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XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

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Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#141

Post by wutbrodo »

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

This is a great example, but is still horribly limited in functionality. I use my Google home constantly, but I've built a mental model of its limitations and am still frustrated by the "latency" involved when my model assumes it can do something it can't.

Hopefully we're getting there though!

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#142

Post by miccah »

> but we can hijack it to instead scan the screen for URLs and open the browser

For comparison, rxvt-unicode has perl utils for mouse-less URL selection [1]. Since it's operating within the terminal, scrollback is also available for selection (not just the currently visible screen).

After invoking the selection mode, it's as easy as using j/k to choose the URL and Enter to open or y to yank to clipboard. Installed on Arch with the `urxvt-perls` package.

[1] https://github.com/johntyree/urxvt-perls

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#143

Post by selfhoster11 »

majewsky wrote: post #138
selfhoster11 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm actually a great fan of using emoji to spice up terminal output. Most of these would be fixed width too, isn't it? I know there are wide emoji, but most times I see them around one char wide.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#144

Post by SllX »

DonHopkins wrote: post #59
SllX wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is getting overruled, you now have one additional choice of links to click on for the same material, free of charge.

Sadly the unixsux site lost its luster when Netscape disabled the _ cursor. http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/login.html Here's my not-so-subtle Solaris joke about how AT&T was ruining Unix: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/panic.html

I mean clearly the blink tag had to go. It was annoying, unsafe, a blight on the web; not at all like CSS3, JavaScript, WebAssembly and whatever that DRM thing was called, encrypted media extensions, was it? Priorities, man!

Thanks for coming out, the X Windows Chapter was my favorite in the book. :)

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#145

Post by linsomniac »

enriquto wrote: post #95
mkesper wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely! I often use cat in tmux instead of less because of this. Will try xterm now, too.

You can use the -X option to less to avoid it clearing the screen. To set this option by default, put "export LESS=-X" on your profile. If you want the same sane behavior for vim, add "set t_ti= t_te=" to your .vimrc.

Indeed, but it's more painful to get these things set across all the systems and accounts I use, even given Ansible. Doable, but titeInhibit is kind of nice. :-)

With Kitty, which I've been playing with and doesn't support titeInhibit, it requires deploying a termcap package everywhere, which is also painful, but I ended up building a version with those escape codes removed, which was kind of a benefit of having to use and deploy a custom termcap.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#146

Post by icedchai »

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.

Back in the 90's, some machines shipped with X authentication disabled, open to the world (SGI IRIX 5.x was one of these.) Back then, few people used firewalls. X11 keyboard sniffing was very common in some circles.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#147

Post by asveikau »

DonHopkins wrote: post #61
andrelaszlo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about xclock?

Why use xclock when you can use Sun's "clocktool"? https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-disaster-128d39... X has had its share of $5,000 toilet seats — like Sun’s Open Look clock tool, which gobbles up 1.4 megabytes of real memory! If you sacrificed all the RAM from 22 Commodore 64s to clock tool, it still wouldn’t have enough to tell you the time. Even the vanilla X11R4 “xclock” utility consumed 656K to run.…

This is really dated criticism.

Nobody in 2021 is talking about Sun Open Look. And even that, whatever its faults at the time, was probably less resource intensive than what most HN readers would use to build a UI today. Try running electron on an Open Look era machine.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#148

Post by alanbernstein »

rvense wrote: post #111
alanbernstein wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the practical value in better VT compatibility? I'm not familiar with the history, but I guess this is essentially referring to a standard defined by hardware products from the 1970s? Why is that still relevant?

Same as adhering to any standard? The software you want to run produces VT-compatible output, the terminal consumes that and provides a display.

What i mean is, many other computer standards become obsolete and get replaced. What is so special about this standard from the 1970s that has given it so much staying power?

It is a software standard, influenced by hardware, which has outlasted nearly every other hardware and software standard of its time. Doesn't that strike anyone else as bizarre?

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#149

Post by jstimpfle »

xterm is still the only usable terminal that supports crisp (bitmap) fonts as far as I'm aware. Which is why I'll be using it until we have high DPI screens everywhere. All the other terminals are unbelievable blurry with their antialiased fonts on ~100dpi screens. (Or alternatively, unbelievably ugly, when turning off antialiasing).

I never understood why so few people are bothered. These blurry fonts hurt my eyes.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#150

Post by dharmab »

aduros wrote: post #83
dharmab wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That opens the new terminal in the home directory, right? My keybind opens it in whatever directory I’m already in which I find handy in deeply nested projects.

It opens in the current directory, not just home.

Sweet!
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