Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Yeah, especially when you figure you can buy a 10$ 333mhz machine off Ebay that will easily do the trick. Retrograde a whole office full of machines on this and you have yourself a nice little computer lab. Just imagine schools running this being able to save hundreds of thousands of dollars. With windowing text mode, you can run nearly everything you would ever want and have no limit to productivity other than what you impose upon yourself.
You know - maybe it's not so perverted after all - if it can use framebuffer and somebody sometime will implement AA into FB... who knows...
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
but why put twin on it?
gnu screen does a much better job if you're in text mode!
If you have to use a window system, why not use X
I must say that Twin is a cool state of the art program, but there's no real world use for it!
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.
Sounds like you really want screen. (Yes, it does split screen.
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
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"
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"
I run X on an AMD 100MHZ chip at home. I have no complaints about the performace of X (I use WindowMaker, not KDE or Gnome). Its only Netscape's horrible rendering engine that kills me on nested tables. Otherwise the box works fine for what I use it for (a firewall and a modem).