Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16

Yes. But how often do I spontaneously need previews of something? And how often is it then enough to get what this EFL lib can give me? In terms of format support, and in terms of functionality (e.g. can it show me the TOC of some pdf and allows me to navigate to some chapter?). Well, there seem to be some use cases... Obviously... I still cannot imagine how they look like, though.

> Well then either dolphin is by some miracle orders of magnitude faster than any file browser I have ever seen [...] Or [...] Or [...]

Maybe a combination of all of them... :) I don't know. The performance was always good enough to be much faster than I am.

My point was also: Before we now start to shoehorn graphical functionality into terminals, which we then only can use in graphical environments anyways, shouldn't we better just improve the graphical apps? There is no inherent reason for them to be any worse than your terminal apps (that are eventually hosted by just an ordinary graphical app).

About your list what Dolphin needs to do but terminal apps don't: Yes, sure. A lot is going on. In the background. I don't have to wait for it to generate thumbnails. It's not bash, which completely freezes then, e.g. when the network drive has a slow day, and I blatantly pressed Tab. Same for most of the other things you wrote. Win 98 did it as well (not the mimetype-detection, though). Even that was okay for most practical purposes. But look what machines we had back then! I've just navigated to /bin. At least around 3000 files. I would avoid having so many files in a single directory. For organizational purposes. Anyways. I instantly see it listing the files, and it felt finished instantly, and i was able to scroll around. No waiting time that would have blocked me.

BTW: All the thumbnail stuff is done on demand, as soon as you scroll down.

And finally: You can just turn it off! ;)

Counting the files, and determining which application is associated with a file type, are quite cheap operations. That's nothing, even compared to the very bare directory enumeration, right?

> No, it will not do that when I press tab.

Yes, well, sure... But that's not because a terminal is the superior environment (how could it be if you just emulate it with the "bad" one). If all that 'modern' (win98) Dolphin magic is too slow, there are probably more lightweight alternatives that are still graphical. I still don't see the point in patching graphical features into something text-based, which you then need to run in an actual graphical environment anyways, instead of just getting the graphical apps right.

>> I really don't see why terminal applications should be fundamentally faster than graphical applications in that regard > ..........um, what?

Yeah, I'm assuming terminal applications that you run in your graphical terminal emulator. But that's obvious, right? If I would be wrong, then, of course, let's today start porting all our graphical apps into that E terminal thing. Maybe we then can get even faster by putting that again inside an E terminal. And again, and again...

A terminal application that you run in an emulator, which is just some graphical application, cannot fundamentally be faster than just directly running graphical applications without that indirection, right? That would make no sense at all...

> Seems to me like maybe you've never used a terminal program?

I was a child when I got regular access to my first PC... It ran MS-DOS 5. I played more with command.com than with the actual games installed, I suspect... My friends played NES, while I tried to hack custom program launchers as .bat files. :-/ Even they made use of the 16 colors (or 8?!) you could have, though. ^^ No idea where I found out how to do that, a decade before my first internet connection... But at least as much I loved my first Windows 3.0 installation! Sure, command.com was probably quicker than Windows File Manager, strictly speaking. It was never so bad that I opened a terminal window for file management, though.

> GUIs and GUI toolkits, on the other hand, are huge complex libraries

Technically, I can just agree again. But all that happens so quickly nowadays, in terms of wall clock time, that I really doubt the practical relevance. A "hello world" app in either Qt or GTK starts instantly on my machine. No waiting time that a human being could recognize. I press Enter, and it's there while I'm releasing the Enter key.

> And before you start taking into account that a lot of gui software is just poorly written trash seemingly written by morons under the CADT model (Hi, gnome!).

We can definitely agree here!!! :)

> I don't know what else to say. Go talk to every single GUI application author ever, I guess?

Better than reinventing a whole new kind of terminal applications which aren't actual terminal applications, but only work in an environment emulated by the very thing they want to replace. The same morons will come and screw up with all kinds of things there again, once that'd get more momentum. But now, since they also have to maintain EFL plugins or other graphical-to-terminal translations for their apps and file formats, they will even screw up heavier.

>> If you know the file name starts with "cat_s", then you can also find it this way in Dolphin. > Sure. After you've waited almost an entire second, [...]

On an average day, I open a Dolphin window maybe once or twice... Often not even once (e.g. I just open my IDE and stay there, or the browser, or a game, you name it). You don't need a new one for every operation! I mean, if your workflow is seriously superior, then be happy that EFL and all that exists and supports all the file formats that you want to preview, and be happy that it provides all the features you need. I'm happy with you then. I have the feeling that it's a very special workflow for a very special task at best, though.

> I'm not even sure what point you're trying to make here - that sometimes your preferred method is even more shit, and so you sometimes have to fall back to the one I default to?

If you want to understand it that way, that's fine... And you type "xdg-open" while I can just press Enter (or double-click ^^). Why should I constantly want previews of something, so often that I'd care about a second of waiting time once in preparation, so much that I should avoid Dolphin, which just gives me these previews without any user intervention needed, just because it take a second to start?! Couldn't you just leave it open then?! Yeah, you'll definitely have some reasons...

> I already specifically said that "We do also use our graphical environment".

Sure you do! I know! Terminology is one of them. That's exactly the point. For an actual (virtual)terminal, it would at least remotely make some sense to me. Because there it's not an option to just use a common X11/Wayland image viewer.

> Who said terminology is "trying to be a graphical app"?

No; it already is of course. It's trying to make terminal apps graphical, right? And all that technical complexity is just there because you don't have to move your eyes to another window (there are very basic image viewers without any features; I've no idea why they should be slower than the EFL previewers - and if you want a video thumbnail, just write an ffmpeg oneliner as an alias). Again, I'm happy for you that it's available, but I'd definitely dislike to see all that arriving in major desktop environments. And I'm still optimistic in that regard. If it does, at least there might be ways to integrate the Dolphin thumbnailers. :)

> I'm not sure why you insist on making this so complicated or acting like it's scary somehow.

In some way that's exactly what I'm wondering about when people have terminal-centric workflows in an environment that could actually just do graphics. In particular when they then start to patch graphics support inside their terminals.

All the terminal tech ecosystem is already somewhat beyond it's actual capabilities. You see that when you e.g. use tmux or screen. Or when you just have some emojis which are actually wider than the API tells you and your alignment goes off the rails. Or that conceptual discrepancy between the 16 colors support, where users can typically decide freely how exactly each color should look like (up to the point of having the background in white instead of black), and then the additional 256-color support, which adds 240 more colors (or sth like that?!), but with really fixed color values...

Everything is just a historically grown mess. And I've just mentioned a few points that came to my mind spontaneously, and there are probably a lot of further problems that I've never even heard about.

With that in mind, when I hear about the idea of hacking full graphics support into that, as a professional software developer my first instinct is to understand whether that's really worth the trouble. And what the rationale behind is. And whether it actually makes sense, from an architecture perspective if you want to call it this way. And all the arguments that I've read here made no sense to me at all. It feels more like a cult when I talk to terminal-centric users.

I don't have any privileges to decide for any involved project, though. If e.g. Konsole starts supporting that tomorrow, well, I'd doubt this was a useful thing, but then that's what it is. I could then only hope that they didn't break other things.

As a Linux user since 20 years, my experience tells me that all these things always break something else.

And then it's basically for people who say that basic image viewers start too slow for them. Either that's trivially fixable (and then we'd all be better off doing _that_ instead!), or just an illusion/cult, or the EFL previews will not be faster. There is just no way they could be faster. A basic graphical image viewer would do the same thing, just without all these indirection, translation to escape sequences, interpreting them again, etc.

Similar for the matters of proper keyboard support.