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A week or two ago we all sat around and tried to think up a name for the client; we can't call it Mosaic, because that's the name of the company [or was at the time -Erbo]. The marketroids had all kinds of silly suggestions like Cyber this and Power that and blah-blah Ware. Then someone said something about crushing NCSA Mosaic, and I blurted out ``Mozilla!'' Everyone seemed to like that, so I think that might end up being the official name of the browser.

Then, of course, when Netscape decided to go open-source, he went and registered mozilla.org to house the new project.

A week or two ago we all sat around and tried to think up a name for the client; we can't call it Mosaic, because that's the name of the company [or was at the time -Erbo]. The marketroids had all kinds of silly suggestions like Cyber this and Power that and blah-blah Ware. Then someone said something about crushing NCSA Mosaic, and I blurted out ``Mozilla!'' Everyone seemed to like that, so I think that might end up being the official name of the browser.

Then, of course, when Netscape decided to go open-source, he went and registered mozilla.org to house the new project.

The Trarnasaurs Rex-ish character related to the netscape browser is "mozilla". Its the name of the browser, and its the name of the character as well.

"Mozilla" was proposed as the name of the (browser) by JWZ sometime before Sunday, 5 August 1994 according to his diary at jwz.org..

He definitely had capital as he had been with Netscape since the very early days.

The ultimate list is at: http://www.jwz.org/doc/java.html. It's the ultimate reference. Much better than the O'Reilly article IMHO.

10. Delete all deprecated methods, fields, classes, and interfaces.

9. Fix incorrect naming conventions.

8. Eliminate primitive data types.

7. Extend chars to four bytes.

6. Fix threads.

5. Convert file formats to XML.

4. Ditch the AWT.

3. Rationalize the collections.

2. Redesign I/O.

1. Redesign class loading from scratch, this time with human interface factors in mind.

There is a problem with C/C++, and this isn't the solution. THIS is the solution.

I had a professor which demonstrated the problem of this in a simple example. Suppose you are designing a robot which can climb and descend stairs. It must monitor sensors and adjust angles of its joints appropriately to go down (quite difficult, really). Now suppose the GC runs halfway through the middle of a step. All processing stops, gravity takes over, robot falls down.

Well, your professor was a very ignorant man who understands little or nothing about modern garbage collection techniques. Just because a system uses GC does not mean it can't make guarentees about latency.

I'm not claiming that Sun's implementation has a good, low-latency GC (it's been a while since I've used Java, so I don't know what they're up to these days) but I do know that the Java specification does not say much about such things. Which is as it should be: the desired GC behavior depends heavily on the platform on which the code is running.

Garbage collection gets a bad reputation due to the seemingly inexhaustible supply of crappy implementations out there in the world (e.g., Perl.)

Hence the reason java puts a clause in its license about no use in safety-critical applications.

Oh come on, they put that in because the company is run by lawyers and they wanted to cover their asses. That license clause doesn't mean "you can't use Java in a critical application", it just means "if you do, you can't blame us."

"Warning: coffee may be hot!"

Ada is especially safe. It is, in fact, one of the VERY few safety critical environments you will find. It's very simple- A safety critical program must never exit and give up control functionality entirely, no matter what happens. There are many things that you can do with C/C++/Java that will cause a crash unrecoverable by the system.

Ada is designed to inherantly prevent a programmer who follows the appropriate standards from writing a program that can just crash and exit. As long as every possible exception has a handler, an Ada program can be written that will not crash.

In what way is Ada better than Java in this respect? I only know a little about Ada, so this is a serious question. My understanding is that Ada and Java have very similar safety goals (especially with respect to exceptions) so I'm curious about what you think Ada gets right and Java gets wrong.

It should be the case that the only way for a Java program to "crash" is if there is a bug in the runtime library or hardware interface: the same kinds of problems can of course affect Ada.

(I've got a lot of problems with Java, mind you, but I'd never say it was "too lenient"...)

I can't figure out why *anyone* still uses CBR except the shoutcast/icecast people, who need a constant bitrate for streaming.

Well, that's exactly why -- I ripped all of my CDs, and I only listen to the MP3 versions, but so that I can listen to my home CDs at work, without having to carry hard drives around with me, I listen to them via icecast. That would be impossible had I ripped them in VBR, which is why I didn't.

I suspect a lot of others had to make the same decision.

Now if only they could write some decent drivers for once in their lives.

The problem with this approach (which Microsoft, Apple, etc. recognized back in the '80s but we still haven't caught up with) is the notion that text is not the only thing that needs to be cut, copied and pasted among and across applications.

Thus, there is inherently a different semantic involved when transferring objects other than text, because X doesn't know how to handle those. X knows nothing of moving a picture between a charting application and a word processor, for instance. Nor should it.

This is not true.

See this article by Jamie Zawinsky: http://www.jwz.org/doc/x-cut-and-paste.html

The interesting part:

One of the really cool, yet rarely used, features of the selection mechanism is that it can negotiate what data formats to use. It's not just about text. When one application asks another for the selection, part of their communication involves the requester asking the owner for the list of types in which they are capable of delivering the selection data; then the requester picks the format they like best, and asks for it that way.

As a simple example, suppose there is a program displaying text in multiple fonts. When pasting that into a text-only program, you'd want to paste only the text. But when pasting that into a word processor, you'd want to keep the font information: if both applications spoke HTML, they could use that as the intermediate format by which they transferred the data.

More complex things are possible, too: for example, when an image is selected on a web page, the web page displayer could offer to serve that up as raw image bits; or as JPEG data; or as the original URL of the image. When trying to copy and paste an image into a text editor that can't do images, the text editor might decide that the next best thing would be to paste the filename of the image, or the URL.

The content negotiation mechansim is very powerful, and I wish more applications would take advantage of it.

For examples of how to use it, see the files select.el and/or x-select.el from any XEmacs distribution. There are some utility functions in there that will let you experiment with content negotiation with other apps, see what types the apps are capable of converting to, etc. For example:

(x-get-selection-internal 'PRIMARY 'TARGETS)
==> [ TARGETS TIMESTAMP TEXT STRING LENGTH FILE_NAME OWNER_OS HOST_NAME USER CLASS NAME CLIENT_WINDOW PROCESS COMPOUND_TEXT]

(x-get-selection-internal 'PRIMARY 'FILE_NAME)
==> "http://www.jwz.org/doc/x-cut-and-paste.html"

I thought Ctrl-Z/X/C/V/P/F was already a given? Are these shortcuts different in Linux?

Linux is a kernel. The "shortcuts" you refer to are found in the desktop environment, which is built on top of the XFree86 windowing system... The KDE desktop uses the shortcuts you mentioned by default. Gnome uses different key bindings by default. However, they are all globally configurable, so you get what you want. But these desktops are not Linux; these desktops are available for, and used by, various different UNIX systems.

If it is, it's just ridiculous, and is the reason why Linux doesn't make a good desktop system.

I for one dislike having to use ctrl-c/ctrl-v in Windows; cut and paste with a three button mouse (or the equivalent, such as a scroll wheel) is much quicker and intuitive after you become accustomed to it. (This is called "primary selection" as opposed to "clipboard selection" - X11 has both. Read this for more info)

The point that some now see the primary issue as how to gain desktop market share at Microsoft's expense is irrelevant. It is not ridiculous, just different. And configurable.

As far as I'm concerned some things in Linux are far too complicated, even for me. That makes is a powerful OS, but doesn't really help with ease of use.

If it is too difficult for you to learn, then don't use it. How this is different from Microsoft, I don't know. If it is a question of changing from a known to an unknown for an office drone, everything is difficult. And how does being complicated make something powerful? A 2002 Ford Focus is considerably more complicated than a '69 Mustang 428 Cobra Jet R. The GNU/Linux system is actually elegantly simple in comparison with the various MS OSes.

A good example is the standard text editor that ships with Unix, VI. Seriously, this is a powerful tool, but it's counter-intuitive in too many ways. E-macs is equally complicated. There needs to be a simple edit tools, like DOS-edit. Nice and easy to use.

Have ever really tried to learn to use a Linux distribution? If you want a very simple editor, there are dozens of options. GNOME and KDE each have their own simple editors that come with the system. This you should know if you feel competent to criticize.

Granted, vi and emacs require an effort to learn, but the reward is rich indeed. I use Vim (a supercharged, vi based editor with a GUI mode) for all my programming, and could not live without it. The choice between the two is largely a matter of religion (who got to you first) in my view. vi got to me first.

XFree86 for Win32 in general isn't terribly stable yet, but it works pretty good. It only runs in a window, so it doesn't really integrate seemlessly with the Windows GUI the way eXceed in passive mode does (where each client window can pop up separately using your Windows "window manager").

We have eXceed 3D (GLX), but I haven't gotten it to work well. It is dirt slow running the GL Xscreensaver hacks, but I probably need to recompile using the eXceed libs if I can figure out how to do that... I haven't had a lot of luck running GLX apps over the network either, probably because most of my GL apps are statically linked or something :/ .

My favourite solution for accessing UNIX desktops from a PC remains VNC, though.

Cygwin is just about mature enough to make Win32 a viable *NIX platform. The biggest thing missing is just decent file access (it's currently very, very slow, because they have to open every file in a directory just to get check for hidden UNIX-style attributes I guess.) Once this is handled better, as well as maybe some security issues, you'll pretty much have a decent POSIX environment.

Let's hope Wine does a good job catching up from the other end! ;)

uh-oh. you know, if jwz was annoyed by all the keyboards out there when he wrote xkeycaps a few years of people messing with this and submitting their own keyboards should really piss him off.

uh-oh. you know, if jwz was annoyed by all the keyboards out there when he wrote xkeycaps a few years of people messing with this and submitting their own keyboards should really piss him off.

uh-oh. you know, if jwz was annoyed by all the keyboards out there when he wrote xkeycaps a few years of people messing with this and submitting their own keyboards should really piss him off.

Dude you are a troll. If you weren't you'd be stupid because you're citing a 1998 rant from a guy that now FUCKING uses linux on his laptop and his PC. Unless you think he thinks his time means nothing perhaps you better click here and get your ass set straight.

Thanks for trying and as i said before, Nice troll.

Just like jwz said about Linux, its free only if your time is worth nothing.

I used to download a lot of songs(I never could bring myself to download a whole album, something about that just didn't seem right). Lately I've downloaded a lot less - and if I do its purely to sample the music.

There are several very good reasons I gave up downloading MP3.

Finding a song that is encoded at a high-quality rate and that is not purposely screwed up is getting harder to do. Someone out there is purposely seeding P2P networks with "songs" that aren't the real thing, contain 30 second loops played repeatedly, or that have large chunks of blank space.

The value of the time I would spend downloading a whole album of high-quality MP3 and burning it to CD would pay for a new CD a few times over.

I'm one of those people who can tell the difference between CD audio and MP3. I have a portable MP3 player, but generally I listen to CD's.

Also, I've been a musician for many years and have long supported my favorite musicians and groups by buying their products and going to see their shows. You are mistaken when you say famous musicians will earn less - if anything broader distribution and "airplay" will make them earn more. Also, in reply to those who think bands earn money by playing live - very few of them do. Most bands tour to sell more CD's.

There's nothing wrong with downloading something to try it out or to have technology to make backup copies of your media and to convert it into different forms. But to say its free is just plain wrong. If you listen to the same MP3s over and over again and you never support the band, and its against the bands wishes for you to do so - you're a thief, plain and simple. What gives you the right to take someone's blood sweat and tears and call it free? Only the right you gave yourself by grabbing without considering the wishes of the creator.

"Linux is only free if your time has no value." JWZ

when i read your post, i immediately thought of a Jamie Zawinski article that i read a few weeks ago:

http://www.jwz.org/doc/mailsum.html

he talks about this very thing. quite interesting if you ask me.

Probably noone will ever see this since I'm posting AC but anyway...

jwz has quite a case for mail summary files that were used in pre-NS4 mailreaders. See http://www.jwz.org/doc/mailsum.html

The basic idea is to use the old (relatively space efficient, compatible with everything) mbox format but also keep a "summary file" to allow quick threading/seeking/etc within the file. Actually quite workable. Worth a read if you're going off and designing (what you think will be) a grand new mail storage scheme. Don't repeat the same mistakes netscape made with NS4!

/. punchingbag jwz has some strong opinions about using databases (etc.) for mail storage. I tend to agree: everything can read from and write to files, there no versioning issues, they can be easily transported among different operating and file systems, they can be backed up easily. But it's another wheel to reinvent, so everyone hop to it at once and then lose interest in two or three weeks!

/. punchingbag jwz has some strong opinions about using databases (etc.) for mail storage. I tend to agree: everything can read from and write to files, there no versioning issues, they can be easily transported among different operating and file systems, they can be backed up easily. But it's another wheel to reinvent, so everyone hop to it at once and then lose interest in two or three weeks!

Actually it's still out there. He took this look before The Matrix i believe.

Please read this entire message before giving any consideration to modding it down. It is not intended as a flame.

Is it really appropriate that Mozilla be celebrated at the DNA Lounge?

For those of you not aware, the DNA Lounge is owned by Jamie Zawinski (aka JWZ), a former Netscape employee. When things weren't going his way, JWZ made a very high-profile exit from Netscape Communications and from the Mozilla project. He was very rude about it; he had very harsh words about Netscape's newer employees, he pushed all of the same FUD arguments that MS mouthpieces such as ZDnet tend to do, and he basically declared the project a failure.

JWZ's high-profile registration was a big setback for Mozilla, because it lowered morale inside the team and served as a huge negative PR piece.

Now that Mozilla has successfully reached its 1.0 release, they're going to celebrate by paying JWZ for booze and entertainment? Is this the way to reward the person who did more to hurt the Mozilla project than any other single person in the industry?

Perhaps I'm just being curmudgeonly about this, but I really don't think it's appropriate. Mozilla succeeded despite JWZ.

If you do not have RSI - if you use computers long enough without listening to what I and others here say, you *will* get it. I mean, it's like trying to life 500 pounds and get a hernia, or smoking 2 packs a day until you get lung cancer. Just because it takes a few years to get you doesn't mean it eventually will. If you're young, be smart and pay attention so your hands don't get crippled. You don't have to go overboard, there's some simple things you can do to help you out. And if you feel pain - DON'T IGNORE IT, do something about it.

Some people have posted good things here. The web page that helped me out was the RSI web page by Netscape developer guru Jamie Zawinski.

As people have said, it's all about repetition. If you do the same thing over and over and over again (e.g. click a mouse, type), eventually your hands will slowly start getting screwed up and you will start feeling pain whenever you mouse click, or type, or whatever. Ask programmers you know who are over the age of 25, I guarantee 50% of them either have RSI or say they type in a manner that avoids RSI.

Here are some things I do to help:
I use a different mouse at home and work. At work it is the basic Microsoft mouse. At home it is a trackball-type mouse with a big ball. I also switch hands with both mice, I go half an hour with the left hand, then half an hour with the right hand. This way, both hands get half an hour of use and half an hour of rest. This helps me more than anything.
Also, continually typing for hours on end is no good. Zawinski takes a 5 minute break every 40 minutes, or when feeling pain, every 20 minutes. Go to the bathroom, get some water, get a Snapple. Or stop typing and read some manual or papers or something. Do some hand-stretching exercises.
Also, having a good ergonomic keyboard, mouse and chair, and sitting and typing at them properly help. And if you feel real pain, go more overboard on this stuff and see a doctor. And sue the hell out of everyone in sight!

Speaking to that last topic, Bush and his cabinet guys say RSI is bullshit and people like me and thousands of others who feel pain in our hands are imagining this. Hmm, that wouldn't be because the ITAA (funded by Microsoft, IBM, Intel and so forth) is handing him millions of dollars, would it be? Also, this is is a professional concern, not a partisan political one - both Democrats and Republicans have been taking ITAA money. Although with professional issues, we're more likely to get initial help on RSI from Democrats, and we're more likely to get initial help on H1-Bs from Republicans (like Rep. Tancredo). Organizations like the Programmers Guild fight for programmers and administrators on issues such as this. So think about checking up on them, and maybe even signing up, or at least getting involved.

Another good thing to do is to use some program like xrwits. It's a keyboard timer that tells you to take a break every (whatever you set it to) minutes. You can delay the break if you are in the middle of something, but it gets progressively more annoying. Of course it's entirely voluntary and you can kill it easily, but if you use it well it helps. I originally saw this recommended here.

Something that helped me personally was taking a yoga class - and probably any system of regular stretching that involves the wrists will have the same effect. Whatever gripes one may have about the pseudo-mysticism of things like yoga, it made a really noticable difference in the amount of pain I felt in everyday typing that semester (ah if only I could work up the self discipline to keep doing it regularly).

Also, you may be surprised; depth perception in humans is an interesting field of study. Less of it comes from your eyes then you may think; most of it comes from image processing. Your binocular vision has effectively no discrimination past six feet or something like that; I'd have to look the exact number up but it's shorter then most people would think.

I probably ought to clarify that. In this domain the computer can indeed get a good depth perception shot if it wants. My point is that even humans make less use of this data then you might think, even at close range. Giving it to a computer adds new problems (handling that data), which may or may not be helpful anytime soon.

"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ``I know, I'll use regular expressions.'' Now they have two problems." - jwz. It's similar to this, I think. Merely throwing more data at a vision problem often adds to the problem list more then it takes away, at our present state of knowlege.

(Of course all of this is moot anyhow, because the math says even a human being isn't accurate enough to function as a facial recognition system anyhow. Computers aren't going to solve the problem. Nothing ever will. The math says it's impossible.)

I can only blame the fact that I was posting to slashdot late at night, and also not in the enivronment of an editor, because I would really format functions like this (at least in C++):

int
function_name(int x, int y)
{
int* z;
printf("hello\n");
return 99;
}

Briefly, the important points are this:

• The return type has a newline after it, so the function name is rammed up against the left side. This way, the regexp "^function_name" will only appear one place in all of the code, at the function definition. Now you can type "egrep ^function_name *.C" and get what you were looking for.
• The braces are rammed up against the left wall. In vi (which I don't use often) you can easily jump to such braces (I belive "[[" and "]]", though I could be wrong), making function navigation easier.
• Four spaces for indent. Yeah, Gnu uses two and Linux uses eight (or is it a tab?); however, in my opinion, two isn't visually distinctive enough, and eight is excessive and wastes screen space. I know the Gnu people and the Linux people can both justify their decision, but to me, four just looks better. (If it's not clear to you why non-power-of-two indents are aesthetically unappealing, you should reconsider being a programmer.)
• Spaces for indent, never tabs. See JWZ's document "Tabs vs. Spaces" to see why. He also explains how to set up emacs and vi to do the right thing for indent.
• Eighty columns, unless you really can't fit it in. It's much easier to print code formatted to eighty. If you never print code, then it's much easier to merge code side-by-side if it's formatted to eighty. In this day and age of reallyLengthyVariableNamesAndAPIS, it can be tough, so if you have to break this rule in rare cases, it's ok, but only if you tried your hardest.

I've been programming in Java a lot recently, though, where all your functions are in a class scope and therefore the "ram it up against the left" set of tricks doesn't really work. In this case, I tend to format like my original example. Mostly, I think, just to save vertical space.

This isn't exactly in line with what you are doing, but it's similar enough that you may get some good ideas from it. JWZ, of Netscape fame, has been hard at work at a night club called DNA Lounge. It includes kiosks for internet access based on Linux terminal servers, as well as a few other ideas. If you go to the backstage area of the site, you'll find instructions on how to do many of the things he's done.

When I was writing it, I thought about putting money in that list as well, but thought better of it.

My thinking was that no reasonable amount of money would make it worthwhile. If someone were to offer me a completely unreasonable amount (on the high end, of course) to program something, I could probably find a way to enjoy it...maybe write up a little app that plays a cash register sound ever 100 key presses, or something along those lines.

JWZ did something like this (http://www.jwz.org/hacks/marginal.html...the worth perl script) when he was working at Nestcape.

5. Remove unnecessary links. We don't need to link to CNN's home page every time we write the letters "CNN." Just link to the article or issue at hand.

I would beg to differ on this one. It is only polite to link to the site to which you are refering. It's kind of the same as in written works, it is considered appropriate to provide full citations when referencing other's work. Plus that is the nature of the web. The more highly interconnected it is the better

Second, from a software engineering point of view, speed is hardly irrelevant either. One of the main problems in software engineering is that the communication overhead in a programming team is O(N^2) where N is the team size. That means that people who work twice as quickly form teams that are more than twice as effective.

Your comment about comments is well taken. Comments explaining the rationales of code are very important for maintainablity.

Code under a deadline doesn't neccessarly get less design. After all, good design can help speed coding, provided the design itself is produced quickly. Besides, Worse is Better and refactoring is your friend.

So, provided grades refect readiblity and commenting, I think time pressures are a good thing in an educational setting--- and in a commercial setting too, provided they don't smother refactoring.

-Tupper

I always liked jwz's DadaDodo

While it doens't paint pretty pictures, it shows some interesting results when pointed at a month of e-mail composed mostly by me. Given much more than a month or from too many people word use tends to normalize and the results seem very random.

An individual can do anything they like such that it doesn't infringe on anyone elses rights.

The devil's in the details. Chiefly, defining 'infringe' and 'rights'.

Reminds me of JWZ's " Peace and Justice for Everyone" bit. I'd be really surprised if people like Hillary Rosen and Co. really wake up every morning thinking "man, I'm going to infringe me some rights today". I'll bet she genuinely believes she's doing some good.

With that said: she isn't, and I agree with you.

There's still a lot more potential manpower in OSS. As has been proven in several big OSS projects, like Mozilla for one, just because there are tens of thousands of people who can work on a poject, it doesn't mean there will be tens of thousands of people who do work on a project.

resignation and postmortem.

The truth is that, by virtue of the fact that the contributors to the Mozilla project included about a hundred full-time Netscape developers, and about thirty part-time outsiders, the project still belonged wholly to Netscape -- because only those who write the code truly control the project.

He did, the first modern implementation on Unix that became the base of what is known as Emacs in the modern era.

Here's a timeline: (Jamie Zawinski) Timeline

Enjoy !

Unfortunately, CMatrix currently and will probably always need a terminal to run in, because it uses ncurses. What many people seem to like doing is running it in a transparent terminal the size of the root window that is lowered/always on bottom. More simply, you could use xmatrix from jwz's Xscreensaver
. It depends on which program you prefer and how much hassle you want to deal with.

See here for more info.

TWW

dont' ask me if internet radio can survive, read a rant by JWZ.

Pics from the con are also available on the club's website.

Old link - New link

evilpiper said "Most new commericals show people standing in front of multiple waving flags.". What would you call that if not blatant abuse of a country's symbol by idiots trying to sell Gap T-shirts or God knows what else.

Somewhat related, I'm worried about how Bush is going to fuck up the world thinking he's right, let's see how many more hate-the-US-extrimists his current moronic policies will bring, damn, even I am starting to dislike him (there goes any chance of me getting a Visa to visit the US).

Also, wasn't it comforting to hear about how "We killed 400 Al Queda's in one day!", imagine the newscaster bringing the news "400 US soldiers were killed today.". As much as we believe we (the US, the western ("civilized") world) we are right, and that "God is with us."(TM), so do bin Laden and friends believe that they are right, and that "Allah is with us.".

This is one of the main reasons people put email servers offshore now, even if they're operating onshore. This got started with HavenCo's gaming clients, but we now have general-purpose mail server customers who just want to company with their existing onshore document retention policies without the risk of someone subpoenaing their mail server and then trying to recover the disk.

I'm unclear about this. If they get a subpoena, it could be worded such that it's the mail they're interested in, not the physical storage device. In JWZ's account of the subpoena'ing of Really Bad Attitude, they didn't seize any of Netscape's servers, they required Netscape employees to print the whole thing out. If a court orders the company to deliver copies of their email, and they refuse, they're in contempt of court which is an offence in and of itself. And if HavenCo assist them, while it may be perfectly legal under Sealand's judicial system (assuming you have a formal set of laws there), don't forget you are surrounded on all sides by the EU who aren't above applying their own laws outside their jurisdiction. Witness pressure from the EU and US on offshore tax havens.

What if they take out an injunction against your upstream bandwidth provider(s)? What if they send Customs and Excise agents to raid you, as the UK has done to vessels at sea suspected of smuggling? (Backed by a Navy frigate and detachment of Marines, usually). What if you personally are arrested as soon as you enter an EU country?

I'm not saying that it's impossible to provide such a service, but that it's becoming increasingly difficult.

Jamie Zawinski has a rather unpleasant story about this on his site:

http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/rbarip.html

A very good example of how essentially harmless email can be seriously misinterpreted.

If you don't have Java installed, but you do have Xscreensaver installed, you can just run the `ccurve' hack. It looks quite similar to these Kock curves.

If you don't have Java installed, but you do have Xscreensaver installed, you can just run the `ccurve' hack. It looks quite similar to these Kock curves.

from design, by Jamie Zawinski.

StrawberryFrog asked:

Why is this so hard?

The main reason why you run into multiple incompatible mechanisms in software like Emacs is that the software started as a TTY application, and only gained an X interface later (and in the case of Emacs in particular, the fact that it still works independent of X if X isn't available).

I can to Ctrl-k ctrl-y to cut and paste in Xemacs, but it doesn't work across different xemacs windows.

It sounds to me as though you are starting multiple independent instances of Xemacs to edit multiple files - I don't know Xemacs, but speaking as a GNU Emacs user, I think that you will find that running a single Emacs process and opening multiple "frames" to edit multiple buffers is the correct way to go.

It isn't quite the GUI-less daemon that you describe, but the xclipboard utility might be of interest.

Jamie Zawinski's notes on how Selections, Cut Buffers, and Kill Rings are supposed to work on X might also be interesting to you.