to resurface, new bugs to appear, or current workflows to be broken.

In this tutorial we will have a look at…

Building an epaper laptop: The monitor

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 19:05:12 GMT

The most distinct part of making an epaper laptop is obviously the screen. And picking a screen for this project was always going to be one of the most critical decisions. The biggest available panel I could find with a somewhat reasonable price was a 10.3” Waveshare…

Building an epaper laptop

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 20:19:46 GMT

Ever since I got my first ereader twelve years ago I’ve wanted an epaper laptop. The allure of a laptop which would work in direct sunlight and has incredible battery life has always drawn me. Sure, laptops have come a long way in the past twelve years, especially the battery…

Labelled exceptions for smoother error handling

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 11:34:30 GMT

Error handling, a contentious and oft-discussed topic. Each language has some way of dealing with errors, be it error codes, result types, exceptions, something entirely different, or a mix. How to properly deal with things going wrong in our programs has been important pretty much ever since we started writing…

Teaching old C code new tricks with Nim

Fri, 08 Sep 2023 13:49:28 GMT

Recently I was met with an interesting problem when wrapping a C library in Nim. The library in question was MAPM, an older but quite complete library for dealing with arbitrary precision maths. Unfortunately the library doesn’t have much in the way of error handling. If something goes wrong…

Setting up a Nim server for dummies

Thu, 08 Jun 2023 08:54:26 GMT

Nim is a great candidate for server development, but if you want to run your own server and are new to the world of server management or Linux there can be a daunting amount of information to consume in order to do it right. In this article I’ll give a…

Wrapping C libraries in Nim

Sun, 16 Apr 2023 20:22:49 GMT

As we discovered in my last article, Nim will by default generate C code and then call on a C compiler to actually produce a binary. This might seem like an odd choice, especially in the age of LLVM. However it’s actually not uncommon for languages to compile or transpile…

Dynamic libraries in Nim

Sun, 19 Feb 2023 22:12:54 GMT

This is a question which has been asked in various places over the years, and recently on the forum in multiple separate threads. Seeing how I’ve built commercial software with Nim dynamic libraries, I thought I’d chime in with my knowledge. But since there are multiple threads out there and…

Is Nim a transpiler?

Tue, 19 Oct 2021 12:16:34 GMT

This is a question that has come up time and time again in the IRC channel, when talking to people in person, and in the comment section pretty much every time Nim has an article on Hackernews or one of the bigger programming subreddits. It’s also a question that has…

Asynchronous programming in Nim

Fri, 03 Sep 2021 07:53:49 GMT

In the previous article we got a small primer on various kinds of multi-tasking, in this article we'll have a look at possibly the simplest form of this. Namely asynchronous execution. As discussed in the last article asynchronous execution is a way for our programs to tell the hardware…

Multitasking in Nim

Fri, 03 Sep 2021 07:47:09 GMT

This is a series of articles about a topic in the Nim ecosystem that has so far been written fairly little about. Namely threading, asynchronous operation, and communication.

To begin we first need to have a good grasp of the concepts we're going to discuss. There is quite a bit of…

Fixing a broken Firefox session

Tue, 27 Apr 2021 09:08:02 GMT

In order to stifle my tab-hoarding habits I have recently set my Firefox install to not recover sessions when I restart the browser. This means that every time I turn my computer off for the day it will delete all the random documenation pages and weird links people have sent…

Video content - Advent of Code 2020

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 08:45:35 GMT

For NimConf2020, our first virtual Nim conference, I realised how poor my microphone setup was. I have previously toyed with the idea of recording videos for various projects, or just presentations in the same style as the one I did for NimConf. For the conference I borrowed a better…

Creating condensed shared libraries (Embedding NimScript pt. 3)

Mon, 22 Jun 2020 20:38:58 GMT

In the first part of this article series we looked at why we would potentially want to be able to run NimScript embedded into our Nim programs. In part two we dove a bit deeper and looked at how we could do this embedding, and how we could pass data…

How to embed NimScript into a Nim program (Embedding NimScript pt. 2)

Sun, 31 May 2020 18:19:38 GMT

In the first part of this three part article series we looked at why we would want to embed NimScript into our Nim applications. Particularly why we would want to use it for configuration. Whether or not that is your goal, this article will explain how this can be achieved.…

Using NimScript as a configuration language (Embedding NimScript pt. 1)

Sun, 31 May 2020 18:19:23 GMT

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Over the past couple of years I’ve been playing around with creating my own WM. I recently picked up the project again, and I quickly realised that it was time to re-do the configuration system. Up until this point I had been using a TOML file for the configuration.…

Nim Q&A (originally a HN reply)

Mon, 20 Apr 2020 20:03:10 GMT

Recently I got made aware that a comment I made on HackerNews had been linked to in a ZDNet article, this made me realise I should probably feature in here as well. So in a similar fashion to my older post that was a Reddit reply, here is…

Tips and tricks with implicit return in Nim

Fri, 01 Nov 2019 15:07:52 GMT

One feature in Nim that it shares with several other languages, especially functional ones, is implicit return of values. This is one of those small features that might just seem like a way to avoid writing return everywhere. But in fact it can be used for much more than that!…

Welcome to a brief explanation of history

Tue, 17 Sep 2019 08:28:11 GMT

History, as you might know, is of course the GNU History Library. It is a utility that allows us to read, repeat, and track the commands we run in our shells. Apparently a lot of people feel really strongly about history, so I’ve added some quotes in this article to…

Metaprogramming and read- and maintainability in Nim

Tue, 04 Jun 2019 16:06:51 GMT

One thing I've mentioned about metaprogramming in Nim, both in posts on this site and in talks, is that metaprogramming in Nim can enhance read- and maintainability. Opponents of metaprogramming would probably sneer at that and remark that it's quite the opposite. And sure, metaprogramming is a powerful tool, and…

Meta-programming in Nim - FOSDEM talk companion post

Tue, 05 Feb 2019 14:48:18 GMT

This article is intended as a companion to the lightning talk I held at FOSDEM 2019. If you haven't seen the talk yet the official recording from the FOSDEM site is embeded below (if you want you can also grab the slides for this presentation on that site).

[video webmsrc="https://video.fosdem.org/2019/H.2215/nim_metaprogramming.webm" mp4src="https://video.fosdem.org/2019/H.2215/nim_metaprogramming.mp4"]…

Optional value handling in Nim

Mon, 06 Aug 2018 16:44:46 GMT

I recently had a look at a functional language named Toccata which amongst other things does away with booleans. While this migth seem utterly insane it's not an entirely new concept and proponents of such ideas will warn you of the perils of boolean blindness. This refers to the fact that…

Handling files in Nim

Thu, 03 May 2018 20:24:25 GMT

In a post over on Reddit someone noted that Nim doesn't really have any article or tutorial about file reading. Trying to prove them wrong led me to a half-answer over on Rosetta Code and a forum post from 2014 asking about examples on file handling. Since this is a rather…

Nim at FOSDEM - Frequently asked questions

Thu, 22 Feb 2018 21:38:29 GMT

Nim recently had a stand at FOSDEM 2018. It was lot's of fun meeting up with all the people whom I've only gotten to know by their IRC nicknames. And very interesting to help out at the stand telling people about Nim. In this post I want to write…

Nim types (originally a Reddit reply)

Tue, 09 Jan 2018 10:48:38 GMT

While perusing the Nim subreddit I stumbled across a post asking for an explanation of how types work in Nim, especially how Nim allocates different types on the heap and the stack. Since the answer grew pretty long I decided to post it here as well for perpetuity. What…

Server migration and downtime

Sat, 21 Oct 2017 17:38:58 GMT

This site has been down for a couple of days now. In fact the entire server has been down, which probably pained me more than it did you. Reason for this is that I have various services running on this server, most importantly perhaps my private git server. I've written…

Cross-platform GUIs and Nim macros

Wed, 22 Mar 2017 20:23:52 GMT

A while ago I read John Novaks great rant on how hard and annoying it can be to do something as simple as extending a cross-platform application with the simplest of GUIs. Or as he puts it:

You must not under any circumstance try to open a window (on the computer,…

Presentation on Functional programming

Sat, 18 Mar 2017 01:49:18 GMT

Recently I held a presentation on functional programming at the University of Tromsø. The presentation was meant as an introduction to the concepts of the paradigm and some of the ideas behind it. It also contains a short section on how the data structures that facilitate the immutable state collections…

Adding touch controls to the i3 Window Manager

Fri, 30 Sep 2016 00:37:35 GMT

A while back I got myself a second hand Surface Pro 1. It's a great device, and with a little tweaking I got it running Linux just fine. At first I started out with what I was currently using as the operating system on my main machine. Keeping all my…

Git-hooks and web development

Thu, 16 Jun 2016 21:44:28 GMT

In a previous post I wrote about how this website was created and how the content was managed with CouchCMS. However there is more than just the textual content to this site. In the recent post about my Nim implementation of TinyWM the need for syntax highlighted code became apparent. Other features recently added was the home…

TinyWM implementation in Nim

Mon, 13 Jun 2016 18:19:27 GMT

Lately I've been toying with the idea of creating a window manager for Linux. It's not that there is a lack of them, rather quite the opposite, the Linux world is full of them. But suffice to say that I have some ideas which I think would be a welcome…

Creating a managed website with CouchCMS

Thu, 19 May 2016 21:21:29 GMT

After having decided that I wanted to create this DevLog I had to decide how I wanted to create it. Initially I was set on creating my own content management system (or CMS for short) since I've never been too fond of the ones I've used in the past. I feel…

Welcome to Peter's DevLog

Sat, 19 Sep 2015 16:54:07 GMT

Over the years I've been involved with various projects, either by myself or through work. During these projects I've often looked around for similar projects and borrowed information or procedures from others. During all of this I've often ended up piecing together information from multiple sources to get the result…