[HN Gopher] Cool, but obscure X11 tools (2019)
___________________________________________________________________
Cool, but obscure X11 tools (2019)
Author : RalfWausE
Score : 274 points
Date : 2023-07-13 13:06 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cyber.dabamos.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (cyber.dabamos.de)
| [deleted]
| codetrotter 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.
|
| Hah! Poor Poettering tho. He really gets a lot of hate '=(
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| The hate towards Lennart is truly regrettable. I like how
| systemd has enabled managing and securing daemons easy
| (Before=, After=, CPUQuota=, ProtectSystem=, ReadWritePaths= to
| name a few of them.)
| panzi wrote:
| Never had any problem with systemd, but I did have problems
| with PulseAudio -- the high latency audio server. (These days
| it seems to work good enough, still looking forward to
| PipeWire.)
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Pipewire is ready. Solved all my bluetooth headphone
| troubles too, I haven't had a single audio frustration
| since I switched.
|
| I believe pipewire is already the default in Debian, Ubuntu
| and Fedora
| yakubin wrote:
| Yeah. It's actually funny how Pipewire and Wayland turned
| out. Wayland was supposed to be ready for general use
| "any day now" since 2011. It's 2023 and the situation
| looks thus:
| <https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers>.
| Whereas Pipewire seemed to have scarcely any marketing,
| instead it just happened. I remember reading about it for
| the first time at some point and started wondering
| whether Debian, a conservative distro, turned it on or
| whether I should change a setting to opt into it. I
| looked at htop and lo and behold: Pipewire was there. So
| it happened before I even heard about it, without a
| single hiccup, so smoothly that I didn't even notice the
| sound system changed.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| It's more about his personality than about his software I
| think.
|
| Especially the way systemd was pushed through by making gnome
| dependent on it was not cool.
|
| This made me dislike systemd and Poettering even though it's
| not bad as such. I just don't like to be forced into things.
| I don't hate him but I'm not exactly positive towards him
| either.
|
| I use FreeBSD now anyway because I think commercial influence
| over Linux is too great. So I'm admittedly an outlier.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Lennart earned himself a reputation for thinking his own
| shit doesn't stink, closing bugs against his software as
| NOTABUG or WONTFIX even when his software was flagrantly at
| fault.
|
| Here is one particularly egregious and clearcut example:
| https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/6237
|
| tl;dr: a systemd service configured to run as a user who's
| username started with a digit (e.g. the username '0day')
| would instead run as root. Lennart initially closes the bug
| report and refuses to fix it because he thought such
| usernames weren't acceptable, despite the kernel and most
| linux utilities permitting it and handling it gracefully. A
| good engineer with a shred of humility would take this
| report seriously, even if he thought other systems
| shouldn't be permitting the circumstance. To see the lead
| engineer of a project so important to linux take such a
| childish stance on a security-related bug was infuriating
| and demoralizing.
|
| This is just one example, which didn't take anybody by
| surprise. It's his modus operandi. May the gods have mercy
| on the Microsoft engineers who now have to call him a
| coworker.
| freedomben wrote:
| > _Especially the way systemd was pushed through by making
| gnome dependent on it was not cool._
|
| Can anyone link me to a history of this? I've heard this a
| number of times but haven't seen anything factual (i.e:
| that answers "what were the technical benefits to gnome?").
| It seems pretty reasonable to me that Gnome devs would see
| some nice features/integrations that they wanted to use,
| and decided it was worth it. It also seems plausible that
| they would have used gnome to strong-arm in systemd. My
| experience tells me that the former is a lot more likely,
| but I'd like to investigate the situation.
| always2slow wrote:
| https://suckless.org/sucks/systemd/ - I dunno if there's
| anything about GNOME in there but that's got a lot of
| info
| [deleted]
| em-bee wrote:
| _It 's more about his personality than about his software I
| think._
|
| as someone who has met him in person, i have to reject
| that. there are arrogant and uncomfortable developers. he
| is not one of them.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| None of that required systemd's basic architecture. That is
| what is truly regrettable.
| lmm wrote:
| Forcing adoption probably did though. Better alternatives
| that played nice with a unix-style system (e.g. runit)
| existed for years, but since distributions weren't forcing
| them, services mostly didn't bother integrating with them.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Those PascalCase keys are an unfortunate signal, and reminds
| one of the Windows registry. "Mixed plus case-sensitive"
| names are the worst of both worlds--hard to get right unless
| one uses copy/paste.
|
| Unix tradition (see AOUP) and perhaps supervisord precedent
| recommend names that need to be user-typeable should be
| lower/snake case:
|
| https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1863.
| ..
|
| Not a huge deal, and keys are not filenames. But it shows a
| lack of detail-orientation for someone working at such a
| fundamental level in the OS.
| freedomben wrote:
| Ha! I saw XLennart also and came here to Ctrl+f and see if
| anyone else had commented.
|
| Indeed, it's wild to see the level of systemd hate that there
| is. Hopefully Lennart takes it in good humor. I would in his
| shoes. Can't take ourselves too seriously
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Last I heard, he now works for Microsoft.
| eadmund wrote:
| Some might wonder if he's been effectively working for
| Microsoft all along. I don't think that's really fair. Both
| PulseAudio & Systemd are trying to do something really
| useful and make things better than they were before ... but
| _man_ some of the architecture & design choices along the
| way are regrettable.
| hulitu wrote:
| Pulseaudio was a program which, for some years, only
| worked, if you killed it. Start firefox, try to play a
| youtube video, does not play audio, kill pulseaudio,
| sound works.
| swayvil wrote:
| I love Angband deeply.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| A missing one: ddd debugger
|
| A debugger that can represent data structures like linked lists
| graphically.
| db48x wrote:
| Sadly, changes to gdb have made ddd somewhat unreliable. Also,
| it has a lot of trouble dealing with programs written in Rust
| :)
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Because it is unmaintained
| db48x wrote:
| Yep.
| somat wrote:
| This list is how I discovered xsunclock. which quickly became my
| poster child for everything I love about computing. It is very
| clearly a labor of love. It follows no ui guideline known to
| man(I like to refer to these sort of programs as following the
| R'llyeh school of design). It is just barely on this side of
| usable but offers an unmatched set of timekeeping options. It is
| pretty great.
| shrubble wrote:
| The program xsunclock uses the look and feel of the Open Look
| toolkit, which is a programming toolkit from Sun that pre-dates
| Motif and others, but it definitely looks quite different from
| other GUI toolkits.
| rdtsc wrote:
| Speaking of FSV2, I remember randomly discovering fsn on the SGI
| Irix as an intern and realizing it was the cool 3D file browser
| from Jurassic park. I thought it was a special effect prop for
| the movie and then to my surprise it was an actual working
| application.
| timetraveller26 wrote:
| I just wish the VR UI from Community were real too
| <https://youtu.be/z4FGzE4endQ>
| haolez wrote:
| I sometimes wonder what a modern desktop would look like if every
| app had the Motif look. I wonder if the consistency of this
| experience would surpass the subjective ugliness of it.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| The SGI Irix 4dwm used it and was pleasing to the eye. Also had
| vector icons.
|
| Add 4k, text antialiasing, and an updated terminal and I think
| would look and work quite well.
| hulitu wrote:
| I find Motif good looking and practical. I like visual feedback
| when i press a button.
|
| Using modern UI without borders, with cluttered title bars,
| with tiny scrollbars is a PITA.
| watersb wrote:
| Mad props for Hans Ecke's XPlanet Resources page:
|
| http://hans.ecke.ws/xplanet/
|
| For a year or three, I ran this setup on my Linux background
| desktop. Our team was returning to the United States after
| working with our colleagues at the European Southern Observatory
| https://www.eso.org/public/ and a flight attendant noticed the
| image of Earth, Moon, sun on my computer.
|
| She asked if I were interested or involved in space exploration,
| and I told her that we looked at stars from the ground, but could
| get pretty far. She bent closer to me and murmured, "The pilots
| have just heard from the radio, there has been an explosion of
| the Space Shuttle."
|
| 2003, somewhere over Greenland.
|
| Anyway: XPlanet rocks.
|
| https://xplanet.sourceforge.net/maps.php
| boredumb wrote:
| Seeing GLXGears is giving me a panic attack thinking about
| setting up linux on a shitty old laptop years ago and trying to
| get world of warcraft to boot up.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Is x2x considered obscure?
|
| I always thought it was remnant of a much cooler alternative
| branch we could have gone down for UI, but didn't.
| dark-star wrote:
| How can a page like this miss out on Xaos, one of the coolest
| fractal programs for X11 :-D
|
| https://xaos-project.github.io/
| evilotto wrote:
| don't forget xfractint
| ptx wrote:
| > _A simple RTF editor for X11. [...] Prone to crashing._
|
| That makes is pretty useless as a word processor, unless it has a
| really robust auto-save system.
|
| Anyway, the Plan calendar thing looked neat, but I don't think
| it's packaged in Arch.
| anthk wrote:
| The GTK2 port of Ted it's better.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| For me xfishtank would top the list. I still use it sometimes.
|
| Xblast was also cool. It would transform the mouse pointer into a
| crosshairs and if you clicked it would shoot a hole in the window
| that you could actually see through. It was really fun to annoy
| first year students at uni before xauth was implemented.
|
| Xeyes too of course with some --geometry to make it full screen.
| Did that with a huge video wall once (nearly got me fired but I
| was just an intern. So worth it)
| hawflakes wrote:
| Wow. I remember a different Xblast. This was a multiplayer
| Bomberman clone: https://xblast.sourceforge.net
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Hmm maybe it was called xblaster. Not so sure now. But blast
| and x were definitely part of the name.
| oaththrowaway wrote:
| XBill is one I had forgotten about for a long time
| camel-cdr wrote:
| Not that obscure but I recently started doing "xeyes debugging".
|
| We have so many debug logs that trying to find your log of a
| background task, takes a non zero amount of time.
|
| So just inserting system("xeyes"); is actually way easier, to get
| instant feedback, and you can just use system("xmessage msg"), if
| you need a message.
| epilys wrote:
| I read somewhere, don't remember where, that xeyes can be used
| with xwayland to see if a window is wayland or X11: because the
| cursor position is private in Wayland windows, the xeyes will
| stop moving.
| tildef wrote:
| Ah, I love these posts. There's always some gems popping up in
| the comments.
|
| My top 3 are Xaos (previously mentioned above), XEphem
| (https://github.com/XEphem/XEphem); an absolutely lovely
| ephemeris, and predict (https://www.qsl.net/kd2bd/predict.html);
| the satellite tracker--which has a bunch GUI versions--for
| example gpredict, which I guess is more relevant for this story.
| naillo wrote:
| Hey gvim isn't obscure..
| mike_hock wrote:
| Nor is xterm. Or xcalc. Or xclock.
| Thrymr wrote:
| Free42 is also available as an iOS app!
| NikkiA wrote:
| Back in 1994 I remember playing an X11 clone of missile command
| that alternated the traditional defense wave with an offensive
| wave when you attacked the attacker's cities.
|
| I've long since forgotten what it was called.
|
| I was kind of hoping it might have been on this list, but sadly
| it wasn't.
| rwl4 wrote:
| OpenBSD has a ton of obscure x11 games and apps in their ports
| collection if you want to play with a different subset than
| FreeBSD's ports includes. I spent a whole evening enjoying the
| UNIX archaeology contained in their repo.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Cool, but Obscure X11 Tools_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29681507 - Dec 2021 (128
| comments)
|
| _Cool but obscure X11 tools_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20713003 - Aug 2019 (246
| comments)
| ISL wrote:
| To that list, I'd add xdiskusage.
| marinhero wrote:
| GLXGears was my command of choice to verify if my graphics
| drivers were installed. Either they would run smoothly (when
| installed) or choppy and broken. Can't use that anymore because
| the APUs and generic drivers got so good that everything runs
| smoothly. Good times.
| anthk wrote:
| glxgears -info | less
| squarefoot wrote:
| Yes, I recall using GLXInfo in a xterm window to check whether
| I correctly installed graphics drivers or not. "Direct
| Rendering: Yes" would confirm that. Good old times indeed.
| CamouflagedKiwi wrote:
| And you could tell based on whether it ran at ~100FPS or
| several thousand. I assume that doesn't work so well any
| more...
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| it used to be slideshow vs 30fps on some cards back in the
| day
| Inhibit wrote:
| That'll still work to see which driver is running. Might want
| to append "| head -30" so you don't get all the unnecessary
| debug for your answer, though. Or grep for what you're
| expecting (i.e. "| grep -i nvidia").
| sgt wrote:
| Was it using xdpyinfo or driconf or something? Muscle memory
| tells me it's somewhere around there.
| JackFr wrote:
| What about XTartan and Xrisk???
| jghn wrote:
| And XTank!
|
| Loved XTank. My friends & I wound up getting the source as we
| found out the version we had deployed on our university's
| system was older and missed out on a lot of cool tanks &
| features.
| timthorn wrote:
| Many happy hours playing XRisk and XPilot at work 25 years ago
| :)
| sigio wrote:
| I'm missing XMMS, basically X winamp ;)
| lelanthran wrote:
| I'm using qmmp (it's in the debian/ubuntu or mint repo, not
| sure) which is visually and functionally identical.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| xev is extremely useful; a natural counterpart to xbindkeys and
| very useful when you're trying to reconfigure your keyboard
| mappings. xsnow is maybe my favorite from this list, I install it
| every winter for the holidays.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| Surprised not to see Xpdf on this list. I actually used it until
| fairly recently as I just wanted a simple, no-frills PDF viewer
| (I now use Zathura instead).
| hulitu wrote:
| xpdf was updated. It is terrible now.
| philsnow wrote:
| I loved Xpdf, it was part of my weird "tex->pdf REPL", which
| was just % xpdf -remote work output.pdf &
| [1] % inotifywait --monitor ... | \ while read;
| do \ make && xpdf -remote work -reload
| done
|
| At the time, xpdf was the only PDF reader that wouldn't eagerly
| try to re-read the PDF file the instant it noticed a change.
| ps2pdf / latexpdf etc don't write the file atomically, so other
| PDF readers would display garbage (and then not re-display
| after latexpdf was finished) and usually lose the page that I
| was looking at.
|
| With xpdf I could do xpdf -reload after my build finished, and
| it would retain my place (as long as I hadn't `\if 0`ed the
| place I was looking at out of existence).
| guessbest wrote:
| NEdit was perfect when I was transitioning from Windows to Linux
| in the late 90s early 2000s. It was even in Slackware.
|
| Also, I miss the large clear, 16/256 color icons from the win 3.0
| and 1990's unix era.
| anthk wrote:
| https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1920644
|
| and
|
| https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Solaris-8
|
| Change the GTK settings as always. Or use lxappearance.
| chris_j wrote:
| NEdit was my main editor for a few years after I started using
| UNIX in the late 90s but couldn't get the hang of vi and emacs.
| I have fond memories of using it and I'm pretty sad that it was
| so tied to Motif that it never developed further. I used it on
| Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and even Windows (via Cygwin). I kind of
| miss using an editor so uncomplicated.
| nequo wrote:
| Wouldn't gedit do this today? It looks like gedit works on
| Windows too:
|
| https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Gedit#Installation
| _fat_santa wrote:
| Actually I hear about GLX Gears pretty often, usually as a test
| step in setting up graphics drivers. But personally I am super
| fond of TiEmu because that's what I used all through college. As
| I got more and more into my CS coursework I found that I really
| didn't need my TI-84 _most_ of the time but I still needed it
| _some_ of the time. TiEmu helped shave about 1lb off my heavy
| backpack and let my brother use my Ti-84 for HS/College.
| fullstop wrote:
| I used a lot of these in the late 90s and early 2000s. I guess
| I'm just old, but a lot of them don't seem that obscure.
| gsliepen wrote:
| A great list, although I'm not seeing xteddy, xkoules and
| spellcast in it.
| lelanthran wrote:
| Strangely enough, I have run and used every single item on that
| list, with the exception of xwpe.
|
| How did I not know that this existed?
|
| TIL that: sudo apt-get install xwpe
|
| actually works!
|
| Will have to play with this later.
| Aachen wrote:
| xwpe being a
|
| > Borland-like integrated development environment (IDE)
| zerr wrote:
| There was also RHIDE.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Which was deadly slow, it used delay loops for timing IIRC.
|
| Not a bad product otherwise. The Borland IDE still feels
| like home to me.
| krylon wrote:
| I'm not sure I would describe gvim as obscure. But this is
| certainly an interesting list.
| metrix wrote:
| I'm sad that xsnow doesn't work on modern environments. Having
| Snow fall on top of windows was really cool
| hulitu wrote:
| 1.42 version works flawlessly. The new version is a disaster.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Still werks for me, I use it every year. I think it even has
| some wayland support, but I haven't tried that.
| kristopolous wrote:
| It says last updated in 2022 but I swear this list reads like
| it's from 1997.
|
| I appreciate it nonetheless.
|
| I browsed around the site and I found this collection which I
| like a bit more
|
| https://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/index3.html
|
| It appears to be in roughly alphabetical order by topic, which is
| quite an accomplishment
| klooney wrote:
| The cool kids don't make x11 apps anymore.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| To be fair, a list of things obscure in 2022 will naturally be
| weighted to dated software that became obscure with age. I'm
| surprised to see xterm on the list, but I guess most people are
| using more modern terminals, or urxvt if they prefer it retro.
| arcade79 wrote:
| Still using xterm, thank you very much. :)
| dunham wrote:
| The obscure part of xterm for me was the built in tektronix
| (vector) terminal emulation. I remember digging up a .dvi
| viewer that could display on tektronix by drawing a _lot_ of
| horizontal lines.
| codetrotter wrote:
| Well then again, some things are timeless yk
| Brendinooo wrote:
| I looked at a screenshot from one of them and it says it's from
| 2002
| kristopolous wrote:
| I think it's best to assume it was a multi-year project that
| concluded a long time ago.
|
| Countdown to y2k and NCSA mosaic would have been of pretty
| limited use in 2002 and some of this software didn't exist
| pre-2000.
|
| There's probably meta information on the images or a last
| modified date if people really want to map things out.
|
| Regardless, it's a time capsule either way
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I remember some of them from my first forays into linux, around
| 20 years ago now. Which is late by some people's standards, but
| still.
| kristopolous wrote:
| I remember checking some of these out from CVS and killing a
| bunch of processes so my machine didn't hit swap when
| compiling it.
|
| You'd use ctrl+alt numpad keys to switch resolution and color
| depths sometimes if you don't have a lot of video memory. You
| could get high resolution, low color or low resolution high
| color.
| toast0 wrote:
| Not sure exactly when Micropolis was added, but much later than
| 1997.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| SimCity for Unix was originally released as a commercial
| product from DUX Software for OpenWindows/NeWS/HyperLook in
| 1992:
|
| https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/simcity/simcity-
| revi...
|
| Then later DUX Software released a collaborative multi player
| version of SimCity for X11/TCL/Tk in 1993:
|
| https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/simcity/simcity-
| anno...
|
| https://groups.google.com/g/comp.newprod/c/5KWv25ckYHc/m/MgG.
| ..
|
| Then it was finally re-licensed under GPL-3 for the OLPC as
| SimCity, and for any other use as Micropolis in 2008 (with
| the multi player stuff disabled because the X11 network
| protocol was not safe or simple enough for kids to use on a
| mesh network):
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2008/01/simcity-goes-open-
| sou...
|
| https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis
| ajot wrote:
| IIRC Micropolis was "born" for the One Laptop Per Child
| project, so arround 2008 maybe?
| AnonCoward42 wrote:
| You might be onto something
|
| > Dock app that simply counts down the days, hours, minutes,
| and seconds left until 00:00 January 1, 2000.
|
| https://cyber.dabamos.de/unix/x11/#wmy2k
| codetrotter wrote:
| What does it do now? Count increasingly negative numbers?
| kristopolous wrote:
| http://www.cs.mun.ca/~gstarkes/wmaker/dockapps/time.html#wm
| y...
|
| put in printf("%s\n",temp); around line 52 and you'll see
| it is indeed negatives. This very much confuses this line
| copyXPMArea((*p-'0')*7 + 1, 0, 8, 13, k, 2);
|
| But hey, with a change of the targettime you can re-release
| this as wmy2k38
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem)
| koprulusector wrote:
| Random thought: should they be "decreasingly negative
| numbers," since technically moving left of 0 is a decrease?
| codetrotter wrote:
| Possibly.
|
| To me, sign and absolute value are often separate
| concerns.
|
| The series 1, 2, 3, ... is increasingly positive.
|
| The series -1, -2, -3, ... is increasingly negative.
|
| But I understand, and accept, that others may think
| differently about numbers.
| noam_k wrote:
| I would argue that using the -ly suffix here is wrong:
|
| The series 1, 2, 3 is increasing (and) positive.
|
| The series -1, -2, -3 is decreasing negative.
|
| The series -3, -2, -1 is increasing negative.
|
| Edit: formatting
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| I think you could probably say either decreasing or
| increasingly negative, but not decreasingly negative,
| because that would describe a sequence that starts from a
| negative number and moves towards zero (but hasn't gotten
| there yet)
| lmm wrote:
| No. They may be decreasing, but they're not "decreasingly
| negative", quite the opposite.
| okasaki wrote:
| sunclock is a favourite of mine, and I can't find any newer
| alternative.
| nmstoker wrote:
| When I see screenshots with window decorators like that I always
| wonder if there's someone actually using an ancient computer or
| if the screenshots are just really really old. I tend to guess
| it's the latter.
| projektfu wrote:
| A lot of them are made using Xt and Athena widgets. They are
| ... Spartan. Also the scroll bars often work best with 3 button
| mice.
| timthorn wrote:
| That's just CDE:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment
| msla wrote:
| It's entirely possible to run that window manager on a modern
| system.
| II2II wrote:
| Using an older window manager is usually a case of installing
| its package and adding it to a file executed by your display
| manager. I don't have much love for the old window managers,
| but some of the newer ones are quite nice.
|
| As for the old window managers (and applications) themselves, I
| would imagine they are still bundled with Debian. Now that
| Debian allows non-open drivers in their official installation
| media, I'm tempted to try installing it to relive some of that
| X11 nostalgia. (I have fond memories of xv, xfig, and such.)
| em-bee wrote:
| it appears the author is running freebsd, and based on the
| style of the title and border i am guessing that this is the
| fvwm windowmanager, the screen background on some of the images
| seems to support that.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| Yep, when you run startx on a new FreeBSD install (or openBSD
| for that matter) this is what it looks like by default.
| nmstoker wrote:
| Interesting! I didn't realize it would be that easy and
| like that by default. This is why I love the kind of
| discussions that crop up on HN!
| koprulusector wrote:
| This is how modern X applications look by default. It's gtk,
| compositors, and window managers that add/change the
| aesthetics.
| josephcsible wrote:
| If you're just running an X server and a single program, I
| thought you didn't get any decorations at all.
| asveikau wrote:
| Window decorator has a specific meaning in X terminology,
| referring to the frame of the window done by the window
| manager.
|
| The screenshots are using some commercial Unix wm (mwm?) or
| one of the free ones that copies their look (fvwm?)
|
| I use fvwm on one of my machines in 2023, in part because I
| found myself on a retro kick a few years ago, so I don't
| think it's _that_ weird, though it is extremely dated.
| LeFantome wrote:
| Super fast and light.
| signa11 wrote:
| i stick with it because i haven't found a window-manager that
| is better than that. i tell you, there are dozens (yes dozens
| !) of us.
|
| this is how it looks for me: https://imgur.com/a/OXGVCsK
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Getting some old man yells at clouds vibes :)
| reaperducer wrote:
| _this is how it looks for me:https://imgur.com/a/OXGVCsK_
|
| That's way too useful and productive.
|
| It's not a real OS if it doesn't have ads flying out when you
| click controls, and constantly telling you the forecast and
| what Taylor Swift is up to this minute.
| LeFantome wrote:
| More than you think.
|
| There is also NsCDE: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
| em-bee wrote:
| before fvwm tvtwm was was my choice. fvwm improved on that
| dramatically with its featureset. but even fvwm i stopped
| using already 25 years ago because nicer alternatives became
| available (i used window maker for a long time, then compiz,
| now i am just lazy with standard gnome)
| urinotherapist wrote:
| XPilot is missing.
|
| https://www.xpilot.org/
| ttctciyf wrote:
| Also xlander ( apparently maintained!
| https://github.com/ac000/xlander )
| phkahler wrote:
| Xpilot, xanim, xterm?
| hulitu wrote:
| Xanim was the first free video player.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Possibly not old enough to be included in that list, but my
| oldest piece of desktop software I always run on my main machine
| is GKrellm with BubbleFishyMon as system load monitor.
|
| http://gkrellm.srcbox.net/
| philsnow wrote:
| This is giving me strong nostalgia, I loved gkrellm ~20 years
| ago because of how densely it showed information. I stopped
| using it eventually because it used a non-trivial amount of CPU
| just displaying stuff.
| squarefoot wrote:
| I noticed this too, but setting refresh to low values, like 5
| per second, reduces considerably the CPU use.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I guess it is time for some beers, I recognise like 60% of those
| applications.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| XPilot! And my favorite X11 game: XBattle
| arethuza wrote:
| xtank as well!
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Yes I remember playing that one too.
| tpoindex wrote:
| Adding two of my favorites:
|
| XMorph - blends two images together:
| https://xmorph.sourceforge.net/home/gourlay/public_html/Xmor...
|
| ACM - Aerial Combat Simulator:
| https://www.gnu.org/software/acm/
| em-bee wrote:
| xmorph was awesome. i'd love to see a more modern version of
| that that produces better quality results.
| evilotto wrote:
| And xconq
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| XBattle is a great game and seems ripe for re-discovery and re-
| implementing, maybe as a mobile game. It shares some elements
| with RTS games but had its own vibe.
|
| There've been a few XBattle clones in the last 20 years, mostly
| Flash games, but none really took off. It's a great game
| mechanic.
| renox wrote:
| I wouldn't put NEdit in the 'obscure X11 Apps' category. It's
| very useful, for example to visualise logs.
| elkos wrote:
| nedit was awesome I really enjoyed using it on my old scrapy
| computer
| panzi wrote:
| gvim and xterm are obscure now? O_o
| froseph wrote:
| One I dont see mentioned is Xnest (or its successor Xephyr). In a
| previous life, used it all the time to debug apps in multiple
| desktop environments.
| lelanthran wrote:
| Good one.
|
| I recall, around 2004, using it on Windows, under Cygwin, to
| run cygwin-compiled X apps on Windows.
|
| I'm not sure how that worked at all, to be honest. I hope my
| memory is not playing tricks on me again.
| philsnow wrote:
| My (less-than-half-baked) master's thesis has a screenshot of
| Xnest, which I was using to demonstrate some ridiculously
| primitive precursor to kernel namespaces, IIRC
| xioxox wrote:
| I like xvfb-run which runs GUI X11 applications in a headless
| mode.
| philsnow wrote:
| One of my favorite bits of software is Xpra [0], "screen for
| X". You'd run it and it would start another X server (start
| apps in it with `DISPLAY=:1 xterm` or whatever), and you
| would "attach" it to your running X server with `xpra
| attach`.
|
| You can attach to e.g. `ssh://hostname/:1`, so I ran a
| firefox instance on a homelab server and attached to it from
| my laptop and my desktop to not have to bother keeping
| bookmarks, tabs etc in sync.
|
| [0] https://xpra.org/
| ben7799 wrote:
| Definitely a blast from the past. I haven't really been using a
| linux desktop the last 10 years.
|
| Especially in college in the late 90s I remember using/trying a
| lot of these application.
|
| Some of these like XBiff were standard things almost all of us
| setup as we configured out desktops. Mostly we were using FVWM
| but you had to basically build your own environment.
|
| When I was in school the campus computers were basically a mix of
| Sun, IBM RS6000, and SGI, and the IT department had everything
| configured extremely nicely where you could log onto any machine
| and your desktop appeared and all your files were there and
| everything just kind of transparently worked as if you were
| always using the same computer, even though the machines were all
| different versions of Unix. For non programming work it just
| worked. For my CS stuff you would just have to recompile on the
| current arch you were on.
|
| Gnome and KDE didn't appear till about my 3rd year.. I don't
| think any of them were really available on the school machines
| unless you built it yourself and did the work to configure your
| environment to use them. So we used a lot of these old school X11
| programs.
|
| I never had any money for a TV, game console, etc.. at that point
| and actually played some of these amateurish X11 games for fun.
| None of them were good enough to hold your attention very long
| but there were a lot of them to try. Some were really good for
| the time, like Netrek. The graphics were not amazing but the
| multiplayer gameplay was well ahead of it's time.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Gnome and KDE didn't appear till about my 3rd year.. I don't
| think any of them were really available on the school machines
| unless you built it yourself and did the work to configure your
| environment to use them.
|
| That brings back painful memories of getting Gnome (v1,
| perhaps) compiled and running properly; was it "the Gnu Network
| Object Model Environment" or similar?
| ralferoo wrote:
| Somehow missing XDaliClock which has around seemingly forever.
| It's better than most of the clocks they included.
| buildsjets wrote:
| If they did list or link to it, JWZ would probably revert all
| the graphics to hairy testicles.
| arethuza wrote:
| When I first learned about xmosaic in 1993 my first reaction was
| "nice hypertext tool though not sure why anyone would want to
| load documents over the Internet"....
| kuschkufan wrote:
| Some not so obscure ones too. Seems like a general app listing of
| the X11 days.
|
| Who doesn't remember XEyes, XBiff, XClock, XEdit, Xev, XKill (!),
| Xv (!!), XMosaic (!!!) ... many others on there.
|
| Granted I did not know FSV2 and some others.
|
| Nice collection, glad to not have to run any of them. Not saying
| they weren't useful for their time!
| morsch wrote:
| Is there an xkill equivalent for Wayland yet?
| drewg123 wrote:
| I still use xv to look at images, GLXGears to debug GL issues,
| and xev to debug any weird keymapping issues, and xterm as a
| visually different terminal for things like monitoring console
| output.
| kristopolous wrote:
| The xv guy might still be accepting payment. I wonder how
| much he gets these days
|
| http://www.trilon.com/xv/
| ttctciyf wrote:
| It's such a quick and handy tool that I became habituated to
| xv over a decade of use. Some years ago though, I found it
| was no longer available to install after an upgrade. I was
| eventually able to fudge a working version from old code and
| patches and taking hints (iirc) from some patches for MacOS,
| but now that has suffered bitrot.
|
| So I'm curious what OS you're running and where your xv is
| from? Still miss it!
| hulitu wrote:
| xv runs perfectly on linux (Slackware 64)
| ttctciyf wrote:
| Thanks!
| foobarbecue wrote:
| xkill is frequently useful at my work, unfortunately
| jcelerier wrote:
| I still use xev regularly and xkill pretty much everyday? Along
| with xclip (everyday too), xdotool (for automation
| workflows)... glxgears very often too to check if for some
| reason the GPU driver bailed out
| simias wrote:
| Xev is super useful when messing with keybindings.
|
| I also use xmag (not in this list) when I want to inspect
| something on screen or as a makeshift color picker.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| If anybody uses kwin, you can set mouse-wheel bindings for
| zooming with a keyboard modifier using xbindkeys like this:
| "qdbus6 org.kde.kglobalaccel /component/kwin
| invokeShortcut view_zoom_in" Mod4 + Super_L + b:4
| "qdbus6 org.kde.kglobalaccel /component/kwin
| invokeShortcut view_zoom_out" Mod4 + Super_L +
| b:5
|
| You can change Mod4+Super_L to whatever modifier keys you
| like.
| bzzzt wrote:
| It's 2023 and there are stable graphical operating systems
| that don't make you check 'if the GPU driver bailed out'
| every 15 minutes...
| spookie wrote:
| I don't know... Sometimes I've to pull Windows into safe
| mode and run DDU. The reasons are varied. I assume macOS
| might run into similar things, all software has bugs
| Krssst wrote:
| Do they also not include telemetry or forcefully installed
| software you never asked for but cannot remove anyway and
| will remind you of their existence ar every opportunity?
| dgfitz wrote:
| Yes.
| [deleted]
| seanw444 wrote:
| With great power comes great responsibility. If you don't
| want the responsibility, that's fine, but someone else gets
| the power.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| glxgears was/is useful if you use a proprietary graphics
| driver. Those are prone to getting broken when you update
| to a new kernel. With in-kernel drivers for most GPUs this
| is much less of a problem today. Probably still a problem
| for Nvidia owners.
| failuser wrote:
| It's more of the driver's fault, right? BTE, Windows has a
| Ctrl+Shift+Win+B shortcut to restart the graphics driver if
| it bails out.
| jcelerier wrote:
| ohhhh I didn't know this one (as I have of course the
| same problem on windows regularly on that machine but
| then I just reboot)
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Windows has a Ctrl+Shift+Win+B shortcut to restart the
| graphics driver if it bails out._
|
| The fact that Windows has a built-in shortcut to restart
| the graphics driver illustrates that graphics drivers are
| not as faultless as the parent poster believes.
| gabrielhidasy wrote:
| Last time I had to do that, it was on Windows 11 on a
| friends PC that was unexpectedly using 1024x768 on his 4k
| HDR monitor.
|
| Glad I don't have to deal with that, Arch just works
| mcguire wrote:
| Shades of my old Vic20.
| lmm wrote:
| > It's 2023 and there are stable graphical operating
| systems that don't make you check 'if the GPU driver bailed
| out' every 15 minutes...
|
| In my experience it's got nothing to do with the operating
| system and everything to do with who wrote your graphics
| card driver. (NVidia is stable everywhere, AMD is... not).
| [deleted]
| prmoustache wrote:
| Same for xkill? Who needs to kill a graphical application
| every day and what kind of distro parent commenter is using
| to need to do that in 2023?
| jcelerier wrote:
| i'm happy for you if you never have any application that
| hangs and ends as a zombie process but for me it happens
| very, very regularly (generally because of some stuff
| being on a network share or some hardware being plugged
| in an out a bit too much.. like unplugging an USB
| soundcard when it's being actively used, this one always
| causes some mess)
| h4ckerle wrote:
| Not OP, but I use xkill semi regularly (like 1-2 times a
| week) to check whether an app is running in xwayland or
| natively...
| E39M5S62 wrote:
| xeyes can check that too, without killing the
| application.
| em-bee wrote:
| right, xterm is obscure?
|
| but xmosaic should count of obscure today because now it only
| works on old and obscure websites ;-)
| fuzztester wrote:
| I used to use
|
| xterm -fn 24 &
|
| on HP-UX workstations and servers. Even on Linux maybe,
| earlier.
| II2II wrote:
| For those who are relatively new to X, it is likely very
| obscure. People seem to be using desktop environments these
| days, and desktop environments come with their own terminal
| application. Those seeking out replacement terminals would
| probably stumble across xterm, but how many would actually
| try it? It's feature list isn't exactly designed for those
| with modern sensibilities.
|
| (I was using xterm until very recently, mostly because it
| used sharp rasterized display fonts. Now that I have a
| reasonably high DPI display, it is easier to use nearly
| anything else.)
| lelanthran wrote:
| > For those who are relatively new to X, it is likely very
| obscure. People seem to be using desktop environments these
| days, and desktop environments come with their own terminal
| application. Those seeking out replacement terminals would
| probably stumble across xterm, but how many would actually
| try it?
|
| It's really very configurable. My problem with mate-
| terminal and similar is that they don't often let me set a
| cursor color independent of the foreground color.
|
| I like to code C projects in a single vim session running
| in a terminal; by having a bright green fast-blinking block
| cursor I can visually locate where my cursor is after
| reading code in a different split.
|
| So, yeah, I use xterm (or uxterm) because of this single
| feature that I value of any other feature it might be
| missing.
| em-bee wrote:
| with that argument every X11 app that isn't gnome/gtk or
| kde/qt is obscure. but then that is pretty much what the
| list shows, so maybe that's the authors definition as well.
| bitwize wrote:
| Most Linux users these days run GNOME or KDE and have never
| heard of these janky little apps linked directly against xlib.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| I wanted to test something on a "normal" system so I started
| a new Fedora 38 vm. gnome 44.2.
|
| What an incredibly obtuse, unhelpful, un-useful interface. I
| don't know about kde but definitely gnome does not get to
| charge anyone else with any words like janky.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I always thought xbiff was named after the back to the future
| character. Turns out it was named after one of the campus dogs
| instead :)
| mcguire wrote:
| Heidi Stettner's dog, at the Berkeley CSRG.
|
| (Ok, I had to look up her last name. I'm getting old.)
| pkulak wrote:
| I use XEyes all the time to find out if an app is running in
| Wayland or XWayland.
| em-bee wrote:
| how does xeyes help with that? does it fail to track the
| mouse on wayland apps? i can see that would be useful.
|
| i actually have problems with XWayland, it frequently (every
| few days), goes to a 100% CPU and locks up the screen. then i
| have to remote login and kill it, at which point i see which
| apps die, so i know what is using XWayland from that. :-)
| bcrescimanno wrote:
| > does it fail to track the mouse on wayland apps?
|
| Exactly. It will work properly if the app is using XWayland
| and fail for native Wayland.
| hollerith wrote:
| Another way to do it is the xlsclients command.
|
| Also, I can reliably tell based on the fact that the contents
| of the XWayland windows are fuzzier.
|
| I can do that because I have had lots of practice discerning
| fuzziness, because I am using a old monitor (as opposed to a
| HiDPI display) and because I have a fractional (non-integral)
| scaling factor declared in my monitors.xml file--when the
| scaling factor is set to 1.0 there is no difference in
| fuzziness as far as I can tell.
| evilotto wrote:
| _It 's a UNIX system! I know this!_
| stOneskull wrote:
| it's a bit of fun running them in wsl
| kangalioo wrote:
| In what way are these "X11 apps"? Aren't those just "GUI apps
| that support X11"? Which is not a particularly special trait,
| because it applies to every Linux compatible Desktop app?
| koprulusector wrote:
| X is the client and server for rendering pixels on to a screen,
| which is mapped to one of more monitors. It provides the most
| basic, bare bones way to draw a window to the screen, and
| that's about it.
|
| It's not even a GNU/Linux thing, X predates Linux, it's more of
| the standard system to draw a window on Unix-like systems.
|
| X11 apps are GUI apps uncontrolled by/unaware of a desktop
| environment, theme engine, or window manager. They appear in a
| minimalist, maybe even brutalist, aesthetic. You can launch a
| single X11 app from the console, and the resulting window will
| be your entire graphical display/instance, returning you to the
| console after the program terminates execution.
|
| Maybe another way to think about your question might be, think
| of X vs Wayland.
| tmalsburg2 wrote:
| You interpret X11 apps as a technical descriptor, but I think
| it's more a description of the ecosystem in which these apps
| evolved and whose culture they represent.
| kangalioo wrote:
| I see, thanks for explaining
| bitwize wrote:
| A lot of these are built against Xlib directly, or X11-only
| toolkits such as Motif. Porting them to other window systems
| would require significant rewrites.
| saint_yossarian wrote:
| Also most (all?) of these apps use xlib directly, rather than
| going through a toolkit like Gtk or Qt.
| hulitu wrote:
| There are a lot of toolkits besides GTK and QT: XT, Motif,
| Xaw(3d), xforms, xview, wxwidgets.
| jghn wrote:
| `xneko` brings back memories. My freshman year at university we
| were on X terminals where they came in a little pack of several
| stations. Each of them had X authority on the others within the
| same pack.
|
| People quickly learned they could open a billion `xneko`s on
| another person's screen to completely lock them up.
| supportengineer wrote:
| Someone did it to me with a single Xeyes window. I was in my
| dorm room by myself at the time!
| jghn wrote:
| At some point people figured out they could plaster another
| person's screen with porn via `xv`. But then someone else
| discovered that meant you could go in and Save File to the
| original user's directory. Once people realized that giving
| people write access to their directory wasn't a wise idea,
| this practice stopped.
| em-bee wrote:
| xv was the wrong tool, there are others that would have
| been able to project images without giving the receiver the
| ability to write to your directory.
|
| the most obnoxious would have been to set the background,
| because that's not easy to undo if you don't know how.
|
| when i was a student i used to hang out in the computer
| halls until late at night. being one of the last ones there
| i was often able to get use of the one sun workstation that
| had a color screen.
|
| one night the sysadmin logged remotely into the machine i
| was using and played "always look on the bright side of
| life"
| watersb wrote:
| There was a mode, included with the After Dark screen saver for
| classic macOS, that was basically an xneko port, named "Neko
| Neko".
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| Oh gee, I still have my TI-92 Plus in some drawer!
|
| So many memories, what do I do what that? So obsolete now but
| can't just throw away that piece of working hardware.
| fuzztester wrote:
| There was one called xlsfonts which would list all the available
| fonts.
|
| https://www.x.org/archive/X11R7.5/doc/man/man1/xlsfonts.1.ht...
| alangibson wrote:
| FWIW GLXGears is still in common use by those stress testing
| LinuxCNC systems
| r9550684 wrote:
| I remember spending some non-insignificant amount of time playing
| 3dpong, because that was the first time I got exposed to a
| wireframe game. I thought the formalism was delightful, it felt
| very cyberpunk. My first 3d game was probably Stunts, a racing
| game that used flat shading (there was also Abrahams tank, but I
| never got into it as much as some of the older people in my
| circle), and then there was a lot of games that used a kind of
| hybrid sprite, flat shading, texturing mapping approach, from
| wolfenstein to Daggerfall. I got 3dpong from a Slackware cd,
| which was also my first linux install, back when linux was cool
| :> I was democoding, so probably implementing phong reflection on
| a sierpinski cube which was a style at the time, and here was a
| game that established an entire 3d experience space with just a
| handful of lines.
|
| (some might ask "how the hell did you not know about Elite or
| Tempest??" before pervasive internet discovery was a non-linear
| process, I think I learned about these games in the early 2000s,
| from the internet)
| pizzapill wrote:
| Feel like Stunts is such a sleeper retro game so many played
| and nobody ever talks about. Incredible fully customizable
| levels with massive obstacles rendered in 3D. In 1990, 3 years
| before doom.
| r9550684 wrote:
| I sometimes think we collectively rewrite our past for the
| common denominator. have people always been doing that, or
| it's an internet phenomenon? like maybe you listened to Andy
| gibb or The Bee Gees in the 70s, but you retrospectively
| remember that you somehow was Black Sabbath's biggest fan,
| even though that wasn't the circles you've spent time in at
| all.
|
| I sometimes have to consciously remind myself that I haven't
| played chrono trigger until 2005, or that I clocked some
| unreasonable amount of hours playing rise of the triad, Star
| Wars dark forces and Ultima underworld, rather than the
| whatever's on the list of top 90s video games.
| pengaru wrote:
| Stunts was fun but would often send my vehicle infinitely
| skyward from bugs in the tracks having jumps... that kind of
| ruined the simulation
| pizzapill wrote:
| You got a flight simulator for free and you are
| complaining?
|
| :)
| Brendinooo wrote:
| The first item on the list (3D Pong) looks like it could have
| been the inspiration for Strong Bad's famous "your head a splode"
| game
| vzaliva wrote:
| I used to run Xroach to freak out colleagues. You move a window
| and they scramble! Tiling window manager I am using nowadays made
| it obsolette :)
| cbsmith wrote:
| I feel old.
| swayvil wrote:
| This is why easy coding is important. It opens the floodgates of
| creative production.
|
| In the fine arts we call it a plastic medium. A medium that's
| easy to edit. It's why we sculpt out of clay instead of beercans.
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| I don't know if I'm missing your point, you're overly
| nostalgic, or you just never had to write a substantial X
| Window app back when most of these apps were developed, but
| nothing about that development environment was easy.
|
| It was full of incredibly verbose, buggy API calls with a bunch
| of platform-specific bugs and _everything_ was manual.
| [deleted]
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| I was working on a small bash notification client, and I wanted
| some simple universal apps to use in the examples for actions
| (run a command when a notification, or a button on it, is
| clicked) and was shocked to discover that xterm is no longer a
| safe assumption.
| darkwater wrote:
| TIL about XLennart, which it's somehow funny but I still think is
| undeserved
|
| On the other hand I knew XBill for decades and that was totally
| deserved.
| prosody wrote:
| It's a little bit interesting to me that XBill has the
| eponymous figure replacing a diverse ecosystem of OSes, not
| just Linuxen, with his own. That probably is a sign of the
| times, when that diversity existed in fact and you might be
| playing that game on an HP-UX or another prediluvian machine.
| Maybe not though, maybe the waters were already rising. You
| might even imagine with some fairness an XTorvalds in which you
| vainly try to save the BSDs and proprietary Unixen from a Linux
| monoculture. It makes it easier for me to charitably accept how
| some systemd detractors describe themselves as for init
| diversity, even if non-systemd and non-sysvinit inits on Linux
| seem like a curiosity, rather than assuming that they are just
| contrarian. It is part of a tradition of valuing a variety of
| ideas and implementations of ideas, even when it becomes
| quixotic.
| greggh wrote:
| As strongly as anyone can disagree with something, I disagree
| with the "undeserved" part of this.
| maxmalkav wrote:
| I did not find the XLennart very graceful neither.
|
| I admit I am also biased about the original XBill one.
| mzd348 wrote:
| I also remember a lot of these from the 90s. But I didn't see
| xphoon, that was a pretty cool one to display a (fairly) detailed
| picture of the current phase of the moon in your root
| window/desktop.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Wow. I know most of those (and used a CDE desktop environment, so
| the window decorations really take me back).
|
| Kind of weird to realise so much time has past.
| eager_noob wrote:
| GNUJump doesn't really belong in a list that suggests installing
| packages with pkg, but that's the one this brings to the mind.
| LispSporks22 wrote:
| I never got a chance to write UIs using Motif. Was it pleasant to
| work with?
| coliveira wrote:
| It is similar to write win32 apps. Of course the C compilers
| were way better than MS, but on the other hand no IDE with
| autocompletion was available. Similar to the MS world, people
| did anything to avoid writing C apps, so Tcl/TK was born.
| ceving wrote:
| Xterm obscure? I use it all the day.
| dumdumchan wrote:
| Did anyone ever create a video player titled xvideo?
| helb wrote:
| not a player, but there was (is?) xvideo extension:
| https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.5/doc/man/man3/Xv.3.html
|
| i remember it as an mplayer output option mplayer -vo xv [file]
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