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Comment by jcelerier | Hacker News Reader

I still use xev regularly and xkill pretty much everyday? Along with xclip (everyday too), xdotool (for automation workflows)... glxgears very often too to check if for some reason the GPU driver bailed out

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Xev is super useful when messing with keybindings.

I also use xmag (not in this list) when I want to inspect something on screen or as a makeshift color picker.

If anybody uses kwin, you can set mouse-wheel bindings for zooming with a keyboard modifier using xbindkeys like this:

    "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

You can change Mod4+Super_L to whatever modifier keys you like.

xdotool sits that the heart of a few useful keyboard macros I have set up, e.g.

    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

Finds the zoom meeting or webinar I'm in, brings it to top, and unmutes it. Very useful

I recently discovered xdotool and it's fantastic. I'm using it with lirc to run a special media TV for my mom, who has Alzheimer's.

It's 2023 and there are stable graphical operating systems that don't make you check 'if the GPU driver bailed out' every 15 minutes...

Do they also not include telemetry or forcefully installed software you never asked for but cannot remove anyway and will remind you of their existence ar every opportunity?

Yes.

It’s more of the driver’s fault, right? BTE, Windows has a Ctrl+Shift+Win+B shortcut to restart the graphics driver if it bails out.

Windows has a Ctrl+Shift+Win+B shortcut to restart the graphics driver if it bails out.

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.

ohhhh I didn't know this one (as I have of course the same problem on windows regularly on that machine but then I just reboot)

I don't know... Sometimes I've to pull Windows into safe mode and run DDU. The reasons are varied. I assume macOS might run into similar things, all software has bugs

Same for xkill? Who needs to kill a graphical application every day and what kind of distro parent commenter is using to need to do that in 2023?

Not OP, but I use xkill semi regularly (like 1-2 times a week) to check whether an app is running in xwayland or natively...

xeyes can check that too, without killing the application.

i'm happy for you if you never have any application that hangs and ends as a zombie process but for me it happens very, very regularly (generally because of some stuff being on a network share or some hardware being plugged in an out a bit too much.. like unplugging an USB soundcard when it's being actively used, this one always causes some mess)

who runs js in a web browser every day in 2023.

aha, I just used it for a very simple reason: it was simpler for me to type "<meta+d> xkill" and point & shoot than to go through the save & exit confirm dialogs of a GUI app I was about to close

With great power comes great responsibility. If you don't want the responsibility, that's fine, but someone else gets the power.

Last time I had to do that, it was on Windows 11 on a friends PC that was unexpectedly using 1024x768 on his 4k HDR monitor.

Glad I don't have to deal with that, Arch just works

Shades of my old Vic20.

glxgears was/is useful if you use a proprietary graphics driver. Those are prone to getting broken when you update to a new kernel. With in-kernel drivers for most GPUs this is much less of a problem today. Probably still a problem for Nvidia owners.

> It's 2023 and there are stable graphical operating systems that don't make you check 'if the GPU driver bailed out' every 15 minutes...

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).

>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.

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