Re: Eliminating the xterm
Re: Eliminating the xterm
- Subject: Re: Eliminating the xterm
- From: Vernon Williams <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2007 15:12:04 -0600
Saturday, November 10, 2007, 1:17pm
For me, I have X11 set to fire up when I boot up my Macs, and I
always leave it running. It is also always in my Dock. It always
comes up with xterm, which I hate, so I always instantly close it.
I haven't bothered changing it to something else, since I only
boot up my desktop PowerPC G5 (my primary computer) every
few months, so the unwanted xterm is not a big deal.
For this reason, the whole discussion about how X11 starts up
is pretty irrelevant to me, since I only start it up (automatically)
when I boot up.
I use X11 constantly, but I only ever use one X11 app, nedit,
which is my editor of choice as a programmer, which I love
being able to run on my Mac side by side with other Mac apps.
I always run nedit from a Mac Terminal, have a script that runs
it in the background (so as not to tie up the Terminal or require
direct use of & or give the ugly messages like "[1] 19958" and
"[1]+ Done nedit" when you use & directly to run in background).
My editor script also fires up X11 if it is not running before trying
to run nedit, in case it has died or I have had to kill it for some
reason, so again I never have to. I also have a non-Apple X11,
Xtools, which I rarely use these days, but my editor script also
checks for it running, and uses it if it is already running, rather
than starting up Apple X11 if it is not running (I never have both
running at the same time, as they do not coexist well).
My editor script also does a lot of other cool stuff, by the way.
It set up defaults like I want them, allows me to change them
with arguments of my own. If it can't find a file as specified, it
looks in default source directories. It has options to make the
editor window fit the data as best it can, as well as to open
multiple files in smaller windows based on the number of
files. It can load standard input into an editor window (so I
can just pipe the results of ls or grep or the like into a free
floating read only editor window sized to fit the data, where
I can easily view the results, edit them, copy or past them,
print them, etc.). It has a variety of options for including or
excluding files from the specified files, using wildcards and
the like. It allows specifying default file extensions, so I
can leave off common file extensions. It also allows using
xedit or TextEdit as the editor rather than nedit, via options.
As might be guessed, it is a moderately complex script,
helped in the file name handling by a much enhanced
version of ls of mine (called ds) that I use in preference to ls.
When I do work-related stuff on my Macs (as opposed to
personal stuff), I use the Mac Terminal a lot, which I love
compared to xterm. On work computers (Sun work stations), I
don't use xterm there, either, always using Sun's dtterm, again
much better than xterm.
There was some discussion on this list a few days ago about
how users typically use X11. From my perspective, there
probably is not a typical way, but that anybody who uses X11
is probably sophisticated enough to use it in their own unique
ways, as my discussion above perhaps suggests.
Somebody suggested most Mac X11 users used it to ssh into
LInux or Sun boxes or the like. And no doubt many do, but I
certainly do not, despite using X11 constantly.
I work from home mostly, but I do not use ssh or the like to get
to our Sun Unix network, to which direct public access is not
allowed. Instead, I use Citrix on my Mac to log in to the work PC
network, where I run a browser based program the company
provides (as a wrapper on Citrix) to log in to the work Unix network,
which runs very well over a high speed cable Internet connection.
So I am running work Sun X11 programs on my desktop Mac via
a work PC network (Windows 2000), not using Mac X11 in any
way to do it. I just use Mac X11 and nedit to do most of my software
development and basic testing, then transfer the source to work
via Citrix, where I recompile it, test it some more, then check it into
our work software base (a bunch of rcs libraries) and rebuild the
relevant work executables, where I can test the final results.
I write a lot of C and FORTRAN 90 code, most of which makes little
direct use of X11, and most of it is fairly general routines which
can be tested with small test programs written to test just them,
on my Mac (or one of our Suns), without need to bring in any GUI
stuff. Our work software mostly makes a pretty clean separation
between application code and GUI code, which is an excellent
idea.
For the record, I have not yet switched to Leopard, being of the
philosophy, "Never get version 1.0 of anything". Or, "If it ain't
broke, don't fix it." I am still running Panther on my G5 tower,
with Tiger on my newer Macbook Pro. Both work fine as they
are, so I have no pressing need to upgrade. Leopard has
some nice features, but nothing I can't live without. OS upgrades
almost always break something, and since I use my computers
for work, I don't want to have to take the time to get things working
again, so I always wait for stability before upgrading anything.
That said, I have read the recent posting on Leopard X11 with
interest, and I am glad there are the early adapters, the point
men willing to take all the bullets and arrows, rather than those
following. And I am happy to see the rapid progress in getting
the X11 bugs fixed, so that by the time I eventually get Leopard,
hopefully it will be in excellent shape. Leopard has only been out
for two weeks, and most of the most serious X11 bugs seem to
have been fixed. Ben seems to be doing a great job, along with
those on this list who have helped him out.
Vernon Williams
On Nov 10, 2007, at 7:51 AM, 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?
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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