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Who Needs XFree86?
An anonymous reader writes "With this review Linux and Main says it is kicking off a project to put together a Linux machine that operates entirely in the console, including applications, without the user ever having to enter anything at a command prompt. The review is of Twin, the very cool windowing environment for the console. Applications will be added over time, and readers are invited to nominate their favorite little-known console applications."
Linux machine that operates entirely in the console, including applications, without the user ever having to enter anything at a command prompt
Sounds like Windows NT/XP/ to me.
OMG, there will be nothing stopping normal people using Linux if this comes true...
Not confused enough? http://translate.google.com/translate?u=www.slashdot.jp&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=ja&tl=en
In my experience, firing up a windowing system
:-)
tends to reduce productivity. A simple text
based console app allows you to focus w/o
disractions.
In years past, I knew of someone who used
emacs as his login shell
---eludom
it reminds me of the early 286 days just before GEOS game around wayyyy before windows... norton commander looked very much like that (without the adding of applications)
Me? I think X is fine... If I can scale it down to fit on a floppy WITH my kernel and ramfs filesystem (tinyx) then it's perfect for me.
Does it support AA and alpha chanell? .-)
This is probably one of the coolest things I have seen in a long time. The possibilities are endless.
If you have an older box, you can make it a very serviceable desktop. My only question is, does anyone have any information on the kind of resources it requires?
I don't know what's more frightening, that he did or that you can.
operates entirely in the console,
that'll keep 'em from using it, I bet
Reminds me of the old Windows 1.0 days... Looked just like that, except not as advanced. This looks pretty cool/useful,if you're going to be using console. Personally, console always holds a special place in my heart. =D
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
Why not directly boot up Emacs? .-)
.. with aalib. ;)
1. I dont need a windowsystem on a server, console (commandline) works fine.
2. If I am going to use the box as a workstation, why do I want to use something ugly that makes my eyes bleed?
I can't find a valid use for this sort of system. Can anyone?
- To understand recursion, we must first understand recursion -
Count the flashbacks to Turbovision!
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
I need X because administration of Solaris machines all but requires it. If you want to use any of the tools that Sun provides to make life easier (not knocking Sun, they do make life easier), then you need a machine running X.
The only thing he found wanting in emacs was a good text editor :)
...this idea is so old.. I can't remember.. The site already exists since 2001...
And I liked that little penguin logo at bootup, Now im constrained to 80x25x16 forever.
In my day, I also programmed an app similar to Twin for DOS on my old comp. It was a pseudo-graphical app I used to login, launch programs, etc. it was basically my hub from which I did other things. Even had a screensaver (it was basically the date and time wandering accross the screen). Then I got a 286 with Windows 3.1 and forgot all about it (though I still used a different version of it whenever I got back to DOS, or during startup).
I basically forgot all about it when I got a Pentium with Win95 and Slack.
Dude, portability. As Zawinski put it, writing as an SGI user;
"Of course, all of the software I write runs on Linux; that's the beauty of standards, and of cross-platform code. I don't have to run your OS, and you don't have to run mine, and we can use the same applications anyway!"
XFree86 is conservative & lazy with regard to new features; as long as it implements the X protocol, who cares?
These two projects are trying to develop "real" alternatives to X.
Fresco is dead, but Directfb already has full gnome support, X emulation, mplayer support, alpha blending, and hardware accelleration and because it uses the same technology as the penguin logo on bootup, its fast!. This is a REAL alternative to X, and I hope you give it more support.
Directfb homepage
Last time I looked at it, TWIN needed an X server or a pure Linux console - as in literally sitting in front of a machine running Linux on the keyboard. Telnetting or SSHing in wouldn't work.
Obviously, TWIN is so much faster than X because X can work over a network, and TWIN can't. How many people use network transparency anyway? Down with X!
Hint: this was a joke
The one of the ways for visually impaired people to use computers is via "braille screens", which in themselves struggle to render graphical displays.
This work will have the important consequence that visually impaired people will be able to do more than they currently can, the collection will make it much simpler to select the applications available. Great work which will make the world a better place.
Obligatory: (also)
:)
So did he end up using Vi?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Anybody who works with graphics.
M-X viper
just "emerge twin".
and can be used as server for remote clients in the same style as X11
Does this mean it is actually an X server? Will it display any X application (ie netscape etc) in text mode? When he says the same 'style' does he mean it is compatible with the X11 protocol, or just similar?
I.O.U One Sig.
It reminds me of Visual Basic for DOS. VB-DOS was around at the same time as VB1.
Let's assume that you are right. But if a simple text based console can improve productivity, then what can a GUI (that means one background image and 12 Xterms) do to your productivity?
Well, the other side of the medal is that in our daily work we are usually forced to do more than one thing at the same time. And for that I really prefer to have some virtual terminals on my graphical desktop, so I can use the power of the text console and multiply that power by using it on several tasks simultaneously.
back when most people were computing on vt100s, there were a number of toolkits like that. vt100s even have built in support for text windows.
Bitchx, screen, links, ntaim, and vim.
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
-Kevin
not trying to bash here, but this kind of seems like a waste. this guy obviously has some good coding skills so there has to be something more useful he could create other than an app that looks like DOS. maybe i'm a jerk, but this doesn't look like it is advancing linux very much.
windows 1.0 screenshots
(18 gentoo user, 1 week rh user, 1 day mdk user, 2 week debian user)
Although I have misgivings about unused potetial of GUIs my best hope has always been with the command line, because learning to type is not that hard for many people and your instructions are coming from your head rather than a response to what must first be onscreen. My hope is this: that a windows interfacing program be written which accepts a well thought out set of console commands which directly manipulate and switch between the graphical windows on screen. Bang-like commands which move and arrange windows (get to know your coordinate space ;), open dialogs or pre specify what to put in them, search for buttons via their text and are of course scriptable. The impetus is of course to translate your wishes in thoughtform into screen movement.
The closest thing we seem to have are key chords and the 'tab' key.
Nothing would please me more but to see windows transforming around me through the latency of my typing movements.
I know there have been times where I would have thought multiple windows running on my server in the same terminal screen would have been much more convenient that having multiple ssh's open. With this, It looks like I could ssh in and run this over the connection allowing me to perform tasks.
Tis better to be silent and thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt --Abraham Lincoln
MS is launching a strategic project to allow fully text based operation of their famous desktop environment.
An MS spokesman commented: We knew very well but came to realize only too late that the command line interface is the mother of human/computer interface. Much like MS-Dos is the mother of mainframe computers.
The following is a sample of fully text based operation commands (TM) that have leaked from the MS laboratories:
- drag-mouse-imps2-to-point [X, Y] # Defaults to middle of "Start" button
- click-mouse-imps2
- click-click-mouse-imps2
- control-alt-delete [USER-NAME/PASSWORD] # Defaults to administrator's credentials
- start-application [APPLICATION_NAME] # Defaults to IE
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Are you kidding? There's a great editor for EMACS!
"In years past, I knew of someone who used :-)"
emacs as his login shell
Was his name RMS by any chance?
Beep beep.
If you want to go lisp machinish but don't want to work totally from within emacs, check this out:
Probably a sure way to keep anyone from hacking on your system too - they won't be able to figure out how to do much of anything, if my CS classes are any indication.
http://clisp.sourceforge.net/clash.html
this not a troll I swear /. about M$ Longhorn XP or whatever its called, it was beautiful and a user interface is not only eye candy we have that already just look at the tons of themes but also concept like responsivness which X lacks with its big FAT slow ass
The good news is that people are finally understanding that X sucks, X is ugly, slow, stupid, a big pile of hacks and rustry code.
I think X is one of the reasons that Linux is not catching up on the desktop, why have built-in network transparency when you can still have a remote desktop by other cleaner ways, no matter how much effort is spent on fixing X it will for ever suck
the bad news is that this distro is a step back to the good ole 80s the desktop is becoming more graphical, loaded with eye candy,a day ago a story was posted on
for Linux to do some serious desktop stuff it should lose X as soon as possible.
Now, that's just sick.
If I can't use it to look at pr0n, I ain't interested.
You think I can pick up a copy on LimeWire or Kazaa?
Man, finding this old stuff is harder than getting Dixie Chix songs from the middle 90s.
I use XFree86 just as a way of having mutliple consoles in a way I like to work. Yeah I could use screen if I wanted. However what about if I want to browse a web page such as my online photo gallery? Also taking performance of any moderm graphics card surely XFree is fast enough in 2D mode
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Personally I'm comfortable in both, but if it's a choice between arsing aroung for hours trying to set up a network, reading the nitpicky details of some config file and switches, or just using the Redhat GUI tool to do it, I know which one I would pick.
Your ignorance astounds and impresses me. You sir are a true viewer of the lowest common denominator interpretation. Rock on in your simplistic universe, and keeeeeeeep posting!
My Commodore 64 had a better looking UI than that! Plus, who wants to look at ascii porn?
Currently, I have an old laptop that I have been using for java development no less. I don't have X installed... just vim, j2sdk, and ant. Does everything I want. I have found that I am more productive. I tend to be one of those who tinkers with settings, etc, and becomes distracted. Not the case while developing in console mode. It may not be pretty, but I am productive. Also, being that the laptop is an IBM thinkpad with one of those wretched pointing devices in the center of the keyboard, it is defintely better than trying to use any windowed environment with that horrible mouse pointer beast.
You will never "find" time for anything. You must "make" it.
It's not up to X to provide the things you talk about. It's up to the window manager and desktop environment to do that. All X needs to do is draw what it's told to draw.
Now that that has been cleared up, there probably is room for current desktops to improve, although a well themed Gnome2 looks mighty fine to me.
I move around a lot, and use SSH to log into my machine at home to continue working where I left off. The apps I use:
;-) Supports Ogg Vorbis and MP3
vi - IMO _the_ example of bad interface design, but it's fast once you know how to use it (actually, I use elvis, but I guess any vi-clone would do)
mutt - it's just fantastic. A little harder to use than pine, but a lot easier when you have many mailboxen (I have some maildirs and a couple of IMAP accounts)
w3m - ideal if you are on a slow machine. When run under X11 or on the framebuffer, it renders images, too
centericq - all major protocols, and file transfers. This is a program that would benefit from a point-and-click interface, though.
mp3blaster - Housemates flee in terror as the computer suddenly starts playing music while no operator is around
dcd - Yes, I have audio CDs, too
cdrecord - burning those ISOs so I can propagate Free software
abcde - Rip your audio cd, look up the track names (CDDB), and encode to your favorite format - with one command!
And, of course, the usual Unix commands, C compiler, yada, yada.
Cheers!
---
Qui in ventem urinat, se lavare constat.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
If you're interested in something like Twin: you might like MultiTail: it enables you to view multiple files and/or the output of multiple commands in one terminal-window.
Link: http://www.vanheusden.com/multitail/
Description:
MultiTail lets you view one or multiple files like the original tail program. The difference is that it creates multiple windows on your console (with ncurses). It can also use colors while displaying the logfiles, for faster recognition of which lines are important and which are not. It supports regular expressions. It has interactive menus for editing given regular expressions and deleting and adding windows. One can also have windows with the output of shell scripts and other software. Also multiple files can be merged into one window.
www.vanheusden.com - home of Multitail, HTTPing, CoffeeSaint, EntropyBroker, rsstail, bsod, listener, nagcon, nagi
hmm what ever happened to qt/console? There was so much hype about it when it was first released but i haven't heard of it since.. what happened? lol that must have been the most hilarious april fools joke i've ever seen because people were saying how useful this would be without even downloading it. anyway, this is a step towards making a real qt/console! good work
If you want to switch between console applications but you don't need a 'windowing' environment, you can use screen(1). What I do is this on every ssh login:
% exec screen -E '^Z^Z' -D -R
This brings up my applications exactly how I left them last time. Then C-z c starts a new screen, C-z 0 through C-z 9 switches between screens, C-z C-z sends a literal ^Z, and C-z d disconnects. I normally have pine running in terminal zero, XEmacs in terminal one, then top(1) and maybe a shell in two more terminals. This is much handier than having to start applications every time you log in, and essential over a noisy modem line where the ssh connection might suddenly cut out. If it does, just reconnect, run the above command and everything is just as you left it.
Speaking of Emacs, you can do most things inside that including making shell and terminal buffers, so in a way it provides a windowing system like Twin.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Twin is a non-graphical windowing environment!
Wow...welcome to 1993.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Makes it kind of hard or watch videos doesn't it?
I guess I'll be watching the ascii version of Star Wars from now on.
What is wrong with KDE and GNOME interfaces? The fact that the console was never actually all that user friendly. I am not a Linux expert, just a mid-range user, and I notice debian packages for "dialog" etc. Why is it that more console tools do not use that mechanism to communicate with us?
I am personally growing convinced that issues that were not addressed in the console are also dismissed in the GUIs or at least they add to the habit of confision.
+ I love my crappy P200 with 640x480 and I love my Debian so this is nice.
This is insane!
We are having every day more processing power (thanks to Moore's Law), and super-hyper-capable video adapters... and these guys come with an early 80's technology.
Come on, the people at PARC invented the GUI 30 years ago, and we are still discussing a text-only windowing system???
This system is not only awfull, but also innecessary.
Emacs Good operating system shame its not got a decent text editor!
Go to the twin web site and just watch that web counter go....
I hope that it automatically goes to a 5th digit...
--My sig is bigger than your sig--
It's interesting and I like that you can use the multi console while in this windowing system..but I don't know, are people really that hard pressed for affordable CPU/Graphics horsepower? I could see this being used on server maybe, but not workstation..
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
I would like to see this type of project really take off.
More than 10 years ago I was getting by with MS Works under DOS in text mode on crappy, by today's standard, hardware. With multitasking, better networking support and a few critical text-based applications (email, Lynx, xtgold-equivalent) you would cover most of the current business needs.
Nowadays you have too many colours, fonts, formats, etc to choose from.
that's not why he said it was like win2k. It was the part about NOT using the command line.
/sbin/init which can do whatever it damn well pleases. You can choose to not start /sbin/mgetty on your VTs.
And it's not like linux is based on a command interpreter either. It's "based" on
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
Well, this isn't exactly getting rid of X but it would silence all the people who screaming about X's supposed bloat.
:-)
I just stumbled across Kdrive (not related to KDE) which is a _TINY_ X server written by well know X hacker Keith Packard.
Here's a listing of top from the RULE (another cool minimal Linux project) web site running Kdrive and Moz. Kind of a funny contrast really.
792 mfratoni 15 0 22756 22M 12384 S 15.3 59.8 1:19 mozilla-bin
720 root 15 0 7192 3600 1148 S 10.0 9.5 0:27 X
Awww... look at the little X server. He's so cute!
Here's a pic
of kdrive running the Gimp, Xfce (svelt file manager), some random apps and some pagers. That's just very cool to have all those apps running in such a mimimalistic environment.
G. Washington on Government "it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
those flashy console curses interfaces on the other hand tend to decrease productivity. real men have ed as a login shell.
!send
This is definately nerdy, and extremely geeky... but can I make a funtional desktop computer with this and a rotten 386?
Yet Another X Alternative? Must be Monday.
/..
Seriously, people have been announcing plans to replace X with something lighter weight for roughly 20 years now. Every time one of the projects gets far enough along to slap together a web site and a half-assed demo, you guys fall all over yourselves to promote it.
This may finally be the project that gets it right, and 10 years from now it will deliver something that is generally useful. Until then, it probably doesn't need to be on the front page of
- Old Man of the Mountain ---- "I want to disturb my neighbor"
As computers are becoming more and more powerful, we can demand more from them. Do you not think this is more of a negative step? I can understand using this for older machines, but not new. Starting X11 shouldn't take very long on most computers (about 10 seconds on my Athlon XP 1700+) Just my two cents.
--- WAL
Any discussion of making the console a user friendly environment for the mouse wielding masses must take a look at the Arachne Web Browser and Internet Suite. Originally developed for DOS, and included with the FreeDOS distro, Arachne's creator has been working on a Linux port (based on SVGAlib & GGI lib) for a while now - but it is still a beta release. You can also of course run the DOS version in an emulator from the Linux console.
In addition to Web browsing and email, it can also be used as a front end for a media player capable of handling MP3's and some video. And ist can be used as a handy directory tool for browsing your own local files.
One criticism of it is the licensing it is released under - though this is partly due to tools created by others that were incorporated into it. But the author is a SlashDot fan so is aware of the concerns. The standard download is cripple-ware and free for personal use.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
Funny. I fscking actually used emacs yesterday for the first time in over a year. I had to see which line of a config file was causing an application to crash and emacs numbers lines by default. I can't find line numbering for vi on the man page, and I have been to lazy and drunk this weekend to search groups.google.
Anyway I guess I'll go look that up, but it is a nice feature to have on by default.
light weight OS
The UNIX ideal is small programs that do one thing very well. Emacs tries to do too many things.
<Linda Richman>
Discuss.
</Linda Richman>
ive been using it for years on my 486. makes it more useful since its too slow ass to run X. i just ssh in via PUTTY and use twin. even right now i have a session open at work here with a few bitchx, web proxy, apt (ya baby) and other shit running on it without any problems.
At least visually, Twin is reminiscent of Desqview.
Ah, the distant memories....Desqview on a DOS machine with a few megs of "Expanded Memeory" : Brief in one window, a Borland compiler in another, Lotus Magellan in a third window, and maybe a debugger somewhere.
Good stuff, all of 'em.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
You are all pussies. I patched my kernel thusly:
s p; - execve("/sbin/init",argv_init,envp_init);b sp; + execve("/usr/local/bin/emacs",argv_init,envp_init) ;n bsp; + panic("No emacs found. Are you sure this is GNU/Linux?");
-- main.c Sun Jun 3 22:02:34 2001
+++ main.c~ Tue Jul 10 16:05:26 2001
@@ -789,9 +789,9 @@
if (execute_command) execve(execute_command,argv_init,envp_init);
&nb
- execve("/etc/init",argv_init,envp_init);
- execve("/bin/init",argv_init,envp_init);
- execve("/bin/sh",argv_init,envp_init);
- panic("No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.");
+ execve("/usr/bin/emacs",argv_init,envp_init);
&n
+ execve("/bin/emacs",argv_init,envp_init);
+ execve("/usr/bin/xemacs",argv_init,envp_init);
&
}
Copyright
The more you know, the less you understand.
And for those occasions when you do need a graphical X program, use the ratpoison window manager. It's a no-nonsense, no bloat, no mouse needed window manager.
What's nice is if you use a remote server for any kind of development. I find myself in diffrent offices all the time and being able to just attach to my remote system to do whatever i need to do and pick up where i left off is great.
I know you can do that with things like VNC and X but that's ugly, and has dependancies you don't always have access to. Screen/Twin i can just ssh to my box and attach. Nothing going backwards with twin as I can see, it's about time I had a better alternative to screen
To find what line you're on in vi, just type colon, period, equals, and then enter. What could be easier?
(Ok, you can type control-G instead.)
It usually shows in the lower left corner. The format is "59,6", where 59 is the row and 6 is the column. You can use nG or :n (where n in the line number) to jump to a certain line.
The selection is a little thin right now, but it's only a matter of time!
oh my, I'm sorry, but I like X, I mean X is great, console is ok, but X is fair more eye-candy! and maybe I don't know enough to use console...
but I am using GEntoo tho, does that help?
Yes, that's a good one. Now do the same thing with the Mach kernel, and GNU/Hurd will be finished.
i remember the //e rom upgrade had some windowing extras built into it. the /// also had something similar. the mac pretty much killed it that progress. no login capabilites for the apple 2 series that i remember though
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
XDirectFB (not to be confused with DirectFB, which is the general library it uses) only has accelerated drivers for Matrox cards, and a few others.
The whole point of it is acceleration. Video cards that haven't released a single spec as to HOW to excelerate them can't really expect an accelerated driver, can they?
However, it works with any system that has a framebuffer, though it's slow as molasses. If you have openGL on your card, you can use it regardless of the type, so that should be pretty portable.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
One picture is worth a thousand words.
Literally.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Nah.... Fixed-length character strings limit productivity. (See subject). :-)
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Now we just need a GTK port to it. Once you wrap the twin GUI with GTK bindings, all of the X11 apps that you have are now available. A toolkit is a toolkit is a toolkit. The graphic representation right now is solid objects, but that is just a look and feel. That can be changed. As long as you have the same programmatic interface that the app is expecting, you can change the look and feel of the app. Similar to skins, themes, but at the widget level. Most if not all of the gtk objects should be representable using text. Once you have that, there really is no going back. Zero effort for tons of apps that will run natively.
One Token Ring to Rule them All, One Search Engine to Find Them, One WAN to bring them in, and TCP/IP Bind them...
Slashbots complain constantly about how bloated, say, Office XP is.
And you're telling me Emacs is an entire light weight OS?
Double standards are amusing.
"Sufferin' succotash."
What about Midnight Commander, a clone of the famous Norton Commander ???
:-)
It is, IMHO, the best interface design ever, i don't think you can get a better design than this one for managing files: two (not three or four or more: two) independent windows, pointing to different directories and list files in each, a bottom line representing what each F-key will do if you press on it, sticking to some rules about what a given F-key will do (for example: F1 means help and F10 means quit.) and still having a prompt to type commands into the same way you would do if you were at a plain shell.
It is THE killer console app: i can't live without it.
If I do not install active x, then how will IE run Windbloze media player? Unless active x controls do something other than control video motion and sound integration, and other processor hogging bells and whistles.
Perhaps if you see the source code you might enlighten us all to the purpose. However that is not how MS programming works, "just use the library, you do not need to know how it works, it was written by those who are much smarter than you are".
As flakey as Xfree86 is I prefer to be able to crash hack things to my liking in Linux. It is my right under the GNU licence. I do not do XP, because I like to have some hacking control. I have run the same install of Win98se for 3 years and have managed to hack it to where it boots and runs better than any XP box I have seen!
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
firing up a windowing system tends to reduce productivity. A simple text based console app allows you to focus w/o disractions.
:)
:)
Not neccessarily... I like to use the console as well, but I find it is very useful to be able to have multiple console windows open at once, and be able to view them at once. The real estate on the (text-based) console just isn't enough sometimes. I find myself installing X on servers just so that I can do a command in one console window, and watch logs in another. X gives advantages when multitasking.... easier for me than using the alt-arrow / function key... but that's all just IMHO
And some sites just don't look good in lynx...
Place sig here.
Screw that! I use 'cat' for my shell. I'm speaking directly to port 80 right now!
Un-news
anyone that wants a GUI in Linux, until a alternative is available, i never had a problem with X, usually it is the resource hungry and bloated desktops are the problem, get rid of KDE and banish QT to the boneyard...
Does the lack of X mean I have to run all my graphics-intensive apps as root or setuid-root? That's just about as bad as using Windows.
My experience is the opposite.
I find my productivity to be directly proportional to the amount of information that I can see at once. On a decent windowing system, I can make my fonts as small as I want (especially if they're anti-aliased) and lay out my windows as I need. Unlike the twin approach, I don't waste a whole character width on window borders and captions.
BTW, emacs suX0Rz and vi rUl3z. Hope this helps.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Midnight commander is great. I use it everyday. Without it my Linux experience would be cut by half.
That said, XTree Gold's interface kicked in the ass that 2 independent window arrangement of NC/MC.
It could even present 2 directories at the same time, but that was unnecessary for copy/move operations.
Commands were so much more neatly organized, with Ctrl and Alt acting as modifiers of single letter commands.
There are versions for Linux, too. Last time I saw they were making good progress, maybe I should check them again...
And whatever the guy (Mr. Johnson) had, I hope he is cured by now. Sincerely this is my hope.
In years past, I knew of someone who used emacs as his login shell :-)
Stallman?
I live in Soviet Canuckistan you insensitive clod!
I started something like this in the late Eighties on my Apollo workstation ( just befor HP raped Apollo). All it took was some cleaver rebinding of the mouse keys /w Apollo DM and Aegis scripts. I also rebound some of the function keys for special functions. By the time I was done, I could do most of the common tasks and execute "menu"ed programs in any consol window. I really miss Apollo. I wonder if any /. readers remember them. Now HP uses the name for their cheapest line of disposable printers. Sic transit gloria mundi.
Something looks like it overflowed. Hits are at 89 and increasing by about 30 per minute.
What's new here? Curses(3) does everything twin does, and has been around and heavily used since the 70s.
Screen(1) uses curses to support multiple virtual terminals on one physical terminal.
vi(1) uses curses for text editing. Very likely emacs(1) does so too.
Lots of text based admin programs out there, all using curses, eg, top(1), mpstat(1), watch(1).
And several of these programs use multiple windows a-la X, as curses supports that too and always has.
No more problems configuring X on weird hardware!
;-)
Well it has shadows! How long did it take for X Window Managers to do that.
I find that I feel much at home with the console. I'm using the framebuffer so I could still use mplayer!
However, I don't believe I could exist entirely without XFree86 for long.
Perhaps we need to advocate a clean up of XFree86? it is already modular, but could it be possible to make it more modular.
For example, XFree86 has network transparency. Is this kind of sofistication required for a stand alone desktop/laptop or a small network which could use VNC? The more sofisticated networking functions could be taken out of XFree86 and placed into a module that is used when needed?
This may even bring the base XFree86 code to embedded devices more effectivley.
Unfortunatley we will never solve issues such as hardware support unless we lobby the manufactures to provide documentation, instead of having a XFree86 developer sitting in the late hours shooting random bytes at a new AGP card to see what happens.
I've got a PowerVR card, an upgrade from my GeForce 2MX. This upgrade is currently only effective for playing games under windoze as the GNU/Linux drivers (from PowerVR) claim to be ok but are more of an alpha than a beta. I get along fine with the framebuffer for now.
One word: screen
I ran XFree86 with acceptable performance using ctwm on my 20 MHz 386 with 4 MB RAM (installed from a teetering stack of slackware floppies).
I had a monochrome monitor that was supposed to support only 800x600 resolution, but I managed to get some more screen real estate...
Since the monitor had only one phosphor color (and thus a uniform phosphor surface) I was able to twiddle with my XFree86 configuration to get the monitor to sync on some crazy resolution like 900x732. The monitor buzzed a little bit at that setting, but it seemed none the worse for the wear...
The "lisp factor" is a big part of the problem. As an earlier poster pointed out, emacs is a lisp engine.
... oh, what's the phrase ... pickin' up roadkill armadillos. If that don't scare you - imagine roadkill skunks. They stop smelling so bad after a few days; which is about when armadillos start to get really rank, and they stay that way for weeks. Nobody picks up roadkill armadillos, not even buzzards. That's how bad they are, and that's how much I dislike emacs. It's the dead armadillo in the middle of the *nix road.
Lisp, for all its supposed power (I can't abide it, myself) is just not up to the task of being an OS, even if it has a C-based engine running it. Hey, I remember Apollo workstations running Pascal-based OS's. Or so they were said to be. The shell scripts certainly had a Pascallian feel to them. When the whole thing was redone in C, bang! zoom! Same box, incredible improvement. And, Pascal is a compiled language. Lisp, as far as I know, is interpreted. Bog city. Get out the winch.
An OS should be based on a lower level language like C. No, you don't need to get down to assembly (sure it would be faster - maybe - but how often would you come out with new releases of X, Winblows, etc.); so don't bother with the flames, don't waste your breath.
As a text editor, I always found emacs about as enjoyable as
I don't like vi, but I'll use it in a second if it's the only choice other than emacs. If emacs is all that's available, I use cat, sed, and awk.
BTW, I don't want to hear any RTFM flak. Worthless. Why bother? I might as well learn Wordstar and get my carpal tunnel that way.
LOL
Doonesbury
"A generation which ignores history has no past and no future." -- Robert Heinlein
It's interesting that Microsoft considers brain dead
hardware to be an advancement in computing. To my thinking any OS that is so bloated up with hardware instuction routines (including Linux) needs to consider the opposite route for the future.
It would be nice if some company (like Sony) after getting miffed with MS$ decided that it is about time to do something really revolutionary. Perhaps create an embedded 64 bit OS from Linux, without the need to boot from a hard drive. Harddrives need to be consigned to use as a storage device and as a place to store add ons.
Video cards need to be redesigned to work without drivers.
Call me old fashioned but OS dependant hardware is holding up the real advancements in computing!
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Actually, it is your idiocy that amuses me. Clearly, the point of my reply--Slashbot double standards when it comes to bloat--flew over your head and slid down the wall, leaving a sticky trail behind it.
It doesn't matter what the process sizes are. My point was how easily people tolerate Emacs bloat yet accuse every single Microsoft product of the same.
Next.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Oh yeah? Well I'm speaking to my cat right now, so mnyeah.
Y2K Compliant since the late 1890s
(with apologies to Mr. Clinton)
Indeed, if that's the case, it would be correct to say that DirectFB is an X server. To say that it "is X" sounds a bit off, though.
s/it's/its