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Topic: General Unix/Linux Thread (Read 120513 times)

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #226 –
I guess you'll have to toggle a switch somewhere? Dragging to the window edges moves to a different workspace on both Xubuntu and Debian Xfce. Actually I think tiling would be the preferable option. Moving workspaces is easier to control through other methods than dragging (e.g. right click on title bar).

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #227 –
When it wraps to another workspace, at least this thing has to be unticked:

Maybe something more too.

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #228 –
Pekwm looks like a very good balance between tiling and windowing. I haven't tried it yet, but this demonstration is enticing. (Manjaro again)
[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyheCwSZbs4[/video]

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #229 –
Quote from: ersi on
When it wraps to another workspace, at least this thing has to be unticked:

Thanks, I'll give it a look. I don't know if I want the automatic tiling per se, but the automatic desktop toggling is pretty much exclusively triggered by accident. When I want to put a window on another workspace that doesn't mean I want to drag it around — usually I don't, in fact.

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #230 –
Quote from: Frenzie on

I don't know if I want the automatic tiling per se, but the automatic desktop toggling is pretty much exclusively triggered by accident. When I want to put a window on another workspace that doesn't mean I want to drag it around — usually I don't, in fact.

If tiling is not important to you, then everything I have said is useless. Can you describe how windowing works for you?

Tiling is pretty important to me. I have keybinds for tiling. And drag-to-tile is also nice enough to have so I use it when it's available.

My Xfce settings - the part that is shown in the image a few posts up - are as shown in the image a few posts up. When I drag a window to the screen edge, I always intend to tile it, never to move to another workspace.

Still, I have multiple workspaces and I use them too. In Xfce taskbar I have the workspaces widget. When I want to move a window to another workspace, I drag its taskbar item to the workspaces widget on the same taskbar. The same trick works in Openbox when you have Tint toolbar in multidesktop mode - grab an item on the taskbar and drop it to another workspace. (More often though, when I need another workspace, I switch to it first and then begin opening windows there. This is more in line with the way I really work - when I have messed up a place enough, I switch to another place and start with a new clean slate.)

In Xfce, I also have set up keybinds to move through all the workspaces a la spatial navigation, as the workspaces widget indicates: Four workspaces in a grid (Manjaro Xfce has two by default, but I need four). And I have set Alt+Tab to cycle through all windows on all workspaces.

This screenshot still applies as an illustration of the way I have set up the taskbar:

The screenshot also shows that, beginning with version 0.8.11, Manjaro Xfce uses the xfce4-terminal in dropdown mode by default. Terminal emulator dropdown mode was first popularised by Yakuake, if I am not mistaken.

By default the dropdown terminal drops down to about half of the upper screen and it does not use the full width either. I immediately liked the dropdown terminal and I made it nearly fullscreen, down to the taskbar, as shown in the screenshot. I like it even so much that I put xfce4-terminal on Openbox too and I configured it to open up as a similar maximised dropdown there.
 

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #231 –
Quote from: ersi on
If tiling is not important to you, then everything I have said is useless. Can you describe how windowing works for you?

I said automatic tiling by dragging is not important to me. Automatic tiling the way it works in Windows is far more useful, although I like partial overlap to maximize actual content. In Windows first you select a bunch of windows with Ctrl, then you right click and tile. Anyway, it depends on the computer. On the laptop I'm using right now* tile left and tile right could work. On my nice UHD monitor? Other than a few Devilspie2 rules I don't think there's much I can automate there.

* I just moved btw, so I haven't got my computer set up.
Quote from: ersi on
I have multiple workspaces and I use them too.

Yes, me too.

Quote from: ersi on
The screenshot also shows that, beginning with version 0.8.11, Manjaro Xfce uses the xfce4-terminal in dropdown mode by default. Terminal emulator dropdown mode was first popularised by Yakuake, if I am not mistaken.

I don't think it'd work for me. I like to have at least two terminal windows. Tabs or tmux are nice too though.

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #232 –
Quote from: Frenzie on

I said automatic tiling by dragging is not important to me.

I have come to rely on it. Perhaps because I view it as a kind of resizing. We resize windows by dragging the edges, right? Similarly, dragging the window to edge resizes it to a specific state.

Quote from: Frenzie on

Automatic tiling the way it works in Windows is far more useful, although I like partial overlap to maximize actual content. In Windows first you select a bunch of windows with Ctrl, then you right click and tile.

Yes, the Windows way sounds great particularly when you want to tile more than two windows. But for me the most ordinary case is to tile two windows.

Partial overlap can perhaps be best achieved by tiling and then resizing by mouse. Another way would be to cascade and then move/reposition the windows. I used to do this in Opera.

In some Linux desktops I have noticed there are ways to make window decorations (titles and borders) disappear upon tiling and/or maximisation, while retaining them when floating. I have set it this way in Openbox. This makes good use of space.

Quote from: Frenzie on

Quote from: ersi on
The screenshot also shows that, beginning with version 0.8.11, Manjaro Xfce uses the xfce4-terminal in dropdown mode by default. Terminal emulator dropdown mode was first popularised by Yakuake, if I am not mistaken.

I don't think it'd work for me. I like to have at least two terminal windows. Tabs or tmux are nice too though.

The dropdown xfce4-terminal naturally allows tabs, as it always does. A maximised transparent xfce4-terminal (sometimes with tabs) is good for some things, while a black floating xterm (or a number of them, or with tmux in them) is good for other things.

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #233 –
Quote from: ersi on
In some Linux desktops I have noticed there are ways to make window decorations (titles and borders) disappear upon tiling and/or maximisation, while retaining them when floating. I have set it this way in Openbox. This makes good use of space.

That's pretty cool, but for window decorations I'm fine with whatever you call the automatic magnetism. I've only got them at 1 or 2px wide anyway.

Quote from: ersi on
The dropdown xfce4-terminal naturally allows tabs, as it always does.

Yes, but simultaneously means simultaneously, not hidden behind tabs. ;) It's on my netbook that I don't have much of a choice. Perhaps a tiled tmux layout could work, but that complicates interaction.

Mandriva out of business

Reply #234 –
Quote from: http://uk.businessinsider.com/mandriva-goes-out-of-business-2015-5?r=US

A Linux company that spent 17 years competing with Windows is officially over

For decades, Mandriva has been trying to take on Microsoft Windows with a Linux version of a desktop PC. Its claim to fame was a deal in 2007 with the Nigerian government in which it beat out Microsoft to put its flavor of Linux on 17,000 PCs used by Nigerian schoolchildren.

It also had some success in Malaysia.

But by 2012, the company was on the brink of bankruptcy, a situation that had happened several times since its early days, in 1998.

But long live Mageia!

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #235 –
I've been reading about that place having financial troubles for like a decade now. I'm actually surprised they managed to hold out that long.

Regular Expression Terror!

Reply #236 –
For about half a year I was wondering what on earth was wrong with my cute little alias that was meant to handle dotfiles in the directory. The alias had some regex attached to it, so that it would supposedly limit itself to dotfiles only, not other files. The trouble was that it left out some of the dotfiles, never handled them all, no matter how I tweaked it.

I noticed a pattern that it always forgot files towards the alphabetical end of the list. And today I became enlightened with the reason for this - my machine has a non-English system locale.

Spookily, the letters in regex operate according to the alphabet of the system locale...

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #237 –
I know that expressions like [a-zA-z] are problematic because of diacritics, but which regular expression implementation differs by locale?

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #238 –
Precisely the same [a-zA-Z] (except that I had 0-9 also there). It so happens that in Estonian alphabet Z is next to S, so all letters later in the alphabet, such as T, U, V, X, Y, were ignored. To get them covered, I had to explicitly put them all into the regex. Today I understood why this was happening.

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #239 –
I see. But in which regexp implementation is this?

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #240 –
Which regexp implementation? I have heard that BSD version and GNU version differ a bit. I have the GNU version of course, because I am on Linux. But I cannot do regex -v for a better answer :)

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #241 –
I mean, are we talking Perl, grep, Python, Bash… how are you running your regular expression? Of course it's conceivable that they all refer back to the same C library, but in any case it ought to be worthwhile investigating whether you can simply use Unicode. Locale is just too much trouble, but in e.g. Python you have to explicitly import it first. In a sense, I might be asking which regexp implementation I should avoid.

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #242 –
bash

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #243 –
Hm, annoying to keep in mind. Luckily the only locales I'm likely to run probably wouldn't yield too many compatibility issues.

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #244 –
Shashlik: A New Way To Run Android Apps On Linux
Quote from: Michael Larabel, http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=shashlink-android-linux

Shashlik is an "Android Simulated Environment" to serve as a launcher for running Android applications on a conventional GNU/Linux distribution.

Shashlik will be presented later this month at KDE's Akademy 2015 conference as a new way for running Android applications on "real" Linux.

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #245 –
I'm not sure there are any Android apps that I'd like to run on a proper OS. Maybe one of the offline maps apps like MAPS.ME or HERE maps. That's about the only thing I can think of that's superior to e.g. GNOME Maps (which I don't think even supports offline) or the rather different in scope Marble.

One of the comments there mentions TuneIn Radio. Perhaps the app offers some advantage over the website; I don't use it. The suggestion that MX Player can stand up to e.g. VLC or mpv is frankly laughable, as is the suggestion that Windows beats Linux for multimedia (although Media Player Classic is quite good).

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #246 –
Another death announcement that I did not notice in time: Development of Crunchbang Linux has stopped. 

Crunchbang was where I first discovered Openbox. And its underlying Debian supports rather old and weak hardware. This distro has perhaps the sanest defaults I've ever seen.

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #247 –
Quote from: Frenzie on

One of the comments there mentions TuneIn Radio. Perhaps the app offers some advantage over the website; I don't use it.

I'm a long-time user of it. It allows inserting links to your own favourite webradio stations. But the pre-existent catalogue is extensive enough.

The version that I have for now (last updated maybe two years ago) introduced a "like" button (a heart shaped button) that gets in the way when you want to browse your own custom list of stations. The app was better before this update, it had less ads too. That's the usual development, I guess.

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #248 –
A properly curated list of radio stations could be a good thing. As it is, however, I do all of my radio listening in podcast form.

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #249 –
A good podcast feed has become a luxury. The stations that I need to follow have stopped providing them. Sometimes some third-party enthusiasts still create the podcasts that used to be popularly available.