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Emotional about X11: I'm creating a pure X11 “emoji keyboard”

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Re: Emotional about X11: I'm creating a pure X11 “emoji keyboard”

#41
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're in 2024Q3, things have improved. Nvidia helped out. (X)Wayland/KDE/Qt/GNOME bugs were fixed. Apart from that, use X11 as long as you wish! I'm just glad we can finally improve the open source desktop-environment infrastructure to match those of Windows and macOS: we've been stuck for too long.

X11 was and still is superior to wayland

My tearing-free window movement begs to differ

Re: Emotional about X11: I'm creating a pure X11 “emoji keyboard”

#42
post #14
post #8

as long as i need to run nvidia with multiple monitors, i'll hang on to x11.

Is there an issue with Wayland for your setup? I run Gnome + Wayland on Fedora, with two monitors with different sizes and different refresh rates - eerything seems to run pretty fine, including gaming?

Not OP but the last time I tried Wayland was about a year ago (also on Fedora) and I had similar issues using multiple monitors with different refresh rates, ended up switching to x11 which resolved it (using an nvidia card with nonfree drivers if that matters). But it seems I'll have to give Wayland another try if they've addressed it since then, I hadn't been keeping up with it.

Re: Emotional about X11: I'm creating a pure X11 “emoji keyboard”

#43
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya let's integrate gpu-accelerated emoji generation into unicode and require it everwhere, we can call it UTF-8B and standardize on 8GiB per character until that turns out not to be enough.

UTF-8 is innocent here, it's just a (very clever and useful) encoding of Unicode. The problem is adding junk codepoints based on current political ideology, not how they are encoded.

If you use a consortium governed character set, you get the problems of government by consortium. Probably still better to have a versioned universal set than so many to choose from.

Re: Emotional about X11: I'm creating a pure X11 “emoji keyboard”

#44

Fun project, thanks for sharing! On Gnome there is the "Characters" application which is pretty handy. I do want to make a few improvement to search, but otherwise it's pretty good. You copy the unicode character to the clipboard and can then paste it wherever you need. If you run Gnome it's probably already installed. If not: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-characters

There's also a gnome-based app called Smile: https://github.com/mijorus/smile

Re: Emotional about X11: I'm creating a pure X11 “emoji keyboard”

#45
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya let's integrate gpu-accelerated emoji generation into unicode and require it everwhere, we can call it UTF-8B and standardize on 8GiB per character until that turns out not to be enough.

UTF-8 is innocent here, it's just a (very clever and useful) encoding of Unicode. The problem is adding junk codepoints based on current political ideology, not how they are encoded.

For the record, I like utf8, I was just being silly.

Re: Emotional about X11: I'm creating a pure X11 “emoji keyboard”

#46
post #4
post #3

In case someone wonders what's "special" about it: user perspective: As far as I know, it's the only tool offering somewhat reliable emoji input using faked X11 keyboard events. "x11-emoji-picker" comes close, but delegates faking events to "xdotool", with weird consequences like having to restart it to direct emojis to a different window ;) hacker perspective: It directly integrates xcb in a different event loop (he…

why not use xcompose?

i do love me some xcompose (https://github.com/kragen/xcompose) but being able to see the possible options is pretty nice

Re: Emotional about X11: I'm creating a pure X11 “emoji keyboard”

#47
post #5
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why not use xcompose?

Not sure you really mean the compose mechanism provided by Xlib (and xkbcommon etc ...)? If so, this wouldn't work for all these emojis that are represented by grapheme clusters, ZWJ-sequences or are just "qualified". The result of a compose sequence is limited to a single "key symbol", which can only encode a single unicode codepoint. Even for those emojis consisting of a singe codepoint, it would really miss the po…

actually it's possible to send multiple key symbols from a compose sequence; i have sequences for 'n’t ', ' — ' (with thin spaces), ' the ', ' The ', ' and ', ' I’m ', etc. see https://github.com/kragen/xcompose/blob/master/dotXCompose#L...

but i agree that compose is not a great user experience

Re: Emotional about X11: I'm creating a pure X11 “emoji keyboard”

#48
post #19

Unicode sucks. There is a glyph for a hammer, for a screwdriver, but not a soldering iron. During COVID, people were using a golf club as a substitute for a cotton swab. We now have generative AI that can make any desired emoticon you can dream of, except you can't use it because of Unicode.

The goal of Unicode is to ascribe semantic, machine-readable/indexible identifiers (codepoints) to “things that appear in what are conventionally considered plaintext documents” so that “text” can be handled in a standard way across systems like screen-readers, IMEs, LLMs, search engines, etc; and so that we don’t need to depend on some particular pictorial representation / decoding of an image surviving into the future to decode it[1], because the (open, widely replicated) Unicode standard and database files encode a description for each codepoint, and a semantics for each codepoint (things like collation, joining, capitalization, etc.)

[1] Consider if your vector image representing a soldering iron is someone’s IP, and they rescind licensing for use/redistribution of it. Poof goes all the (legal) copies of your emoji, leaving future historians scratching their heads about what was supposed to be there in the text, and what meaning it contributed. (A concrete case of this actually happening — though not with vector images, but rather stock sound effects: https://roblox.fandom.com/wiki/Roblox_death_sound)

Re: Emotional about X11: I'm creating a pure X11 “emoji keyboard”

#50
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're in 2024Q3, things have improved. Nvidia helped out. (X)Wayland/KDE/Qt/GNOME bugs were fixed. Apart from that, use X11 as long as you wish! I'm just glad we can finally improve the open source desktop-environment infrastructure to match those of Windows and macOS: we've been stuck for too long.

X11 was and still is superior to wayland

> X11 was and still is superior to wayland

"was" sure. "still is" it depends on your use case.

for me Wayland overtook X11 as superior in the last year.

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