Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

Under screen, I keep long running emacs sessions with multiple shell buffers running for months and sometimes years, with all the files I'm working on opened up. Each shell buffer might be configured for some branch of some code, with an interactive python or whatever shell running the code connected to the database, with a bunch of useful commands and context in its history. It's a lot of work to recreate all that state.

(Digression: Bash has no way to save and merge and recreate and manage parallel history threads, does it? Or does the last shell that exits just stomp on the one history?).

Back in my Evil Software Hoarder days, I worked on the NeWS display driver for UniPress Emacs 2.20, and later on the NeWS display driver for gnu emacs. Here's a brochure from February 1988 about UniPress Emacs 2.20 and "SoftWire" (NeWS without graphics).

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/ties/scans/WhatIsEmacs.pdf

It supported multiple display drivers (text, X11, NeWS, SunView), as well as multiple window frames on each of those displays (which gnu emacs didn't support at the time), and you could disconnect and reconnect to a long running emacs later. In effect it was a "multi user emacs" since different users could type into multiple displays at the same time (although weird stuff could still happen since the classic Emacs interface wasn't designed for that).

Emacs 2.20 Demo (NeWS, multiple frames, tabbed windows, pie menus, hypermedia authoring):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU

Here are some examples of where the rubber hits the road in NeWS client/server programming of an emacs NeWS display driver. They both download a PostScript file to NeWS that handles most of the user interface, window management, menus, input handling, font measurement, text drawing, etc, and they have a corresponding C driver on the emacs side. There's also a "cps" file that defines the protocol (which is send in tokenized binary instead of plain text), and generates C headers and code stubs. Together they implement an optimized, high level, application specific "emacs protocol" that the client and server use to communicate:

Emacs 2.20 NeWS display driver (supporting multiple tabbed windows and pie menus in the NeWS Lite Toolkit):

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs.ps.txt

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/TrmPS.c

Gnu Emacs 18 NeWS display driver (supporting a single tabbed windows and pie menus in The NeWS Toolkit 2.0):

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs18/src/tnt.ps

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs18/src/tnt.c

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs18/src/tnt_cps.cps

  % Return the minimum size to keep emacs from core dumping
  %
  /minsize { % - => w h
    /?validate self send
    CharWidth 10 mul Border dup add add
    LineHeight 5 mul Border dup add add
    % XXX: Any smaller and it core dumps!
  } def

Once I managed to make it work, and that I am now able to select between the NVidia and Intel - I have to tell, that I do not see any difference, in performance. However the performance is below what I was used on the previous computers - it might be due to the high resolution (3840x2160).

Connecting external monitors is a nightmare. It produces a lot of heat. And it made me lose so much time! In this case I do not even care about proprietary or open source drivers - I just want it to work.

I never had a more sluggish linux system since 1995. Even typing in the browser or in the terminal makes me make mistakes, so much lag is there.

I also think that if a program's job is by good proportion about sourcing shell-scripts to e.g. prepare an environment for them and/or manage their execution, it's also a good idea to make that program in the same shell language. As an example of this, I think Archlinux's `makepkg` was best done in bash.

On why make a program that's about sourcing shell scripts at all, the shell is the one common language all Unix-based OS users know in common, pretty much by definition, so it makes it a good candidate for things like the language of package description files. Besides the fact that software packaging of any language involves the shell, you kind of expect people that call directly on `makepkg` to also want to be able to edit these files, so making them in the language that they're most likely to know is good.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#Patent_dispute

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/emacs/to.jag.txt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:Hy...

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-shape-of-psiber-space-oct...

Around 1990, Glenn Reid wrote a delightful original "Font Appreciation" app for NeXT called TouchType, which decades later only recently somehow found its way into Illustrator. Adobe even CALLED it the "Touch Type Tool", but didn't give him any credit or royalty. The only difference in Adobe's version of TouchType is that there's a space between "Touch" and "Type" (which TouchType made really easy to do), and that it came decades later!

Illustrator tutorial: Using the Touch Type tool | lynda.com: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUkE3XLw_EA

SUMMARY OF BaNG MEETING #4, July 18, 1990: https://ftp.nice.ch/peanuts/GeneralData/Usenet/news/1990/_CS...

TOUCHTYPE Glenn Reid, Independent NeXT Developer

The next talk was given by Glenn Reid, who previously worked at both NeXT and Adobe. He demonstrated the use of his TouchType application, which should prove to be an enormous boon to people with serious typesetting needs.

TouchType is unlike any other text-manipulation program to date. It takes the traditional "draw program" metaphor used by programs like TopDraw and Adobe Illustrator and extends it to encompass selective editing of individual characters of a text object. To TouchType, text objects are not grouped as sequences of characters, but as individually movable letters. For instance, the "a" in "BaNG" can be moved independently of the rest of the word, yet TouchType still remembers that the "a" is associated with the other three letters.

Perhaps the best feature of this program is the ability to do very accurate and precise kerning (the ability to place characters closer together to create a more natural effect). TouchType supports intelligent automatic kerning and very intuitive, manual kerning done with a horizontal slider or by direct character manipulation. It also incorporates useful features such as sliders to change font sizes, character leading, and character widths, and an option which returns characters to a single base line.

TouchType, only six weeks in development, should be available in early August, with a tentative price of $249. BaNG members were given the opportunity to purchase the software for $150.