ADR 0029

What opens the rest: a viewer, a player, an archiver, and a terminal's programs

accepted 2026-10-07 View source

Context

Settings › Default applications said "Nothing installed" for pictures, films, music and archives. A picture double-clicked in the file manager of ADR 0028 opened in the browser, a zip in nothing.

There is also what someone who lives in a terminal installs in the first hour. The desktop already brings two programs of that kind, impala and bluetuith, because the bar opens them.

What there is was installed, or its installation simulated, on the development machine (Alpine 3.24.2, aarch64) on 2026-10-07. Sizes are what each adds to a system that has the desktop:

cliamp is not in Alpine. It is a player in Winamp's manner whose R lists the Radio Browser directory's stations, which is what it was asked for and what cmus lacks. Its release 2.3.0 was read for what it does unasked:

• It listens on a unix socket in ~/.config/cliamp, for its own cliamp next and the like, and on no network address while it plays.
• Signing in to Spotify, Qobuz or YouTube Music opens a port for the browser to answer on, for as long as the sign-in takes. YouTube Music's is opened on every address and not only the machine's own.
• cliamp upgrade downloads a release from GitHub over the program's own file. Nothing runs it but someone typing it, and nothing looks for a new version otherwise.

Decision

The desktop depends on Ristretto, xarchiver with thunar-archive-plugin and 7zip, and mpv. 32 MiB together. /etc/xdg/mimeapps.list gives each the kinds it opens, so Settings shows them where it said "Nothing installed", and another can be chosen as for any kind. The viewer and the archiver are GTK 3, so the stylesheet and the icons the theme writes (ADR 0007's addendum of 2026-10-07) dress them as they do Thunar.

mpv plays music as well as films. One program for both, and it has no library to keep: it plays what it is given.

Nothing new opens a PDF. LibreWolf does.

A file is read by these when someone opens it, and not before. That is ADR 0028's reason for no thumbnails, and it stands: Ristretto, mpv and 7-Zip are parsers of files from anywhere, and what is new is only that opening one no longer takes a trip to the Store.

A terminal's programs are a package of their own, alpymist-tui, which the desktop depends on. lazygit, cliamp, btop, ncdu, tmux and fastfetch, with pipewire-alsa and ffmpeg for cliamp: about 64 MiB. A dependency, as alpymist-tools is, so that an upgrade brings them to every system and the image carries them with the desktop. Leaving it for the installer to add by name was the other way, and would have let apk del take them away again; it would also have left every system there is without them until someone typed a command. They cannot be removed while the desktop is installed.

They are in the menu. btop and cliamp bring desktop entries; alpymist-tui ships one each for lazygit, ncdu and tmux, which have none, under names of our own, and the desktop one each for impala and bluetuith, which it already brought. fastfetch prints and ends, and a terminal opened for it would close before it was read.

Ristretto shows no strip of thumbnails. It asks tumbler for them, and ADR 0028 left tumbler out. /etc/xdg/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/ristretto.xml turns the strip off, and the message about the missing thumbnailer that came with every picture opened. Both are defaults the account's own settings override.

cliamp is an aport of ours, pinned to a release. aports/cliamp builds upstream's tarball, held to its SHA-512 as squint's is, with the Go that Alpine packages (GOTOOLCHAIN=local) and the modules the release's go.sum names. It keeps its own version, so it is in both INDEPENDENT lists and in FETCHED. Nothing of its source is changed.

Consequences

• 96 MiB more on every desktop at its next upgrade.
• A third aport of somebody else's program to move forward by hand, and this one's upstream releases often. A release is a pkgver and a sha512sums; nothing tells us there is one.
• cliamp upgrade is there. An account cannot write /usr/bin, so it fails for one; as root it would put upstream's binary, built for glibc, over the package's. The package's file comes back with apk fix cliamp.
• cliamp's sign-ins are the user's to start, and YouTube Music's listens more widely than it should while it waits. That is upstream's to mend.
• The Xfce archiver plugin adds "Extract here" and "Create archive" to Thunar's menu.
• Ristretto opens PNG, JPEG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, SVG and WebP. AVIF and HEIF need loaders that are not installed, and those two kinds stay unassigned.
• mpv and the terminal's programs take no colours from the theme. lazygit, btop, cliamp and mpv each read theirs from a file the theme could write; that is separate work.
• Tried on the development machine: the four installed from Alpine's packages, cliamp built by abuild from the aport in an Alpine 3.24 container for aarch64, and a build of the same release run there as far as listing its commands and themes. Ristretto opening a picture with the defaults in place, as one window and no message. Not tried: sound out of cliamp, the aport on x86_64, the image, and alpymist-tui as a package, which only CI builds.

Addendum, 2026-10-07 — a card game, and it is ours

A desktop had no game at all. Alpine's with a window, aisleriot, is 67 MiB in five packages, 51 of them Guile, which nothing else here uses; tty-solitaire is 65 KiB and a terminal's. Neither takes the theme.

alpymist-solitaire is Klondike in a window of our own, and the desktop depends on it. A crate like the overview's: the rules with no pixels and tests of their own, a view that lays the table out for any window, and the program that joins them to one. Under 2 MiB, no dependency the workspace did not have, and the table, the backs of the cards and the buttons in the theme's colours.

The faces are pictures, and somebody else's. Byron Knoll's Vector Playing Cards, which he released into the public domain, drawn once to fifty-two PNGs of 300 by 436 and carried in the program, 750 KiB. crates/alpymist-solitaire/cards/README.md says where they are from and the commands that made them. Faces drawn by code would have followed the theme and looked like nothing anyone has played with; faces made by an image model were tried and came out with the wrong pips and letters.

The backs are pictures made for it, twelve to choose from: mountains in mist, the classic red and blue, an aurora, a wave, a neon grid, and two in the manner of the home computers of the 1980s among them. All from an image model run on a machine of our own, with the prompt and the seed of each beside the pictures, 660 KiB together. B or the bar's last button goes to the next and Shift+B to the one before, and the choice is kept as a name in ~/.local/state/alpymist/solitaire-back. None follows the theme; the back drawn in the theme's colour is kept for where a picture cannot be decoded.

Tried: the rules by their tests, the table as pictures drawn offscreen, and the window opened on the development machine. Not tried by anyone but the person playing: how dragging feels.

Addendum, 2026-10-07 — Solitaire keeps time, and the best games

A clock starts at a game's first move and stops when the last card is home. The five shortest games are kept for each way of turning the stock, with three initials asked of whoever makes it among them; of two games as long, the one in fewer moves is the better. A game that is out can no longer be taken back, since its time is taken. Dealing again with a game under way asks first.

What is kept is one file of lines, ~/.local/state/alpymist/solitaire: the back's name, the way of turning, and the best games. It is the account's own, holds nothing but that, and is read as whatever a file may hold: a line that makes no sense is passed over. The file of the first release, which kept the back alone, is read where the newer one is not there. Nothing is sent anywhere, and there is no list but the machine's own.

alpymist-solitaire --nearly-out, which the usage does not list, sets out a game five cards from its end, to try how one ends. A record can be had with it, as it can by writing one into the file.