Re: Eliminating the xterm
Re: Eliminating the xterm
- Subject: Re: Eliminating the xterm
- From: Peter Collinson <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2007 16:17:17 +0000
On 10 Nov 2007, at 13:51, Ben Byer wrote:
Ironically, the reason I chose to make xterm the default app for
the X11 launcher was specifically so that there *would* be a user-
visible result to running X11.app (aside from the icon, of
course). We were worried that people would be accustomed to double-
clicking on /Apps/Utils/X11.app in Tiger and having an xterm pop up
(via the system xinitrc), and that if that didn't happen with
Leopard, they'd think it was "broken". Oh, how silly that seems
now...
I am a little confused, though, as to why we are trying to find a
way to preemptively launch the X server without starting a "real
program". Is this to avoid the .xinitrc / .Xresources race condition?
I think one of the first thing I did on a Mac was to remove this
xterm by using my own .xinitrc. My Tiger practice is to start X11 on
login - and then use the menus as and when to select initial
applications such as a local xterm - or remote machine ssh calls. So
on Tiger, X11 acts as its own launcher and people are used to that.
I am currently Leopardless so what follows is based on my
understanding of the situation. You seem have made X11 and its apps
work a lot 'better' in the Mac environment - where a local or remote
X application joins the family of other applications that the Mac
supports - I can create an icon that drives a program invocation and
place the icon where ever I like - next to any other Mac app. This is
good, IMHO - but does involve a rethink - and opinions will
undoubtedly vary on whether that is a good or bad thing in itself.
Backwards compatibility and user expectation is always a problem.
I expect that then I move from stripes to spots, the jobs currently
in my X11 menu will move to become icons - and I figure again what
people are 'complaining' about is the on the initial click - an
unexpected event happens - a 'mystery' xterm starts. This doesn't
happen when you start iCal:-) It's perhaps sort of reasonable to
think of X11.app as the glue that binds X11 apps together, and it
just needs to appear in the Dock.
Be good to have some 'thing' that will combine a text string with a
regular icon to make a range of 'X11 icons' painlessly... I can
personally do the graphic stuff - but it's a lot of energy to make
good looking icons.
As for cut and paste -- oh, the fun we've had with cut and paste.
Cut and paste sucks in X11.app. Why?
1. Cut and paste kinda sucks in X11 in general, and this is a
generally agreed-upon fact in the X community. Yes, it generally
works, but it's unpredictable at best. There have been murmurings
about trying to fix that across-the-board -- and I'm first in line
when it comes to spearheading that -- but for whatever reason, it
still hasn't happened.
2. About half of the different permutations of cut and paste
between X11 and Aqua are "simple", in the sense that it's obvious
what we want to accomplish. Many of the rest are open to debate.
3. Most of the cut and paste magic happens within closed-source
code -- quartz-wm (hence the need for running 'quartz-wm --only-
proxy). This is stupid. The source for those bits of code is now
up here -- https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13066.
Someone *please* help me find a way to get this into the server (or
at least X11.app in general) so that we can together work on it.
On Nov 10, 2007, at 2:27 AM, Peter Collinson wrote:
Hmm I wonder if it makes sense to start xclipboard as the
'default' X11 app?
There was some discussion in this list a bit ago about the
desirability of running it to 'help' cut and paste..
On 10 Nov 2007, at 00:43, Nathaniel Gray wrote:
Oops! That should be app_to_run instead of app_to_launch.
-n8
On Nov 9, 2007 4:37 PM, Nathaniel Gray <email@hidden> wrote:
Just in case anybody else has the same question.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
you're free to launch X11.app by hand if you find the current
approach
problematic. Change the initial xterm to xlsfonts if you don't
like
having to close that window every time.
Can you explain how to do this? As far as I can tell, starting up
/usr/X11/bin/xterm is compiled into
/Applications/Utilities/X11.app/Contents/MacOS/X11
defaults write org.x.X11_launcher app_to_launch /usr/X11/bin/
xlsfonts
xlsclients might be an even better choice, since it doesn't hit the
filesystem or produce any output when you use it to launch the
server.
Cheers,
-n8
--
-- Nathaniel Gray -- Caltech Computer Science ------>
-- Mojave Project -- http://mojave.cs.caltech.edu -->
--
-- Nathaniel Gray -- Caltech Computer Science ------>
-- Mojave Project -- http://mojave.cs.caltech.edu -->
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Ben Byer
CoreOS / BSD Technology Group, XDarwin maintainer
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