I want my office to be quiet. The loudest thing in the room by far should be the occasional purring of the cat
- Linus Torvalds

Lukan Snopovs

Github::Journal::Projects

I'm a freelance, low-level developer. I love free (*as in freedom*), open-source software and community driven projects. Some of my favorite software is made by *suckless software* and *GNU*. I value privacy over everything and I despise subscription services to the point where I self-host nearly everything. I love simplicity and performance over style. The modern digital world is a mess, having to navigate surveillance, censorship and the ever increasing use of artificial intelligence. Put the power back in the hands of the people. Enough drivel, I have many years of low-level BSD & GNU/Linux experience. My strongest programming language would be C but I've done work in the likes of x86 ASM, Rust, Bash & Python (who hasn't) and the vannila web development trio (CSS, HTML and JavaScript). Do not let my personal website fool you, I am quite capable in the modern web development field. I have experience in most branches of computer science, I have some heavy knowledge of networking and bare-metal hardware coding principles. Some more information about me: In my free time I like to listen to music, one of my favorite bands is *Armor For Sleep*. Programming is also my hobby and something that I enjoy more than most other things. In my free time (if I'm not coding) you may find me making pizza (my favorite food) or watching Neon Genesis :D. Sources: https://suckless.org/ https://www.gnu.org/ https://crux.nu/ View my projects here:

(C) arr - A basic GNU style tool that runs a command on file change
(C) blui - Cross-Platform window management API, targeted at TUI, For C and C++.
(C) canvas - This is a dwm patch that implements the "canvas" mode from wh1tepearls vxwm.
(PHP) CSC - Level 3 Computer Science files
(C) dwm - My personal build of suckless software's Dynamic Window Manager!
(C) node - A basic liked-list memory allocator.
(C) otherwise-lib - An advanced but small library that introduces a new "otherwise" keyword to C and C++.
(C) plate - Universal file tem(plate) generator made for parsing JSON into HTML.
(C) plib - A static, header-only library that implements simple argument parsing.
(Vim Script) vim - My personal vim dot-files, includes ALE, code completions and many other efficiency increasing settings.
(NULL) x3hy - Hosting for the "about me" on both my github profile and my website!
(HTML) x3hy.github.io - File source for my personal portfolio website

Contact

I'm avaiable for discussion, review or feedback. If you are looking to hire me for a task, email me and use the keyword job in the subject line. You can use the tkf.x1os@gmail.com, address that forwards to my work email which I check every so often, OR you can use x3hy@protonmail.com which forwards over SMS to my personal mobile phone.

Other than emails you can contact me through Matrix.

Journal

What is a personal website without a boring journal to voice my out-of-touch opinions? These do derive into ramblings, I apologise.

New projects - 2025-12-02T01:23:06.100Z ago
I've started development on 0bchat - A end to end encrypted chat client using C. With PLib V5.0.1 I've started writing navtui, a navidrome client terminal application, both of these projects are privated at the moment but will go public on their first release. I don't want another incident with unfinished repos ehm motionlayer..
ew protonmail - 2025-12-04T00:03:53Z ago
I've been using proton mail for a few months now, and don't get me wrong I like proton as a company and I understand that they're just trying to make some funding. Personally I'm not a big fan of the corperate presence thats becoming the norm. Now I like to use the aerc email client, small issue with this, proton dosent allow users to use clients other then their offical client.. The only way theyve provided to negate this is to have a proton-mail-plus subscription AND a desktop application (protonmail-bridge-core) which acts as the other end of the encryption that way the client using the proton email can actually read emails.. I have no issue with some features being behind a paywall again proton do need to make some money somehow but this is such a basic feature.. To fix this issue I've created a new email at disroot.org which provides end-to-end symetric encryption using pgp, disroot.org also supports 3rd party clients out of the box. I've set up my accounts so that my proton account forwards emails to my disroot account but in doing so I also noticed that proton does not forward emails sent from its own address so emails sent from your own email to yourself will not be forewarded.. ill also say that there are very few options given to actually change the forwarding settings.. In gmail the options to delete, archive or keep forwarded mail is right there but in proton no such feature exists. Ontop of all of this disroot also has a contact book system that allows you to import your contacts from other services eg google contacts, this is yet another feature that protonmail does not have. This website still shows a google email as a contact email all emails sent to that address will be forwarded to my disroot email. go check out disroot.org, note that they are donation run and therefore have limited time and because of this they close registrations during the weekend. After signing up you have a 48 hour period where a maintainer will have to manually approve your account request. There is no mention of the prior when signing up. EDIT, recently email forwarding was disabled as it is now a premium service!
I Use Arch BTW - 2025-12-14T10:48:32Z ago
The title is a joke cowboy.. calm down. I've been using Archlinux for quite a while now.. 3 years. I recently decided that Archlinux is far too mainstream and so I set out on finding a new OS that could fit my needs as a developer. As a developer I like to have the most up-to-date packages along with quick installation of said packages. When I install an OS I like it to have either a quick and easy setup but a long post-install setup (think BSD) OR a very advanced setup and some other features that make it worth my time. Don't take my last statement as me saying I dislike installing advanced systems, just imagine I want to quickly re-install my development environment onto a new device or from a reinstall, I don't want to have to spend hours compiling the kernal or configuring locales. Now the first OS set I tried was BSD based systems. The few I tried where - OpenBSD - FreeBSD - NetBSD (in order) Now OpenBSD was really nice when installing, just like the other BSD varients it had a very basic installation process using a TUI setup process. I found all of the BSD versions very enjoyable to install. After first installing OpenBSD it prompty took 30 minutes to boot. This was likely due to the fact that OpenBSD is very secure and it performs several memory checks and other system checks on boot, the other more likely reason was that it was the first boot. FreeBSD had about the same installation process give or take, I will say FreeBSD was the only BSD version that I had looked into before. FreeBSD was the next OS I installed, Now I ended up cutting my visit short due to FreeBSD's lack of support for my Realtek ethernet driver, this was because I had downloaded the bootonly option which dosent actually come with full driver support so really this was my fault but don't worry I came back to give it another shot. Now NetBSD was cool and all and it was the first BSD version I actually got to boot, I played around with the default X11 environment before trying to fix the very apparent issue with the lack of graphics drivers which caused X11 to be in 1260x680p which is not ideal on a 1920x1080p monitor.. After some googling I found out that NetBSD dident even have a package for the drivers I needed. I switched back to FreeBSD and figured out how to install graphics drivers. I gotta say FreeBSD was a great system to use. Sure packages where annoying to install but it was a sacrafice I was willing to take. My computer is used for two things and two things only, One being development but two being playing games with my friends. I was a bit disapointed that there is no simple BSD alternative build for either Discord or Steam and the few that where available where buggy and complicated, and I'm far to stupid to even attempt such things. I decided to push the lack of support aside and do some developing just to see if the development experience could make up for it. I like to develop in my own custom environment built offof sucklesses window manager. At the time my configuration used polybar which is a popular lightweight statusbar program, this and a few other dependancies are required for my build to work. I spent an aditional Day installing polybar and the other dependancies and found that the package manager provided was so outdated that I ended up having to manually install from source every time I wanted something up to date. Now again like I said before I have no issue with compiling things myself its no hardship just the time crunch is not acceptable when I'm busy and need a package fast. Now after all of the BSD stuff I started looking into more advanced linux distros. a few that caught my eye where Gentoo and Slackware. First I tried slackware before figuring out the absolutly useless package manager and pre-installed bloat so I immediatly to SalixOS which is built ontop of slackware but also has a more usable backage manager slapt-get. I used slackware for a little until I ran into the same problem as before where packages where outdated and some where just not available. More infuriating Slackware has an online user driven repository of source packages that let you download a packages source code along with a file which can be used to compile the program. This system just reminded me of the arch AUR and PKGBUILDs. Now the issue with this slackware system is that packages are not maintained at all so it was common to find packages that EXISTED but where just uninstallable, and of course this meant installing from source and compiling manually.. nice stuff. Next on the list was Gentoo which was a day long commute to install. Gentoo comes with Systemd which is nice.. uh yeah but guess what the package manager is a compile local package mananger so when installing a package you run a very basic command, yes yes good good, then you wait 20 buisness days for it to download the source and all the dependancies before locally compiling and installing.. holy moly what a waste of time. I'm very sure that it was me that was making these issues so apparent and I'm sure there are millions of alternative routes I could have taken. I've ended up back with arch linux which i guess solved my issue with it being mainstream.. it is mainstream because it is so easy to install now-a-days so every idiot installs it just to say they use linux while running a base kde or gnome setup. I absolultly hate those kinds of people who use something for the main reason of status or reputation.. This was the initial reason I wanted to move over to another OS. I wanted an OS that was not diluted and poisoned by outliers in the community. I guess this week long journey has given me proof that I have an actual reason to be using arch. After all that fuss I think arch is the best distro because it has both up-to-date packages and a comprehensive installation and customization process.
RE: I Use Arch BTW - 2026-03-06T07:52:00.961Z ago
I Installed CRUX linux a day before Tony Banters (@tonybtw) made a video on it. I Used FreeBSD for a long while and I was interested in CRUX mainly for its port-style package management system. I installed CRUX and off the bat the installation was pretty straight forward. The CRUX 3.8 Handbook was very in-depth about how to install and setup CRUX, the only thing I added that wasn't in the handbook was full disk encryption which worked seamlessly. CRUX has a script styled init similar to FreeBSD and so this system seemed to be the highest contender for a Linux distrobution that felt like FreeBSD. After installing CRUX linux it took about a week of bugfixing for things like steam and my graphics card to work but after that the experience has been perfect, the package system is amazing and minimal and the init system is dead-simple, zero systemd OR openrc bloat..
Projects update - 2026-03-06T08:20:43.811Z ago
Plib has gotten to the point where I see no new features other than minor QOL macros, this is good, check it out in the projects section of this site, Plate, my template generator has also come a long way, not anywhere near perfection like Plib but its getting there! This site you're viewing was generated statically using Plate! Check it out in the projects above too!
Is there no such thing as a cheap split-layout keyboard? - 2026-03-06T08:22:45.366Z ago
The Corne V4 series split keyboards are amazing and I would get one if they weren't 500 of my currency...
Thinkpad 10 working!! - 2026-03-06T08:25:36.792Z ago
I've had this old Thinkpad 10 Tablet (Gen 1) which has been sitting rather sadly on my bench for a few months now right next to my Thinkpad T560.. Today a new charger finally arrived and I was able to start debugging the several battery issues I ran into.. Luckily most of the issues where resolved by simply re-seating the battery header cables, the only other functionality affected was the physical docking keyboard mount that will light up but not work.. I intend on using the Thinkpad 10 for my everyday carry, y'know dumbphones EDC style..
[New project] BLUI - 2026-03-12T08:21:45.998Z ago
BLUI is a basic api for creating Terminal User Interfaces (TUI). BLUI is incredibly small and robust, BLUI is cross platform and works on Windows, Linux and MacOS. BLUI is compatable with both C and C++. HOW IT WORKS: Inside the header file it has one global variable called _BLUI, this is where all the data for EVERYTHING is held. You can use a function to append a new "element" to the main app structure. Each "element" can have one of two types, it can either be a box or a text "element", text elements can be aligned to the left right or center whereas all "elements" have properties for x and y position on the screen. BLUI doesn't have any input management yet, this is on my to-do list! Feel free to send in a PR or issue!
Update on thinkpad + working T560 - 2026-03-19T01:53:35.460Z ago
The Thinkpad 10 (gen 1) has been put to rest, sadly it was not a viable machine for daily work, the only USB slot did not seem to function nor did the external keyboard, this means there was no way to write using an external keyboard or even flash a new operating system. I had another thinkpad though, a T560 which I received with a few missing parts. It had no internet card, ram or SSD, the monsters even took the motherboard connector for the SSD! Thankfully I had 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 that I could use for it, I also had a spare SATA M.2 drive I could use for storage drive. I ended up purchasing a T560 Motherboard header to SATA connector and a NVME to SATA converter so I could use the M.2 in place of the SATA SSD it had originally. While I waited for the parts I used a USB to boot an OS off of. The OS(s) I used for this was TinyCore linux and then AntiX Linux, both of which are made for ancient hardware. Anyway, I finally got the new parts for the T560 in the mail yesterday and I put it all together into a fully working T560! I can say it works perfectly now.
New projects update - 2026-03-19T21:05:43.067Z ago
Plib 7.x.x is in development, new features like combined shorthand and a better interface system will be included in the new version, required and extra features will be separated into a plib7.h and plib7e.h (e for extra).
new DWM updates! - 2026-03-26T05:53:21.442Z ago
Hey, this is very personal but my custom build of Sucklesses Dynamic Window Manager [DWM] has gotten some great new updates! Firstly I've fixed the long time issue where ST (suckless terminal) dosn't show up on the titlebar correctly.. this was fixed by patching ST with the title parsing fix patch. I've now completly removed the use of lemonbar and now I'm running a full native DWMBar system! I had to patch status2d with lots of custom code to allow for positioning text in the center and right side of the bottom bar! this allowed me to port my old lemonbar-bar style over to dwmbar, this wasn't too hard as my bar was designed to be modular.. anyway. check it out it you want too..
RE: Is there no such thing as a cheap split-layout keyboard? - 2026-04-03T05:53:48.367Z ago
Hi! Guess what I found.. I found a cheap Corne V4.1 on ebay for under 70 dollars! (61.20 to be exact). This was a great find as the pcbs alone cost more then that. This particular Corne has both QMK and VIAL support which is great, it has both RGB and because its the V4.1 it has no screens which I did not like on the Corne V3's.. Its the wired version which I also prefer. The entire build costs around $100 (my local currency) but I'm able to sell the board for over double that as there is a very small and concentrated market for Cornes in my country.. Hopefully the Corne lives up to its reputation, I've heard they are great for forcing yourself to learn 10-finger-typing and they reduce wrist-strain because of their staggered design. I've wanted a Corne keyboard for so long and I'm quite happy this showed up! I'll post another comment about how my typing style has changed after using it. Side-note, I find it quite funny to think about how people use my computer. This is because I use DWM which already is quite keyboard driven, I've made majority of my computer operable through keybinds alone. I switched to DVORAK layout a while ago and that will put a lot of people off this setup and now lastly I'm moving over from a 61 key keyboard (custom RK61) to a 46 key Corne V4.1..
Plate TODOs - 2026-04-06T12:29:34.919Z ago
Hello! If you're reading this then im sure yourve seen the mess above in the projects section, this is due to PLATE bugs that I haven't solved yet. I'm busy with other commitments (school) so I will not be able to attend to these issues, I'm sorry for the inconvenience!