121–130 of 159 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But what is there for power users today? AFAIK Unix is the only viable option from a very pragmatic point of view. So it's not about being aficionados, it's about being pragmatic.
- xterm just gives up (tried uxterm as well as the .Xresources settings here)
- st prints the arabic backwards (left to right, which I suppose you might prefer if you don't actually plan on reading it), has no colour on the emoji (which again you might prefer!), and completely fails to display the double-composed diacritics (this is a bad one, even if you prefer to KISS)
- I don't know what kitty is doing with the arabic, all I see are some strange rendering artifacts
- sakura (and xfce4-terminal) passes all the tests
`xterm` lacks Wayland support-- a more secure alternative to X11. For a fast terminal with Wayland support, check out `alacritty` or foot: https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot `foot` (foo terminal) benchmarks faster than alacritty and offers a client/server mode for even faster startup for new terminal windows.
A tangent but where could I find a good evaluation of Wayland stack (including Weston etc) security? I know the design is often brought up but most vulnerabilities are implementation errors and bugs, and there doesn't seem to be any mention of security (advisories, etc) on the Wayland web site nor does a web search bring up anything that woudl indicate there's any active security focus. What I'd expect to find is som…
Of course, security is subject to implementation details. But as far as I know, the protocol is sound, and I can't recall vulnerabilities.
How each implementation handles theirs is up to them. At least, we have multiple implementations of the protocol. With X, not so much.
`xterm` lacks Wayland support-- a more secure alternative to X11. For a fast terminal with Wayland support, check out `alacritty` or foot: https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot `foot` (foo terminal) benchmarks faster than alacritty and offers a client/server mode for even faster startup for new terminal windows.
It even comes with a fancy (but rather simple) extension for displaying bitmaps (more efficient than sixel), that I quite like together with ranger.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But my point is that an Ann Arbor Ambassador terminal (with logic, not even an 8-bit processor) talking to a VAX 750 (about 1/2 MIPS, also passing data from kernel into user space) was lightning fast. The internal processor that does nothing but scan my laptop's keyboard to send events to the "computer" is more powerful than the setup we used to have. Yet the entire thing is slower. My Mac doesn't draw any faster tha…
> My Mac doesn't draw any faster than the Alto I used in the 70s. Yes it absolutely does, you just don't notice because of the increase in fidelity. What was then 640x480 pixels is now a 4K display. The total number of pixels is several orders of magnitude more, the number of colors is now 16.7 million rather than 256, and the complexity of the scene has increased where we now have anti-aliased text and alpha blendin…
Want to skip font selection? No emojis for you.
Want to skip glyph selection? No ligatures or Arabic or Devanagari text for you.
Want to skip text layouting? No Right-to-Left support for you.
There is a whole crapton of legitimate complexity in the font rendering stack because we don't want to have the constraints of the 70s anymore (only 256 glyphs, fixed font size, monospace font only).
(Sidenote: For those of you who think "I'm fine with monospace fonts in my terminal", I am using a monospace font as well. But "monospace font" only means that all ASCII glyphs are equal-sized, which is a tiny minority of all glyphs a Unicode font supports. I have grown a very strong opinion regarding this topic since I started to learn Japanese and hence want to be able to deal with CJK characters.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But what is there for power users today? AFAIK Unix is the only viable option from a very pragmatic point of view. So it's not about being aficionados, it's about being pragmatic.
The millions of users using IDEs, Jupiter notebooks and tablets disagree.
Every piece of software (Excel? Word? Outlook? Autocad? Photoshop?) has its own system of automation if it has one at all, with many of the skills complicated to learn on one hand, and not transferable on the other. On tablets, automation is essentially nonexistent.
Whereas on Unix, there's a mostly-unified system of automation (shell), with mostly transferable knowledge.
If there is nothing in your work that benefits from automation, you wouldn't care. But you'd also be rather special, IME - most people spend a lot of time on recurring and automatable actions they gain no benefit from repeating manually.
