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XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

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Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#101

Post by souprock »

Most terminal emulators won't support the -S option. That is needed so that another program can feed data into an xterm that has been created as a child process.

I've seen it used for a modem dial-up program and I've seen it used for the emulation of old computers with serial consoles. It would probably find use with debuggers. Sometimes you just want to pop open a new window, and xterm is the only terminal emulator that will cooperate.

The option parsing is buggy. Only file descriptor 0 works, but that is good enough because of the dup2 system call. Fork, set up the file descriptors, and then exec an xterm like so: xterm -S/0 -T foo -n foo -name foo

I'd love to get the feature, with the exact same syntax, into all the terminal emulators. That would mean that x-terminal-emulator, which is a link to whatever the user installed, would always have the feature.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#102

Post by pjmlp »

enriquto wrote: post #96
pjmlp wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One wouldn't notice that, given how many eschew the progress made and live in the command line as if stuck in the 80's.

It's not as much "the command line", but being able to talk to your computer using a human-like language, instead of pointing with your finger like a baby or a monkey. Do you know any computer/user interface that is based on writing what you want to do? (instead of selecting it from a small list of possibilities) The only one that I know is the "primitive" command line.

Yes, the REPL as used at Xerox PARC, while Bell Labs was busy with troff.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#103

Post by enriquto »

pjmlp wrote: post #102
enriquto wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not as much "the command line", but being able to talk to your computer using a human-like language, instead of pointing with your finger like a baby or a monkey. Do you know any computer/user interface that is based on writing what you want to do? (instead of selecting it from a small list of possibilities) The only one that I know is the "primitive" command line.

Yes, the REPL as used at Xerox PARC, while Bell Labs was busy with troff.

Don't you have a modern example? I thought you were despising 80s technology.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#104

Post by brobdingnagians »

I started using st from suckless and realized that met most of my needs, especially when I learned to use tmux properly. In some ways XTerm is the luxury version compared to st. I don't necessarily recommend st, but it is always interesting to learn that you can get by with a lot less than you thought you could. And it helps you learn some tricks you might not otherwise think you needed.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#106

Post by pjmlp »

enriquto wrote: post #103
pjmlp wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the REPL as used at Xerox PARC, while Bell Labs was busy with troff.

Don't you have a modern example? I thought you were despising 80s technology.

UNIX is still busy trying to catch up with 70's world from Parc Place, and apparently the 80's UNIX world is what UNIX aficionados want to stay on.

No need for more modern examples.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#107

Post by 8note »

enriquto wrote: post #96
pjmlp wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One wouldn't notice that, given how many eschew the progress made and live in the command line as if stuck in the 80's.

It's not as much "the command line", but being able to talk to your computer using a human-like language, instead of pointing with your finger like a baby or a monkey. Do you know any computer/user interface that is based on writing what you want to do? (instead of selecting it from a small list of possibilities) The only one that I know is the "primitive" command line.

Siri and alexa? You tell it what to do in pretty darned close to human language

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#108

Post by zelly »

znpy wrote: post #51

All these Xorg/X11 problems people complain about... I honestly don't see them. I've been using Xorg in one form or another since 2005-2006 and frankly since we all got automatic configuration and said godbye to Xorg.conf it's been a very very pleasant experience. I've been using both nVidia and intel cards, 1/2/3 monitors (in various arrangement) and network stuff (ssh -X and similar), and a videogame from time to t…

X11 is a keylogger, for one. Network transparency is a vulnerability, not a feature.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#109

Post by enriquto »

8note wrote: post #107
enriquto wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not as much "the command line", but being able to talk to your computer using a human-like language, instead of pointing with your finger like a baby or a monkey. Do you know any computer/user interface that is based on writing what you want to do? (instead of selecting it from a small list of possibilities) The only one that I know is the "primitive" command line.

Siri and alexa? You tell it what to do in pretty darned close to human language

Good answer! (but I prefer typing language with a keyboard, instead of saying it out loud, as I'm not a native English speaker and it feels very unnatural to me).

Yet, is it possible to use siri or alexa for all your computing needs? Can you copy files around, convert a few images from tiff to jpg, download, compile and set up a nginx web server, hack a bit the code of the server and recompile, etc.? Because I can do all of that from the comfort of my "obsolete" command line.

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