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XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

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Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#131

Post by znpy »

zelly wrote: post #108
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.

Oh shut up.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#132

Post by selfhoster11 »

zelly wrote: post #108
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.

Network transparency is definitely a feature. I can't count the number of times when X forwarding was an extremely convenient feature to have.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#133

Post by selfhoster11 »

znpy wrote: post #131
zelly wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Oh shut up.

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. (...) Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

- https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please, let's not reduce the level of discussion over here. Let's keep this respectful.

I have deliberately chosen to keep my answer to the OP on point, even though I disagree just as strongly.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#134

Post by selfhoster11 »

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

They are very imprecise, and they cannot fit on your desk. The device is just a speaker, but the actual computer is in a data center elsewhere.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#135

Post by selfhoster11 »

majewsky wrote: post #128
Jasper_ wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Also, in the 70s, you have a bitmap font of max 256 characters of equal size. Nowadays displaying text requires font selection, text shaping (incl. kerning), glyph selection, text layouting (incl. line wrapping), glyph pre-rendering, and a final assembly step to get the composite image of all glyphs. Want to skip font selection? No emojis for you. Want to skip glyph selection? No ligatures or Arabic or Devanagari tex…

Most terminal usage will be restricted to the English-language software and source code, for expediency reasons or because English is the lingua franca of tech. You can usually get away without RtL and ligature/wide glyph support.

What I would like to see is a terminal that has a default high-performance monospace-only rendering engine, but gracefully and dynamically switches to a different rendering engine that supports the full-blown text layout capability once the terminal detects some input that makes use of these features.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#136

Post by tpoacher »

aduros wrote: post #67
tpoacher wrote: post #58

Am I the only person who likes "prehistoric x-apps"? E.g. xdiskusage is far better than any other disk usage app I've tried.

Proud xeyes user here. Have you tried duc for disk usage? It's minimal and has a nice visualizer.

I did ... but tbh can't remember what my beef was with it now, I just remember that when I compared them all it wasn't a favourite, hahah ...

I settled on xdiskusage and gt5 (the latter when I'm on a terminal). Both great tools.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#137

Post by pjmlp »

beagle3 wrote: post #129
pjmlp wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The millions of users using IDEs, Jupiter notebooks and tablets disagree.

Most of them have no effective way of automating their work. 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 transfer…

IDEs for scripting languages with graphical REPL.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#138

Post by majewsky »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #135
majewsky wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, in the 70s, you have a bitmap font of max 256 characters of equal size. Nowadays displaying text requires font selection, text shaping (incl. kerning), glyph selection, text layouting (incl. line wrapping), glyph pre-rendering, and a final assembly step to get the composite image of all glyphs. Want to skip font selection? No emojis for you. Want to skip glyph selection? No ligatures or Arabic or Devanagari tex…

Most terminal usage will be restricted to the English-language software and source code, for expediency reasons or because English is the lingua franca of tech. You can usually get away without RtL and ligature/wide glyph support. What I would like to see is a terminal that has a default high-performance monospace-only rendering engine, but gracefully and dynamically switches to a different rendering engine that supp…

You might be surprised how often you trigger that second code path. For just one example, an increasing number of CLI programs use emoji in their output, whether you like it or not.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#139

Post by dirkt »

dunham wrote: post #49

Many years ago, I was surprised to find out that XTerm can also emulate a vector-based tektronix terminal. The only application for it that I found was a previewer for TeX's dvi files that could render on the Tektronix terminal by drawing a lot of tiny horizontal lines.

If you liked the tektronix emulation, also have a look at sixel graphics [1], which also work in an xterm. Helpful if you are logged in via ssh without X forwarding, and need some graphics...

[1] https://github.com/saitoha/libsixel

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#140

Post by padthai »

aduros wrote: post #64
padthai wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something that I never learnt how to do with Xterm, I put the keybinding in Bash: bind -x '"\C-T": _terminal_here' I would love to know how to execute a command from Xterm directly, I am sure that it is possible.

Try this: XTerm.vt100.translations: #override \n\ Ctrl T: spawn-new-terminal()

Works like a charm, thank you.
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