Cool, but Obscure X11 Tools
cyber.dabamos.de
cyber.dabamos.de
Allows locking your screen without hiding its contents (i.e. just disables input/interaction.) Nice for when you want to keep some stats, top, or just a plain message visible on your screen.
- sm
"screen message". Goes fullscreen and just gives you an editable text field to type a message into. Great to combine with xtrlock mentioned above to put something like "brb, grabbing coffee" on your screen for your colleagues or so :) (Technically a Gtk app I think, but fits the pattern.)
- [ed.] Xephyr
Open another X server as a window in your current X server. Great as a "canvas" for a screenshare if you want to share multiple windows but not your entire desktop. Batteries not included, you need to know how to juggle xauth & a WM (metacity for me) to make the new X server actually do something.
What a blast from the past feeling. I've never used this specific tool but I think there is/was something in Windows to do this? Through college in the late 90's and into my first few jobs in software engineering, there was a minor zeitgeist across my first few companies to diligently leave a description behind on your screen if you were going to be away for a while. It was a scene full of personality and power.
'Find me in the kitchen' was a courteous thing to do. 'Bob left his machine unlocked, bozo!' built camaraderie. Not seeing a message, combined with long absence, was a sense of dread. You could publicly wrap a middle finger in a heart: 'Canned. But I still love you all!'. Like a Post-It note, it said something about the person whose machine it was on. But its magnitude, beaming out of a miraculous cathode ray tube, was meant for and captured the attention of everyone walking by. You could reach and influence an audience you otherwise weren't welcome to speak so candidly to. I may have built crucial favor and long term work relationships from a silly quip. I couldn't possibly say for sure.
Now having worked mostly remote for half a decade, I miss it. This interesting slice of subculture has decomposed into messenger apps thanks to common availability of satellite-enabled-computers-in-pockets. And @here is a painfully poor substitute.
There's probably lots of such programs. I know suckless sent for example.
Besides, they tend to rant about SJWs a lot -- red flag #1 that they are for reals far right.
Did some quick searches and couldn't find anything racist posted by suckless developers, but hard to search for. Got any links handy so one could form their own opinion?
> Besides, they tend to rant about SJWs a lot -- red flag #1 that they are for reals far right.
Yeah, sometimes that is true, but I prefer to see hard evidence before reaching any conclusion, especially when people start advocating to stop mentioning software because of it.
From suckless developers? Or from others? I don't understand how this is related to your argument.
Suckless is a organization that describes itself as "focus on simplicity, clarity and frugality", and "philosophy is about keeping things simple, minimal and usable", from https://suckless.org/philosophy/
I think they are most famous for dwm, but have written a lot of other good software as well.
xclip allows putting stuff in the X clipboard for subsequent pasting into any application. I use it to “copy” canned email responses which I keep in a folder as .txt files and then paste them in the browser for sending by email. No need to bother with browser extensions or built-in crappy functionality (gmail canned responses used to just lose my responses every once in a while).
alias xpaste='xclip -out -sel clipboard'
alias xcopy='xclip -in -sel clipboard' alias clip='xclip -selection clipboard'
cat foo.txt | clip
Sadly the site seems to have been moved from another location and the obj files (the files tgif uses) did not survive the move. Only one file was transferred from another tutorial (in Japanese) about using Tgif with Gimp, most likely because it had a "wrong" extension (.html). It does open fine in a build of Tgif i just did though[2].
[0] http://plaza.harmonix.ne.jp/~onizuka/HowToTgifE.html
This was new to me, thanks!
Essentially, hyperlinks for shapes; any graphic element can be linked to another, including other drawings (documents) or sections of a document.
I suppose that's obvious these days. Hyperlinks are expected.
I know that Visio (Windows) and OmniGraffle (MacOS) can do this. I would build active computer network diagrams, dashboards: you could click on a computer's graphic and get an SNMP report.
SNMP: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Network_Management_Pr...
https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/visio/flowchar...
I think MacDraw did links, too. HyperCard, sure.
[0] https://www.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/projects/nm/tkined/welcome.html.... [1] https://www.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/projects/nm/scotty/tcl+snmp.html [2] https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2225 [3] http://netsaint.sourceforge.net/
- xterm
- xmessage
- xlockmore
- xkill
- xfontsel
- xev
- xcalc
- xchm
- glxgears
For example *xte rm(1)* can is one of the most compatible terminal emulator out there and its nice to have it started each time with random color theme:
- https://vermaden.files.wordpress.com/2021/05/xterm.random.pn...
- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2021/05/19/freebsd-desktop-pa...
With some theming in *~/.Xdefaults* both *xmessage(1)* and *xcalc(1)* look really well:
- https://vermaden.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/openbox-alt-tab...
- https://i.imgur.com/gl1Q63H.png
I still use *xfontsel(1)* to select bitmap fonts.
I lock screen with *xlock(1)* (package name *xlockmore*) to lock the screen:
- https://vermaden.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/xlock-user-pass...
- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/06/23/freebsd-desktop-pa...
I also use *xkill(1)* when some X11 window misbehaves.
Hope that helps.
Regards.
Right?
It's the desktop background. The X root Window.
If you finish all your work, all your windows closed, you get to see them gears!
Some materials (like old HP-UX training or documentation) is available as CHM files. You can convert them to something else but it the looks like sh*t ... this using xchm(1) helps here. Yes, nowadays it also does not happen that often.
Besides xchm(1) does not look that bad:
- https://www.dedoimedo.com/images/computers/2009/xchm-another...
> xev
I use that to test what keys what codes have. For example with ThinkPad W520 the keys to the left and right of the ARROW keys are 'NEXT' and 'PREV' - I always map them to Page Up and Page Down keys with ~/.xmodmaprc file:
! PAGE UP/PAGE DOWN
keycode 167 = Next NoSymbol Next
keycode 166 = Prior NoSymbol Prior
Its not daily but I also do not use nc(1) or traceroute(1) or dig(1) daily but I of course use these tools when needed.
Hope that helps.
Also expected tools for managing X11 (e.g. a sane font selector, or ways to make X settings understandable), but that’s minor.
The one X11 app I still use to troubleshoot issues or when I set up a new Debian system is "xeyes" (just two eyes which look/track the direction of the mouse pointer). As long as it's shipped with Debian, I'll be making sure xeyes is installed.
If you miiiiight have a flaky network, leaving xeyes open in the corner can be a real headache-saver.
Just an artifact of the whole UI being pixel mapped graphics onto buttons/labels/canvas mimicking the calculator. I imagine Tk, Xaw, or Motif is under there, you just can't see it. The TiEmu one appears to be GTK.
Actually launches faster for me that some of the "native" calculators, which I find very strange.
I just checked: although I have Free42 on my Kindle Fire tablet, it's via Google Play Store. I don't see it on Amazon's App Store.
Nedit was very fast, had a familiar user interface (to a person raised on dos/windows) and still had a ton of functionality.
Some of my co-workers said it was weird that I used it because the other editors will do instant linting and suggest code for Ansible YAML. I've found that not using VSCode or Eclipse forced me to learn more about the language and I am now the local subject matter expert on Ansible.
I first learned NEdit at Fermi where it was developed. Been using it for 28 years now. Carrying a dependency on Motif for all that time has been sort of a drag, though.
Master class in Unix user interface design right there.
Of course if you don't have Vim in your brain none of this text will make any sense to you; it's almost like reading a list of (x,y) coordinates if mouse clicks. So you won't have any idea about the UI feedback I'm talking about, and you're likely to make clueless sarcastic comments like the one I'm responding to. But you can easily remedy that ignorance by running Vim or Emacs on an appropriate file and typing the recommended keystroke sequences.
vim has a register for every letter. I.e., register a, register b, ...
And on xscreensavers, are they not the default/only screensavers on distros anymore?
At least GNOME, and I think some others, have their own implementations. Quality varies.
hahah this go me!!!
alias xv='echo You should use qiv or xli now.'
I used it for quite some time during my time as a PhD student and found it rather easy to use compared to gnuplot. Used it to make all my plots for my publications.
I recall the crystallography dept getting excited thinking there was some new research going on, because of the way I lay out my empire maps, and me leaving a printout or two lying around, back in the day :)
Update: Thought xlander was extinct in the wild, but Slackware still has it in their xgames package. Runs fine on Mint 20.2.
Back in the day (about 1993/4?) we had what we'd now call LAN parties playing this game in the computer labs at university. To the point where the admins banned any use before a certain time in the evening because it overloaded the shared 10Mbps ethernet.
Also there was a great Breakout game for X11 at around the same time that I cannot find anything about now.
xmodmap: Modify which keysyms pressing a given button produces
xcape: Make modifiers do double duty as regular keys when pressed and released without other keys.
You could use Xlib to program a client in pure X11, but that approach would have been outdated even 15 years ago. There's no good reason to do so today, even embedded systems often use Qt and there's good support for building embedded/Qt in Yocto. Most embedded devices that have any UI at all are likely powerful enough to run Qt, so I suspect there aren't many cases these days where you need to limit yourself to Xlib because of performance.
Xlib is actually not very pure X11; Xlib makes a lot of things synchronous whereas X11 is really an asynchronous messaging distributed systems protocol that happens to output to the screen as a side effect. Xcb is a much closer to the actual protocol library.
IMHO, a lot of early hate for X11 was really hate at Xlib; but as Xlib was the official library, it was understandable to get them confused.
Things are slowly shifting to Wayland.
Never fully used by all, old hardware around for decades without it, and likely require something else, such as X11 now supports wayland!
Just as I suspect ipv8 will make ipv6 disappear!
ipv8 is identical to ipv4, it just has another 256 in front of it. 5 octlets. A 6th octlet for planet designation...
Very few would bother to do X11 graphics directly with Xlib, we aren't in the 1980's.
[0] - Some would say Vulkan I rather spare myself the burden.
2122 of course.
X11 forever!
Originally on the NEC-PC (Necko is Japanese for "cat"), it has been ported or re-implemented all over the place (Wikipedia is my only brain).
I've asked on these sorts of threads before, but can anyone remember what it was? I seem to have lost all trace -- source code, screenshots, anything. I thought it was "xpool" but that didn't turn up much.
I worked on a Java program that was a point of sales terminal. All the registers were reasonably beefy linux machines that ran a Java Web Start application and it worked well... except when it didn't.
Sometimes it had threading deadlocks and that was a pain to debug. In particular, we didn't know where it came from. So we installed a handler on ctl-alt-delete that would find the Java process running and do a thread dump from that (so we could find the methods that were locked) and also did a xwd to capture the screen to see what was happening. Sometimes we were able to pick out "this modal alert window spawned 100x copies of itself" by recognizing an unnaturally thick border around it. Just seeing what the state that the register was in was useful too.
The xwd and thread dumps where then stored in a folder that was sent back as part of nightly reports back to the central office where we'd look at them the next morning.
On one hand it was a bit clunky, on the other hand it really beat trying to get a bug report from cashiers working the registers in a timely manner - they just had to remember to do a ctl-alt-delete rather than power cycling the machine and we'd get it reported back to us automatically.
As an added bonus it runs perfectly well over the network, as a good X app should. You don't need a fast or low latency connection, it runs perfectly well over even mediocre connectivity.