The Castle — Sanctuaries on Tiago Pires

Godzilla XS-86000

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Godzilla XS-86000 is the visible identity of sanctuary-sx — a habitat rooted in the visual culture of the Sharp X68000: Human68k, SX-Window, and the Japanese workstation grammar of the early 1990s. The chassis is XFCE, shaped by hand until it stopped looking like XFCE; the soul is a machine Sharp never quite built.

Redstone 9X

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Full name: Mineshaft Whistler Redstone 9X First Edition™ Plus. If you know, you know.

Redstone 9X is the gaming wing’s first sanctuary: a container wearing the full desktop grammar of a late-1990s PC — teal desktop, battleship-grey chrome, and window furniture that behaves the way window furniture used to behave. Under the period costume it is a modern, declared system: IceWM shaped to the era, a DOSEMU2 terminal lane, a DOSBox-X compatibility lane, source ports for the classics, and a host-visible .compat/ runtime spine that records how RetroPie collections, DOS projections, and per-lane state relate without flattening them into one folder. Every launcher is declared in DotCortex source rather than hand-installed — the whole thing rebuildable from the repo.

The Emacs Sanctuary

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The working sanctuary: a Guix-backed container built around a topology of independent Emacs processes. Three boot profiles share one body — Qtile ruling the windows today, StumpWM as the Lisp-native second opinion, and probably EXWM in the end — the same sanctuary wearing three window managers, because declarations make profiles cheap. Inside a nested display the window manager is not the host’s problem, so Emacs may as well own the whole X session. The topology: one for core work, one as a disposable launcher frame, one for dashboards, one for agent sessions and long-running tools, one for journals. Each has its own socket, state, and entrypoint. One shared constitution, multiple independent bodies: a wedged agent Emacs cannot freeze the launcher.

KiTTY OS — The Neovim Sanctuary

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

On paper this is the Lua mirror of the Emacs sanctuary: AwesomeWM ruling the windows, Neovim as the IDE surface. But the real goal is a question: how close to Emacs can we get KiTTY?

Kitty is a GPU-accelerated terminal with a graphics protocol, and that changes what “terminal” means. The target is a terminal that behaves like an operating system: Org-mode and Markdown rendered at variable font heights inside Neovim; web browsers running in terminal panes against local servers; LLMs not just writing prose into buffers but generating HTML and JavaScript that renders directly in a terminal browser pane; local and remote databases on tap; the Obsidian CLI treated as a queryable database rather than a note-taking app; Org-roam rendered in the terminal, where the graph actually lives.

The GNUstep Sanctuary

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Window Maker and GNUstep: the NeXT lineage as a living free-software environment rather than an archaeology project. Black title bars, tiles and dockapps, Objective-C where Objective-C belongs — with modern package management underneath, because the whole sanctuary is declared in Guix and tangled from DotCortex like everything else.

The direction of travel (ruled 2026-07-02) is NEXTSPACE — the project that assembles the GNUstep pieces into something that actually feels like OpenStep rather than a parts bin. Window Maker proves the grammar; NEXTSPACE completes the sentence. And the icon layer is non-negotiable: the original NeXTSTEP isometric icons, the ones that taught a generation what depth on a screen could mean.

The CDE Sanctuary

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Common Desktop Environment — the real one, open-sourced in 2012 after two decades as the face of commercial Unix — compiled from source inside its own sanctuary. CDE is not in any distribution’s repositories, and that is fine: it is pinned as an explicit source input in DotCortex, built inside the container, launched through its own Xsession. The desktop that shipped on Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX workstations, running as a declared, rebuildable habitat.

The Commodore Sanctuary

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Amiga wing (ruled 2026-07-02). Commodore OS Vision exists, and it is useful — as a quarry, not a foundation. This sanctuary harvests from it where it makes sense and discards the rest: all the garish underglow theatrics go, the emulation plumbing and the catalogue of Commodore-blessed software stay. What gets built on top is the thing Vision never quite commits to — a proper Amiga desktop. Workbench grammar taken seriously: the grey, the blue, the orange, drawers that behave like drawers.

Steam Classic

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

If Redstone 9X is the 1990s gaming den, Steam Classic (ruled 2026-07-02) is the room next door, five years later: the era when Steam was olive-green, angular, and slightly hostile, and the games it carried were the best PC gaming would ever be per megabyte. A sanctuary wearing that grammar whole — a green-on-green Windows 98 SE face over Xfce, tuned until the chrome reads like the client did in the orange-box years.

BrunOS Platinum Classic

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Every room in this castle is dedicated to something. This one (ruled 2026-07-02) is dedicated to a person: my cousin Bruno, who sat me in front of an Amiga 500 and early Macintosh emulators when we were kids and taught me the single most important lesson in this entire wing — that hardware is negotiable. A machine is a shape software can be poured into. Everything the Virtual Habitat is, every enclave and emulation tier on this site, descends from afternoons at that screen.