Cool, but obscure X11 tools (2019)
cyber.dabamos.de
cyber.dabamos.de
I appreciate it nonetheless.
I browsed around the site and I found this collection which I like a bit more
https://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/index3.html
It appears to be in roughly alphabetical order by topic, which is quite an accomplishment
> Dock app that simply counts down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds left until 00:00 January 1, 2000.
To me, sign and absolute value are often separate concerns.
The series 1, 2, 3, … is increasingly positive.
The series -1, -2, -3, … is increasingly negative.
But I understand, and accept, that others may think differently about numbers.
The series 1, 2, 3 is increasing (and) positive.
The series -1, -2, -3 is decreasing negative.
The series -3, -2, -1 is increasing negative.
Edit: formatting
put in printf("%s\n",temp); around line 52 and you'll see it is indeed negatives. This very much confuses this line
copyXPMArea((*p-'0')*7 + 1, 0, 8, 13, k, 2);
Countdown to y2k and NCSA mosaic would have been of pretty limited use in 2002 and some of this software didn't exist pre-2000.
There's probably meta information on the images or a last modified date if people really want to map things out.
Regardless, it's a time capsule either way
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/simcity/simcity-revi...
Then later DUX Software released a collaborative multi player version of SimCity for X11/TCL/Tk in 1993:
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/simcity/simcity-anno...
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.newprod/c/5KWv25ckYHc/m/MgG...
Then it was finally re-licensed under GPL-3 for the OLPC as SimCity, and for any other use as Micropolis in 2008 (with the multi player stuff disabled because the X11 network protocol was not safe or simple enough for kids to use on a mesh network):
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2008/01/simcity-goes-open-sou...
You'd use ctrl+alt numpad keys to switch resolution and color depths sometimes if you don't have a lot of video memory. You could get high resolution, low color or low resolution high color.
Who doesn't remember XEyes, XBiff, XClock, XEdit, Xev, XKill (!), Xv (!!), XMosaic (!!!) ... many others on there.
Granted I did not know FSV2 and some others.
Nice collection, glad to not have to run any of them. Not saying they weren't useful for their time!
The fact that Windows has a built-in shortcut to restart the graphics driver illustrates that graphics drivers are not as faultless as the parent poster believes.
Glad I don't have to deal with that, Arch just works
In my experience it's got nothing to do with the operating system and everything to do with who wrote your graphics card driver. (NVidia is stable everywhere, AMD is... not).
We are not in the Radeon times with GATOS project any more. Since the radeon(4) driver, Radeon cards might work much better with open drivers and a current MESA release than NVIDIA except for machine learning.
I also use xmag (not in this list) when I want to inspect something on screen or as a makeshift color picker.
"qdbus6 org.kde.kglobalaccel /component/kwin invokeShortcut view_zoom_in"
Mod4 + Super_L + b:4
"qdbus6 org.kde.kglobalaccel /component/kwin invokeShortcut view_zoom_out"
Mod4 + Super_L + b:5
ZOOM=$(xdotool search --limit 1 --name "Zoom Meeting" || xdotool search --limit 1 --name "Zoom Webinar")
if [ -n "${ZOOM}" ]; then
xdotool windowactivate --sync "${ZOOM}"
sleep 0.1
xdotool key --clearmodifiers "alt+a"
fi
So I'm curious what OS you're running and where your xv is from? Still miss it!
i actually have problems with XWayland, it frequently (every few days), goes to a 100% CPU and locks up the screen. then i have to remote login and kill it, at which point i see which apps die, so i know what is using XWayland from that. :-)
Exactly. It will work properly if the app is using XWayland and fail for native Wayland.
Also, I can reliably tell based on the fact that the contents of the XWayland windows are fuzzier.
I can do that because I have had lots of practice discerning fuzziness, because I am using a old monitor (as opposed to a HiDPI display) and because I have a fractional (non-integral) scaling factor declared in my monitors.xml file--when the scaling factor is set to 1.0 there is no difference in fuzziness as far as I can tell.
but xmosaic should count of obscure today because now it only works on old and obscure websites ;-)
(I was using xterm until very recently, mostly because it used sharp rasterized display fonts. Now that I have a reasonably high DPI display, it is easier to use nearly anything else.)
It's really very configurable. My problem with mate-terminal and similar is that they don't often let me set a cursor color independent of the foreground color.
I like to code C projects in a single vim session running in a terminal; by having a bright green fast-blinking block cursor I can visually locate where my cursor is after reading code in a different split.
So, yeah, I use xterm (or uxterm) because of this single feature that I value of any other feature it might be missing.
xterm -fn 24 &
on HP-UX workstations and servers. Even on Linux maybe, earlier.
What an incredibly obtuse, unhelpful, un-useful interface. I don't know about kde but definitely gnome does not get to charge anyone else with any words like janky.
(Ok, I had to look up her last name. I'm getting old.)
> XLennart is a modification of the arcade game XBill. An evil and unpopular computer hacker named “Lennart” tries to install his malicious init system on various BSD and Linux systems. Like in XBill, the player has to hit him and restore infected machines.
Hah! Poor Poettering tho. He really gets a lot of hate '=(
I believe pipewire is already the default in Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora
And from a few posts of his I had read when systemd was being introduced one thing struck me. All of the posts of his that I read where he was defending something of his, the post would be full of blatant straw man arguments. It was very odd.
Especially the way systemd was pushed through by making gnome dependent on it was not cool.
This made me dislike systemd and Poettering even though it's not bad as such. I just don't like to be forced into things. I don't hate him but I'm not exactly positive towards him either.
I use FreeBSD now anyway because I think commercial influence over Linux is too great. So I'm admittedly an outlier.
as someone who has met him in person, i have to reject that. there are arrogant and uncomfortable developers. he is not one of them.
Can anyone link me to a history of this? I've heard this a number of times but haven't seen anything factual (i.e: that answers "what were the technical benefits to gnome?"). It seems pretty reasonable to me that Gnome devs would see some nice features/integrations that they wanted to use, and decided it was worth it. It also seems plausible that they would have used gnome to strong-arm in systemd. My experience tells me that the former is a lot more likely, but I'd like to investigate the situation.
Here is one particularly egregious and clearcut example: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/6237
tl;dr: a systemd service configured to run as a user who's username started with a digit (e.g. the username '0day') would instead run as root. Lennart initially closes the bug report and refuses to fix it because he thought such usernames weren't acceptable, despite the kernel and most linux utilities permitting it and handling it gracefully. A good engineer with a shred of humility would take this report seriously, even if he thought other systems shouldn't be permitting the circumstance. To see the lead engineer of a project so important to linux take such a childish stance on a security-related bug was infuriating and demoralizing.
This is just one example, which didn't take anybody by surprise. It's his modus operandi. May the gods have mercy on the Microsoft engineers who now have to call him a coworker.
But today, you essentially can't have a system without systemd, because it's no longer just a matter of "if you don't want it, don't use it" because all the upstream packages have now changed to depend on it, and now it's a huge job to artificially hack them all back to sysv-init.
And as bad as that all is, what makes it all nuclear worse, is the complete disregard and inconsideration for anyone raising that objection.
Thankfully the Gentoo maintainers still make this easy.
Unix tradition (see AOUP) and perhaps supervisord precedent recommend names that need to be user-typeable should be lower/snake case:
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1863...
Not a huge deal, and keys are not filenames. But it shows a lack of detail-orientation for someone working at such a fundamental level in the OS.
Indeed, it's wild to see the level of systemd hate that there is. Hopefully Lennart takes it in good humor. I would in his shoes. Can't take ourselves too seriously
People quickly learned they could open a billion `xneko`s on another person's screen to completely lock them up.
the most obnoxious would have been to set the background, because that's not easy to undo if you don't know how.
when i was a student i used to hang out in the computer halls until late at night. being one of the last ones there i was often able to get use of the one sun workstation that had a color screen.
one night the sysadmin logged remotely into the machine i was using and played "always look on the bright side of life"
For a year or three, I ran this setup on my Linux background desktop. Our team was returning to the United States after working with our colleagues at the European Southern Observatory https://www.eso.org/public/ and a flight attendant noticed the image of Earth, Moon, sun on my computer.
She asked if I were interested or involved in space exploration, and I told her that we looked at stars from the ground, but could get pretty far. She bent closer to me and murmured, “The pilots have just heard from the radio, there has been an explosion of the Space Shuttle.”
2003, somewhere over Greenland.
Anyway: XPlanet rocks.
Especially in college in the late 90s I remember using/trying a lot of these application.
Some of these like XBiff were standard things almost all of us setup as we configured out desktops. Mostly we were using FVWM but you had to basically build your own environment.
When I was in school the campus computers were basically a mix of Sun, IBM RS6000, and SGI, and the IT department had everything configured extremely nicely where you could log onto any machine and your desktop appeared and all your files were there and everything just kind of transparently worked as if you were always using the same computer, even though the machines were all different versions of Unix. For non programming work it just worked. For my CS stuff you would just have to recompile on the current arch you were on.
Gnome and KDE didn't appear till about my 3rd year.. I don't think any of them were really available on the school machines unless you built it yourself and did the work to configure your environment to use them. So we used a lot of these old school X11 programs.
I never had any money for a TV, game console, etc.. at that point and actually played some of these amateurish X11 games for fun. None of them were good enough to hold your attention very long but there were a lot of them to try. Some were really good for the time, like Netrek. The graphics were not amazing but the multiplayer gameplay was well ahead of it's time.
That brings back painful memories of getting Gnome (v1, perhaps) compiled and running properly; was it "the Gnu Network Object Model Environment" or similar?
Xblast was also cool. It would transform the mouse pointer into a crosshairs and if you clicked it would shoot a hole in the window that you could actually see through. It was really fun to annoy first year students at uni before xauth was implemented.
Xeyes too of course with some --geometry to make it full screen. Did that with a huge video wall once (nearly got me fired but I was just an intern. So worth it)
We have so many debug logs that trying to find your log of a background task, takes a non zero amount of time.
So just inserting system("xeyes"); is actually way easier, to get instant feedback, and you can just use system("xmessage msg"), if you need a message.
The screenshots are using some commercial Unix wm (mwm?) or one of the free ones that copies their look (fvwm?)
I use fvwm on one of my machines in 2023, in part because I found myself on a retro kick a few years ago, so I don't think it's that weird, though it is extremely dated.
this is how it looks for me: https://imgur.com/a/OXGVCsK
There is also NsCDE: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
That's way too useful and productive.
It's not a real OS if it doesn't have ads flying out when you click controls, and constantly telling you the forecast and what Taylor Swift is up to this minute.
As for the old window managers (and applications) themselves, I would imagine they are still bundled with Debian. Now that Debian allows non-open drivers in their official installation media, I'm tempted to try installing it to relive some of that X11 nostalgia. (I have fond memories of xv, xfig, and such.)
Add 4k, text antialiasing, and an updated terminal and I think would look and work quite well.
Using modern UI without borders, with cluttered title bars, with tiny scrollbars is a PITA.
On the other hand I knew XBill for decades and that was totally deserved.
I admit I am also biased about the original XBill one.
In the fine arts we call it a plastic medium. A medium that's easy to edit. It's why we sculpt out of clay instead of beercans.
It was full of incredibly verbose, buggy API calls with a bunch of platform-specific bugs and everything was manual.
% xpdf -remote work output.pdf &
[1]
% inotifywait --monitor ... | \
while read; do \
make && xpdf -remote work -reload
done
With xpdf I could do xpdf -reload after my build finished, and it would retain my place (as long as I hadn't `\if 0`ed the place I was looking at out of existence).
(some might ask "how the hell did you not know about Elite or Tempest??" before pervasive internet discovery was a non-linear process, I think I learned about these games in the early 2000s, from the internet)
:)
I sometimes have to consciously remind myself that I haven't played chrono trigger until 2005, or that I clocked some unreasonable amount of hours playing rise of the triad, Star Wars dark forces and Ultima underworld, rather than the whatever's on the list of top 90s video games.
How did I not know that this existed?
TIL that:
sudo apt-get install xwpe
Will have to play with this later.
> Borland-like integrated development environment (IDE)
Not a bad product otherwise. The Borland IDE still feels like home to me.
https://www.x.org/archive/X11R7.5/doc/man/man1/xlsfonts.1.ht...
It is a command line tool and can be used without a GUI. You can even query for the fonts on another X server's display (1). See this excerpt:
-display host:dpy This option specifies the X server to contact.
(1) - where the meaning of server and client is the reverse of that of traditional client server.
Its fun to query or set information on a remote. The same applies to xdpyinfo, xset, xrandr and many more support the -display option (if they don't then set the DISPLAY environment variable).
Also, I miss the large clear, 16/256 color icons from the win 3.0 and 1990's unix era.
and
https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Solaris-8
Change the GTK settings as always. Or use lxappearance.
You can attach to e.g. `ssh://hostname/:1`, so I ran a firefox instance on a homelab server and attached to it from my laptop and my desktop to not have to bother keeping bookmarks, tabs etc in sync.
I recall, around 2004, using it on Windows, under Cygwin, to run cygwin-compiled X apps on Windows.
I'm not sure how that worked at all, to be honest. I hope my memory is not playing tricks on me again.
My top 3 are Xaos (previously mentioned above), XEphem (https://github.com/XEphem/XEphem); an absolutely lovely ephemeris, and predict (https://www.qsl.net/kd2bd/predict.html); the satellite tracker--which has a bunch GUI versions--for example gpredict, which I guess is more relevant for this story.
Kind of weird to realise so much time has past.
Cool, but Obscure X11 Tools - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29681507 - Dec 2021 (128 comments)
Cool but obscure X11 tools - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20713003 - Aug 2019 (246 comments)
I always thought it was remnant of a much cooler alternative branch we could have gone down for UI, but didn’t.
I haven't played with x2x. Thank you for the tip.
XMorph - blends two images together: https://xmorph.sourceforge.net/home/gourlay/public_html/Xmor...
ACM - Aerial Combat Simulator: https://www.gnu.org/software/acm/
There've been a few XBattle clones in the last 20 years, mostly Flash games, but none really took off. It's a great game mechanic.
I've long since forgotten what it was called.
I was kind of hoping it might have been on this list, but sadly it wasn't.
I found it while going through reddit.com/r/unixporn and looking at other peoples tiling window manager setups.
A debugger that can represent data structures like linked lists graphically.
That makes is pretty useless as a word processor, unless it has a really robust auto-save system.
Anyway, the Plan calendar thing looked neat, but I don't think it's packaged in Arch.
So many memories, what do I do what that? So obsolete now but can't just throw away that piece of working hardware.
i remember it as an mplayer output option mplayer -vo xv [file]
Loved XTank. My friends & I wound up getting the source as we found out the version we had deployed on our university's system was older and missed out on a lot of cool tanks & features.
It’s not even a GNU/Linux thing, X predates Linux, it’s more of the standard system to draw a window on Unix-like systems.
X11 apps are GUI apps uncontrolled by/unaware of a desktop environment, theme engine, or window manager. They appear in a minimalist, maybe even brutalist, aesthetic. You can launch a single X11 app from the console, and the resulting window will be your entire graphical display/instance, returning you to the console after the program terminates execution.
Maybe another way to think about your question might be, think of X vs Wayland.
> You can launch a single X11 app from the console, and the resulting window will be your entire graphical display/instance, returning you to the console after the program terminates execution.
Is this not possible with GUI apps using e.g. Qt or Electron?