[HN Gopher] Cool, but Obscure X11 Tools
___________________________________________________________________
Cool, but Obscure X11 Tools
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 232 points
Date : 2021-12-25 08:34 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cyber.dabamos.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (cyber.dabamos.de)
| jsrcout wrote:
| The Motif window frames really bring back memories. And don't
| forget xlander - my favorite classic DECStation game.
|
| Update: Thought xlander was extinct in the wild, but Slackware
| still has it in their xgames package. Runs fine on Mint 20.2.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| It might bring you some joy - or not:) - to find that CDE is
| still actively available and maintained as well
| vermaden wrote:
| I use these X11 tools daily:
|
| - xterm
|
| - xmessage
|
| - xlockmore
|
| - xkill
|
| - xfontsel
|
| - xev
|
| - xcalc
|
| - xchm
|
| - glxgears
|
| For example *xte rm(1)* can is one of the most compatible
| terminal emulator out there and its nice to have it started each
| time with random color theme:
|
| - https://vermaden.files.wordpress.com/2021/05/xterm.random.pn...
|
| - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2021/05/19/freebsd-desktop-pa...
|
| With some theming in *~/.Xdefaults* both *xmessage(1)* and
| *xcalc(1)* look really well:
|
| - https://vermaden.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/openbox-alt-tab...
|
| - https://i.imgur.com/gl1Q63H.png
|
| I still use *xfontsel(1)* to select bitmap fonts.
|
| I lock screen with *xlock(1)* (package name *xlockmore*) to lock
| the screen:
|
| - https://vermaden.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/xlock-user-pass...
|
| - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/06/23/freebsd-desktop-pa...
|
| I also use *xkill(1)* when some X11 window misbehaves.
|
| Hope that helps.
|
| Regards.
| [deleted]
| millimeterman wrote:
| I'm very curious what necessitates using glxgears daily.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| +1 for xterm. I also enable VT240 graphics (sometimes called
| SIXEL graphics) so that I can easily put up a graph or other
| graphical representation even when I'm ssh'd over to a machine
| somewhere on the east coast.
| nullc wrote:
| From the title I expected to find x2x.
| rubicks wrote:
| Same. That was _the_ tool I used for "multiple desktops" after
| I discovered `ssh -X`.
| stragies wrote:
| and x2vnc, which fits in the same category of tools.
| z3t4 wrote:
| Is X11 going away? what will replace it ? If you are going to
| make a graphics based Linux program today, what technology should
| you chose ?
| pjmlp wrote:
| OpenGL [0], or Gtk/Qt based frameworks basically.
|
| Very few would bother to do X11 graphics directly with Xlib, we
| aren't in the 1980's.
|
| [0] - Some would say Vulkan I rather spare myself the burden.
| fulafel wrote:
| Whatever comes after X11 will also go away, probably before X11
| has actually gone away.
| hulitu wrote:
| After X11 shall come X12. But, as the song says, we are
| living on a planet that's revolving and evolving...
| sleepycatgirl wrote:
| X11 is not going away explicitly, but, Just... Afaik
| maintaining it is huge pain.
|
| Things are slowly shifting to Wayland.
| bbarnett wrote:
| I suspect Wayland will be as ipv6.
|
| Never fully used by all, old hardware around for decades
| without it, and likely require something else, such as X11
| now supports wayland!
|
| Just as I suspect ipv8 will make ipv6 disappear!
|
| ipv8 is identical to ipv4, it just has another 256 in front
| of it. 5 octlets. A 6th octlet for planet designation...
| hulitu wrote:
| Wayland looks like the impaired child of X. They promise
| some security and they are reinventing the wheel.
| [deleted]
| ACS_Solver wrote:
| If you're making a program today, you should be using some
| higher level framework or API than raw X11. If you program for
| Gtk or Qt, or make an OpenGL or Vulkan program, you mostly
| don't care about X11 or Wayland because i.e. Qt supports both.
|
| You could use Xlib to program a client in pure X11, but that
| approach would have been outdated even 15 years ago. There's no
| good reason to do so today, even embedded systems often use Qt
| and there's good support for building embedded/Qt in Yocto.
| Most embedded devices that have any UI at all are likely
| powerful enough to run Qt, so I suspect there aren't many cases
| these days where you need to limit yourself to Xlib because of
| performance.
| toast0 wrote:
| > You could use Xlib to program a client in pure X11
|
| Xlib is actually not very pure X11; Xlib makes a lot of
| things synchronous whereas X11 is _really_ an asynchronous
| messaging distributed systems protocol that happens to output
| to the screen as a side effect. Xcb is a much closer to the
| actual protocol library.
|
| IMHO, a lot of early hate for X11 was really hate at Xlib;
| but as Xlib was the official library, it was understandable
| to get them confused.
| ptx wrote:
| XCB is missing support for some important extensions,
| though. Such as Xft, so you can't display modern anti-
| aliased fonts (unless you somehow use Xlib at the same as
| XCB, I think?).
| ufo wrote:
| Recently I ported a xlib game to SDL. Another option to add
| to that list.
| gpderetta wrote:
| It will go away in '22.
|
| 2122 of course.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Except for a colony planet of Modern Amish, which refuse to
| embrace brain implants, age extension tech, and X11
| replacements.
|
| X11 forever!
| unionpivo wrote:
| X11 is becoming a legend in both good and bad sense.
| nunodonato wrote:
| How is XEvil not mentioned? That game was always severely
| underrated. I kept waiting for someone to come up with a modern
| remake.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| Yes, and Crossfire [1] too. Can't believe how much of my PhD
| time was spent playing that and Xemp [2], though it got to the
| point that I could glance at a terminal-client map and run with
| it.
|
| I recall the crystallography dept getting excited thinking
| there was some new research going on, because of the way I lay
| out my empire maps, and me leaving a printout or two lying
| around, back in the day :)
|
| [1] http://www.crossfireatlas.net/world.html
|
| [2] http://www.wolfpackempire.com/
| pilif wrote:
| Good old Nedit. I used that for two or three years over ssh with
| an X11 server running in Windows to do most of my development.
|
| Nedit was very fast, had a familiar user interface (to a person
| raised on dos/windows) and still had a ton of functionality.
| incanus77 wrote:
| Same here -- found it in college in the mid-90s and it became
| my code editor of choice for years. I brought it back recently
| on some test machines just out of convenience and nostalgia.
| sparcpile wrote:
| I still use NEdit when I develop code. I don't like 1GB+ RAM
| IDEs like Eclipse or VSCode when I can get things done in a
| smaller text editor and a command line. I'll use vi for small
| edit jobs or quick text. NEdit comes out when I need to move
| code blocks around or need to compare.
|
| Some of my co-workers said it was weird that I used it because
| the other editors will do instant linting and suggest code for
| Ansible YAML. I've found that not using VSCode or Eclipse
| forced me to learn more about the language and I am now the
| local subject matter expert on Ansible.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Moving blocks of text in NEdit is its best feature. Try doing
| the same in vim. That is an exercise in frustration.
|
| I first learned NEdit at Fermi where it was developed. Been
| using it for 28 years now. Carrying a dependency on Motif for
| all that time has been sort of a drag, though.
| kragen wrote:
| In Vim? If I'm at the end of the block it's
| v?foo^Md/bar^Mp, which takes about a second. Emacs is
| similar, ^Rfoo^X^X^W^Sbar^M^Y, 10 keystrokes instead of 8,
| not counting the isearch strings, and more awkward chording
| in exchange for being less modal. Either is significantly
| faster than pointing at the block with the mouse,
| especially if part of it goes off the screen. Vim is the
| opposite extreme from being an exercise in frustration.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Nedit lets you use the X secondary selection to do dual
| block operations.
| kragen wrote:
| So you can swap two non-adjacent blocks? When is that
| most convenient?
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| One of my most-used X utilities is not even really a graphical
| one.
|
| xclip allows putting stuff in the X clipboard for subsequent
| pasting into any application. I use it to "copy" canned email
| responses which I keep in a folder as .txt files and then paste
| them in the browser for sending by email. No need to bother with
| browser extensions or built-in crappy functionality (gmail canned
| responses used to just lose my responses every once in a while).
| protomyth wrote:
| MacOS has pbcopy which serves the same function and is an
| amazingly useful way to work.
| michaelhoffman wrote:
| I use xsel for the same purpose. And clip.exe on Windows/WSL.
| easton wrote:
| Set-Clipboard in PowerShell works as well, if you're in to
| that sort of thing.
| leephillips wrote:
| I make frequent use of xcip as well, with an alias to `xclip
| -selection clipboard`, which puts its stdin into the clipboard
| for convenient pasting into GUI programs such as browsers.
| the_pwner224 wrote:
| Same here. In bashrc: alias clip='xclip
| -selection clipboard'
|
| Then you can do things like: cat foo.txt |
| clip
|
| To copy the file into your clipboard.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Inspired by MacOS pbcopy: alias
| xpaste='xclip -out -sel clipboard' alias xcopy='xclip
| -in -sel clipboard'
| jolmg wrote:
| GVim is obscure?
|
| And on xscreensavers, are they not the default/only screensavers
| on distros anymore?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > And on xscreensavers, are they not the default/only
| screensavers on distros anymore?
|
| At least GNOME, and I think some others, have their own
| implementations. Quality varies.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Interesting... Xwpe is still on Ubuntu repositories.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| How about xdotool: X11 automation
|
| xmodmap: Modify which keysyms pressing a given button produces
|
| xcape: Make modifiers do double duty as regular keys when pressed
| and released without other keys.
| waynecochran wrote:
| Still use xv for image viewing and editing all the time. Great
| for using on remote / headless cloud instances. The power of X11
| is to run app remotely and display locally.
| mmcgaha wrote:
| My fingers are so used to typing xv to view an image I had to
| alias it:
|
| alias xv='echo You should use qiv or xli now.'
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| I'm using "feh" since a very long time now. Don't know if
| it's still up to date or now. I'll check qiv and xli.
| johnisgood wrote:
| According to https://github.com/derf/feh/commits/master, it
| is still maintained. I use feh as well. How to view gif or
| webp though? If either of those two support gif and webp,
| then I will switch.
| fmajid wrote:
| What, no xconq?
| waynecochran wrote:
| xmelt was always a favorite before everyone locked their display
| down.
| Someone wrote:
| Has the meaning of _tool_ changed? I wouldn't call 3D Pong and
| quite a few others on this list _tools_. They're _programs_ that
| use X11.
|
| Also expected tools for managing X11 (e.g. a sane font selector,
| or ways to make X settings understandable), but that's minor.
| ipaul wrote:
| Takes me back to end of the fall semester and running XSnow, NCSA
| Mosaic, Nedit, and many of these tools, furiously coding in C or
| lisp on my projects, on an Xterm in the computer lab.
| mmzeeman wrote:
| xroach ftw!
| trailbits wrote:
| Great as a practical joke on colleagues when they stepped out
| of the room!
| mmzeeman wrote:
| Back in the day there was also a huge security hole which
| could be exploited with the xwd command. If you knew the dns
| name of a terminal you could get a screendump from it. It was
| not secured at all.
| shagie wrote:
| An xwd story...
|
| I worked on a Java program that was a point of sales
| terminal. All the registers were reasonably beefy linux
| machines that ran a Java Web Start application and it
| worked well... except when it didn't.
|
| Sometimes it had threading deadlocks and that was a pain to
| debug. In particular, we didn't know _where_ it came from.
| So we installed a handler on ctl-alt-delete that would find
| the Java process running and do a thread dump from that (so
| we could find the methods that were locked) and also did a
| xwd to capture the screen to see what was happening.
| Sometimes we were able to pick out "this modal alert
| window spawned 100x copies of itself" by recognizing an
| unnaturally thick border around it. Just seeing what the
| state that the register was in was useful too.
|
| The xwd and thread dumps where then stored in a folder that
| was sent back as part of nightly reports back to the
| central office where we'd look at them the next morning.
|
| On one hand it was a bit clunky, on the other hand it
| _really_ beat trying to get a bug report from cashiers
| working the registers in a timely manner - they just had to
| remember to do a ctl-alt-delete rather than power cycling
| the machine and we 'd get it reported back to us
| automatically.
| av500 wrote:
| Nedit is still my go to text editor for programming
| [deleted]
| genericacct wrote:
| open source simcity clone! What a gift
| jandrese wrote:
| It compiles and runs! You need to set the SIMHOME environment
| variable to point at the root of the repo. It also generates a
| ton of warnings on a modern compiler, but in the end it pops
| out a running executable.
|
| As an added bonus it runs perfectly well over the network, as a
| good X app should. You don't need a fast or low latency
| connection, it runs perfectly well over even mediocre
| connectivity.
| homarp wrote:
| history of open sourcing simcity
| https://donhopkins.medium.com/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a27...
| Macha wrote:
| Not even a clone, it's the original code that was released by
| EA and ported for the OLPC project
| kbr2000 wrote:
| Don Hopkins, NeWS, Tcl/Tk, ...! Excellent ideas all around.
|
| http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/
| mikro2nd wrote:
| Seems to be missing `phoon` (or was it `xphoon`?)
| codewiz wrote:
| xev is indeed very useful to debug issues with input devices and
| keymaps.
| eqvinox wrote:
| - xtrlock
|
| Allows locking your screen _without_ hiding its contents (i.e.
| just disables input /interaction.) Nice for when you want to keep
| some stats, top, or just a plain message visible on your screen.
|
| - sm
|
| "screen message". Goes fullscreen and just gives you an editable
| text field to type a message into. Great to combine with xtrlock
| mentioned above to put something like "brb, grabbing coffee" on
| your screen for your colleagues or so :) (Technically a Gtk app I
| think, but fits the pattern.)
|
| - [ed.] Xephyr
|
| Open another X server as a window in your current X server. Great
| as a "canvas" for a screenshare if you want to share multiple
| windows but not your entire desktop. Batteries not included, you
| need to know how to juggle xauth & a WM (metacity for me) to make
| the new X server actually do something.
| chias wrote:
| If you're like me and you think xtrlock sounds really useful,
| it's worth taking a moment to google how to unlock your
| computer again before running it.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Xephyr is also fantastic for testing a new wm or a new
| configuration without leaving the comfort of your existing
| setup.
| makeworld wrote:
| Got a link for sm? I can't find it.
| jiffygist wrote:
| I think it's this one https://github.com/nomeata/screen-
| message
|
| There's probably lots of such programs. I know suckless sent
| for example.
| bitwize wrote:
| Can we please not promote neo-Nazis (s*ckless) or their
| software on HN?
| hairofadog wrote:
| This concept is new to me... any chance you could offer a
| quick summary? Is there like a fascist movement within
| software development called "suckless", or what's up with
| this?
| capableweb wrote:
| I don't know where the neo-nazism stuff comes from, but I
| do know about suckless.
|
| Suckless is a organization that describes itself as
| "focus on simplicity, clarity and frugality", and
| "philosophy is about keeping things simple, minimal and
| usable", from https://suckless.org/philosophy/
|
| I think they are most famous for dwm, but have written a
| lot of other good software as well.
| capableweb wrote:
| Has this been proven in any sort of way? As far as I
| know, some suckless developers like to pretend to be
| "software nazis" (similar to "grammar nazi" but regarding
| software) and hence joke about that, but I don't think
| the conclusion is that they are actually nazis. Happy to
| be proven wrong though, haven't looked into the matter
| more than that and wouldn't be the first time I would be
| wrong.
| bitwize wrote:
| Given how we witnessed ironic edgelord racism on places
| like 4chan metamorphose into open, actual, earnest racism
| in like a decade or less, I'd say no, s*ckless do NOT get
| a pass on this.
|
| Besides, they tend to rant about SJWs a lot -- red flag
| #1 that they are for reals far right.
| capableweb wrote:
| > Given how we witnessed ironic edgelord racism on places
| like 4chan metamorphose into open, actual, earnest racism
| in like a decade or less, I'd say no, s*ckless do NOT get
| a pass on this.
|
| Did some quick searches and couldn't find anything racist
| posted by suckless developers, but hard to search for.
| Got any links handy so one could form their own opinion?
|
| > Besides, they tend to rant about SJWs a lot -- red flag
| #1 that they are for reals far right.
|
| Yeah, sometimes that is true, but I prefer to see hard
| evidence before reaching any conclusion, especially when
| people start advocating to stop mentioning software
| because of it.
| nulbyte wrote:
| > Given how we witnessed ironic edgelord racism on places
| like 4chan metamorphose ...
|
| From suckless developers? Or from others? I don't
| understand how this is related to your argument.
| gausswho wrote:
| As for sm:
|
| What a blast from the past feeling. I've never used this
| specific tool but I think there is/was something in Windows to
| do this? Through college in the late 90's and into my first few
| jobs in software engineering, there was a minor zeitgeist
| across my first few companies to diligently leave a description
| behind on your screen if you were going to be away for a while.
| It was a scene full of personality and power.
|
| 'Find me in the kitchen' was a courteous thing to do. 'Bob left
| his machine unlocked, bozo!' built camaraderie. Not seeing a
| message, combined with long absence, was a sense of dread. You
| could publicly wrap a middle finger in a heart: 'Canned. But I
| still love you all!'. Like a Post-It note, it said something
| about the person whose machine it was on. But its magnitude,
| beaming out of a miraculous cathode ray tube, was meant for and
| captured the attention of everyone walking by. You could reach
| and influence an audience you otherwise weren't welcome to
| speak so candidly to. I may have built crucial favor and long
| term work relationships from a silly quip. I couldn't possibly
| say for sure.
|
| Now having worked mostly remote for half a decade, I miss it.
| This interesting slice of subculture has decomposed into
| messenger apps thanks to common availability of satellite-
| enabled-computers-in-pockets. And @here is a painfully poor
| substitute.
| doubled112 wrote:
| I suppose editing the marquee screensaver would have worked?
| fish45 wrote:
| I didn't know about Xephyr. That's super useful
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| > XmGrace
|
| I used it for quite some time during my time as a PhD student and
| found it rather easy to use compared to gnuplot. Used it to make
| all my plots for my publications.
| sparcpile wrote:
| We use grace to provide graphs of resource usage for our end
| users. We wrote a tool that pulls together acct and other data
| sources to provide a graph of usage over time. It made it very
| easy for them to tell us that at 0300, 0442, 0529, the resource
| usage spiked, which makes looking through application logs much
| easier.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| It's interesting that looking at all these, the HP calculator
| apps, mimicking the look of physical HP calculators, don't seem
| to have aged as much as the others (I mean: the calculators
| themselves certainly do look oldschool, but the app doesn't).
|
| The one X11 app I still use to troubleshoot issues or when I set
| up a new Debian system is "xeyes" (just two eyes which look/track
| the direction of the mouse pointer). As long as it's shipped with
| Debian, I'll be making sure xeyes is installed.
| cyfex wrote:
| What kind of issues does "xeyes" help you troubleshoot?
| rwmj wrote:
| I use xeyes as a kind of "is remote X working" test. Quick
| way to test that X forwarding through ssh is functional and
| fast enough.
| myself248 wrote:
| It's a program with no blocking I/O, so if the eyes stop
| moving, you know you're looking at a certain kind of
| connectivity issue. If some more complicated app stops
| responding, the problem space of where to start
| troubleshooting is much larger.
|
| If you miiiiight have a flaky network, leaving xeyes open in
| the corner can be a real headache-saver.
| timidger wrote:
| I use it to check if an app uses xwayland when I use sway
| 0x445442 wrote:
| Back in my college days, the HP 48sx was an extension of my
| soul.
| cyckl wrote:
| I use a GX and feel the same way--something about the HP 48
| is just really charming and I wish for a modern alternative.
| Software emulation isn't enough! Leaves me longing.
| tyingq wrote:
| >don't seem to have aged as much as the others
|
| Just an artifact of the whole UI being pixel mapped graphics
| onto buttons/labels/canvas mimicking the calculator. I imagine
| Tk, Xaw, or Motif is under there, you just can't see it. The
| TiEmu one appears to be GTK.
| trasz wrote:
| Although Free42 is much better on iPhone, simply because it's
| always handy. Also, real HP42 was almost exactly the same size
| as the phone, and the fake tactile feedback is really nice.
| app4soft wrote:
| Take a look on _AzPainter_ [0] and other X11 apps & tools by
| _Azel_ ( 'azelpg').[1,2]
|
| [0] https://git.io/azpainter
|
| [1] http://azsky2.html.xdomain.jp/
|
| [2] https://gitlab.com/users/azelpg/projects
| harryruhr wrote:
| Xfig is missing. A vector graphics editor for X, 36 years old and
| still maintained. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xfig
| kbr2000 wrote:
| Tgif [0] is interesting too, Prolog-based, with Hyper-
| Structured-Graphics [1]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tgif_(program)
|
| [1] http://bourbon.usc.edu/tgif/hgviewer.html
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| And significantly used, too. I still smile every time I
| recognize Xfig art in articles/ papers these days.
| atorodius wrote:
| Just curious: How do you recognize it?
| d1stc wrote:
| XLennart "XLennart is a modification of the arcade game XBill. An
| evil and unpopular computer hacker named "Lennart" tries to
| install his malicious init system on various BSD and Linux
| systems. Like in XBill, the player has to hit him and restore
| infected machines."
|
| hahah this go me!!!
| willjp wrote:
| I love xneko, it's adorable.
| notorious-dto wrote:
| Nobody mentioned Xdmx!
| gsliepen wrote:
| I'm missing x11vnc (a VNC server that shares an existing X
| screen) and xclip (not xclipboard). There are also a lot of games
| in that list, but I did not see xkoules or xrick. There are so
| many nice little gems that seems to be on the brink of being
| forgotten, it's great to see them listed here!
| rwmj wrote:
| xpilot (http://www.xpilot.org/)
|
| Back in the day (about 1993/4?) we had what we'd now call LAN
| parties playing this game in the computer labs at university. To
| the point where the admins banned any use before a certain time
| in the evening because it overloaded the shared 10Mbps ethernet.
|
| Also there was a great Breakout game for X11 at around the same
| time that I cannot find anything about now.
| benttoothpaste wrote:
| I always use x2x. It allows sharing of the keyboard and mouse
| between several machines.
| zbuf wrote:
| Back in the 90s, I has a fun pool/snooker game in 2D for x11. My
| encounter was in the default install of the ARM port of RedHat
| 3.0.3.
|
| I've asked on these sorts of threads before, but can anyone
| remember what it was? I seem to have lost all trace -- source
| code, screenshots, anything. I thought it was "xpool" but that
| didn't turn up much.
| headstorm wrote:
| One candidate to consider is
| https://www.freshports.org/games/flying/ - "Flying is pool,
| snooker, carrom, hockey + curling with nice animated spinning
| balls for pool". I'm not sure about redhat, but it seems to
| have been present in debian from 1998 through 2010.
| Datagenerator wrote:
| Xspringies and substrate screensaver should be preserved forever
| hulitu wrote:
| Reaaly cool site. Editres is my favourite X tool.
| philh wrote:
| Huh, I remember xearth. It would move the stars every time it
| redrew itself. I wanted to have it update every second for some
| reason, and that was distracting, so I patched it to add an
| option to not do that. Then I couldn't find a maintainer to send
| it to, so I didn't share it.
| euroderf wrote:
| I se up xearth to approximate the view from the ISS, at the
| appropriate orbital velocity. But with a decent refresh rate,
| what a CPU hog it was.
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(page generated 2021-12-25 23:00 UTC)