21 ms·

Cool but obscure X11 tools

368 points by navigaid 7y ago

sumanthvepa 7y ago
Takes me back so many years to grad school. I still find myself using a few of the tools though, even after all these years. xload for one is a favourite.
- pgtan 7y ago
  my fvwm "desktop" consists for years only of FvwmPager, rclock, and multiple xload running on different machines.
mhd 7y ago
Oh my, that reminds me of my first year with Linux, discovering all those little utilities hidden on my Slackware install or available on Sunsite…
- nineteen999 7y ago
  Same. Also the games listed here were pretty much the fanciest games we had, apart from Doom (svgadoom and xdoom) and Abuse.
  - otabdeveloper4 7y ago
    What?? How could you forget xevil?
pgtan 7y ago
One BIG thing missing: xteddy! It was xteddy shown in parallel on multiple HP 9000 screens in the early 90ies, which sparked my love for UNIX. http://weber.itn.liu.se/~stegu/xteddy/ http://weber.itn.liu.se/~stegu/xteddy/ see also https://xteddy.org/ https://xteddy.org/ Also xon (very handy for non-ssh users), jwz's xdaliclock and xkeycaps.
- folkhack 7y ago
  Oh man. This made my Friday - just an adorable bitmap bear on my Debian 10 desktop... get this - when you move him, the dragging cursor is a little heart <3 Only problem is now I feel slightly guilty sending a teddy bear a SIGINT.
tangus 7y ago
Nice nostalgia. Unfortunately most of the ones that deal with text are from before the 8bit to utf-8 move, which makes them unusable nowadays (unless you restrict yourself to ASCII).
reirob 7y ago
As well DDD the X11 front-end for GDB [1]. Helped me quite a lot around 2003. [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/ddd/ https://www.gnu.org/software/ddd/
- raverbashing 7y ago
  From what I remember when trying to use it, it looked nice but it was very buggy Not sure it even supported threads for a while
  - nineteen999 7y ago
    Was it DDD that didn't support threads, or GDB though? I remember that GDB support for threads was horrific for a long time, especially back in the 90's.
    - ncmncm 7y ago
      I have not been tempted by ddd since I found cgdb.
- gmueckl 7y ago
  I still miss a good debugging GUI with useful data visualizations. Sometimes staring at pointers and (multidimensional) arrays of numbers just isn't enough.
  - rjsw 7y ago
    Why do you miss that, I used ddd yesterday.
  - Pete_D 7y ago
    For data visualizations I use gdb's Python API. For simple things that can be just adding pretty printers, for hairy things it can be a custom command that prints extra information or dumps it to a graphviz script. https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Python-API.html https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Python-API.html
bechampion 7y ago
xeyes isn't obscure , how else do you test that ssh x forwarding works otherwise :)
- signa11 7y ago
  launch an xterm, smh, kids ^^) /s
  - gmueckl 7y ago
    Nah, big brother must keep watching ;).
- toxik 7y ago
  Glad to know I’m not the only one! That and glxgears.
  - jhbadger 7y ago
    Exactly. Glxgears was (at least traditionally) how you tested whether your video driver was using any of the 3D acceleration!
- gbrown_ 7y ago
  Exactly! though I used xclock. A former co-worker used to always have xeyes open on his desktop to easily find his cursor. Maybe I'm getting old...
- jhallenworld 7y ago
  When my kids were infants, they loved xeyes.
- bch 7y ago
  Ha! Yes! I used to call xeyes a network testing tool.
- teddyh 7y ago
  I use xlogo for that and similar purposes; it’s even more minimalistic in its functionality than xeyes.
throwamay1241 7y ago
For those looking for obscure-but-useful, checkout xdotool. `sleep 2; xdotool type "foo"` is super handy for typing passwords into virtual machines which don't support guest additions. I'd rather not elaborate on the filthy things I've made it do, but rest assured you can use it to do some quick and dirty automation tasks if you really need to :)
- naikrovek 7y ago
  PLEASE elaborate on the filthy things you've made it do!
  - throwamay1241 7y ago
    - Unit/Integration test X11 tools inside docker Xephyr sessions during CI - Transplant magnet links from ThePirateBay into a bittorrent client - Type stuff into virtual machines rather than install guest additions - Import data into remote desktop sessions for otherwise internet-isolated+Copypaste disabled remote hosts, complete with integrity checking powershell scripts which were also imported into the environment that were used to self-integrity check prior to integrity checking other files. The use of xdotool is probably an antipattern in a perfect world, but that doesn't mean that it's not damn handy from time to time.
- Fnoord 7y ago
  Autokey (Python) gives you similar power as AutoHotKey on Windows and Karabiner Elements/Hammerspoon on macOS. Problem is, that you might want Wayland support, as X is on the way out. [1] https://github.com/autokey/autokey https://github.com/autokey/autokey
  - throwamay1241 7y ago
    > Problem is, that you might want Wayland support, as X is on the way out. I vaguely remember someone saying something similar about IPv6 once.
  - toxik 7y ago
    Last time I tried Karabiner Elements, it was quite buggy and brought down the kernel. Not a happy camper. Then Apple blessed us with allowing Escape-Caps remapping out of the box (guess that Touch Bar resulted in something useful...) Did it improve? What do you remap?
sprash 7y ago
Many of those types of programs like XRoach, XSnow, XNeko as well as every program rendering to the root window will never be possible with wayland (unless you built them into the display server).
- ktpsns 7y ago
  You can run a virtual X-Server, like Xephyr or Xnest. They are pretty handy and will make it easy to use root painting programs. Fun Fact: The XScreensaver "preview" function works (worked?) as following: Start an instance of Xnest and run the screensaver rendering the root window there.
- mhd 7y ago
  First they came for the anime babes sitting on my window decorations and I said nothing…
- rootbear 7y ago
  XRoach doesn't work even on a modern X desktop. The background window on, say, gnome, isn't really the root window. I compiled XRoach a few years ago and didn't understand at first why it wasn't working. I don't know if any of the modern desktops have an actual root window that's visible.
  - zzo38computer 7y ago
    Perhaps if you do not use a desktop environment, then the root window will be visible and usable. (I do not use a desktop environment myself.)
- cycloptic 7y ago
  Not necessarily true. With a wlroots compositor, you can use the layer-shell protocol and overlay surfaces.
Fnoord 7y ago
TIL there is a successor to xbill, called xlennart.
favadi 7y ago
How come gvim is obscure?
- II2II 7y ago
  Guess 1: this page was originally going to be "Cool X11 Tools from the 1990's." Guess 2: perhaps the X11 version of vim is obscure. I usually visualize vim users working in a terminal, with those interested in a GUI text editor using something else.
  - buckminster 7y ago
    I used some of these in the 1980's!
dexen 7y ago
>XLennart is a modification of the arcade game XBill. >An evil and unpopular computer hacker named “Lennart”[1] 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 systems. [1] https://cyber.dabamos.de/unix/x11/poettering.gif https://cyber.dabamos.de/unix/x11/poettering.gif
- microcolonel 7y ago
  For clarity, Lennart Poettering is an extremely prolific guy that people somehow love to hate. At the end of the day, his critics either use his software begrudgingly, or use somebody else's to their own detriment, just to spite him. I take some time every year to thank Lennart for systemd and PulseAudio; I remember when the grass was parched brown on my side, green has been a welcome change!
  - coribuci 7y ago
    For clarity, Bill Gates is also a very prolific guy that people love to hate. I take some time every day to curse both of them for the amount of dispair that they cause with their offsprings.
    - vnorilo 7y ago
      I've always wondered about this sentiment about software you are free to use or not. Or is it the fact that a majority of others, or those that have the power, choose for you by making life harder if you deviate? Shouldn't you curse those people, instead of the creators of the software?
      - ejefz 7y ago
        Red Hat controls both gnome and systemd. They made systemd a hard dependency for gnome. That's the only reason systemd "won".
        scrollaway 7y ago
azaras 7y ago
I miss xev.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  It's still there, and now there's wev, for Wayland.
  - azaras 7y ago
    I miss on the list.
    - ggg3 7y ago
      it's not obscure I'd guess
z3t4 7y ago
Cloud computing is becoming a thing ... eg. apps that runs "in the cloud" or in your browser. But with Xserver you can just ssh -X into any machine, run an app, and the front-end GUI will be visible on your machine! You can even play games that way. Technology keeps going in circles ...
- brimstedt 7y ago
  I find xforwarding extremely slow and sluggish. Can/Do you use it efficiently?
  - z3t4 7y ago
    It works fine for me, but I can not really see any use cases, as I can just run the app locally. Use case's might be thin devices, like mobile phones and Chromebooks. Instead of running containers on Chromebooks, students could ssh into a computer that has all the apps they need; GUI apps like Photoshop, CAD, etc.
    - toast0 7y ago
      Just a couple days ago, I used remote X to show some coworkers some things: a) a (bad) NES emulator i wrote that was on my home machine, I didn't want to compile it on the work laptop b) chrome running on the home machine hitting a webcam pointed at a pressure gauge --- I didn't want to bother with proxying and prozy settings, and I don't let the webcam accept connections from public internet. I've also found it super useful for running java based KVM clients for IPMI --- run a VM with the properly old version of java so the webstart file works, and display it with remote X. xv or eog is nice for looking at images without the hassle of transferring them first (although, transferring them would probably use less bandwidth)
  - toast0 7y ago
    It usually helps a bit to enable ssh compression. But, some toolkits are better than others at managing the X connection; in general, things have gotten worse and worse as X over network has gotten less and less popular. To some degree, you're never going to have a snappy experience when the program and the display have a 50+ms round trip, but it's much worse if the program makes lots of synchronous calls to the display while doing work. Most of the older tools discussed here should be pretty good at managing the X connection and are probably doing more things in an asynchronous manner.
acd 7y ago
Xsnow for christmas time and coding fun projects with christmas music :).
nailer 7y ago
No x2x? Control two separate networked computers with one keyboard and mouse. Cursor slides out of right on one side and enters in on the left of the other. Wayland folks is there a similar thing? I don't keep up with Linux desktop tech anymore.
TickleSteve 7y ago
What? no xdaliclock?? https://www.jwz.org/xdaliclock/ https://www.jwz.org/xdaliclock/
- sjmulder 7y ago
  Warning, clicking this link from here redirects to an NSFWish image on imgur. This guy has a problem with HN.
  - ggg3 7y ago
    gotta love jwz. he is forever thankful by all the HN types that made him a millionaire and allowed him to live like an angst teenager forever, that he goes out of his way everytime to show it
  - aidenn0 7y ago
    Apparently temporary containers prevents this from happening...
  - mceachen 7y ago
    `Open link in new tab/window` avoids the referer header and JWZ's bile.
    - jwilk 7y ago
      It doesn't, at least in Firefox.
  - asveikau 7y ago
    "This guy" happens also to be a pretty prolific developer of Netscape fame and others. (xscreensaver included.)
slu 7y ago
Tgif is one of my all-time favorite X11 programs. It's used to create vector drawings, and I could whip out nice infrastructure diagrams etc. so fast using it. See http://bourbon.usc.edu/tgif/index.html http://bourbon.usc.edu/tgif/index.html
brokensegue 7y ago
I would add xkill
- muterad_murilax 7y ago
  It's already in there...
krylon 7y ago
That grey-and-pink color scheme from the screenshots gives me such a wave of nostalgia. It is fascinating how this color scheme is both terribly, terribly ugly and gorgeous at the same time. ;-)
- ggg3 7y ago
  sadly window managers also abandoned proper borders. i mostly use windows-10 themes on gnome/kde because it at least gives me a single pixel border. nobody bothered porting the original motif window like in those screens to any moder wm.
arethuza 7y ago
XMosaic - I remember reading about that in '93 and thinking that it looked like a cool hypertext browser but why would anyone want to load documents over a network!
bump-ladel 7y ago
The 1994 xv codebase still compiles and runs on modern Macs with XQuartz! https://twitter.com/jmcd/status/1143629189817470977?s=20 https://twitter.com/jmcd/status/1143629189817470977?s=20
- waynecochran 7y ago
  Yep. I still use it. I have a headless Amazon EC2 GPU instance that generates images -- I tunnel X11 thru ssh and xv works like a charm!
drewg123 7y ago
I still use xv to open images from the command line. Its like muscle memory.
- saltcured 7y ago
  I switched to the "display" command from the various image/graphics magic packages years ago, and now am frustratingly finding it has become unstable. But, recently seeing some PBS specials on NASA and the planetary probes made me reminisce about "xv". I remember having downloaded images of the Shoemaker-Levy comet impact on Jupiter and browsing them with xv...
msla 7y ago
It mentions Neko, which has its own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_(software)
machinecoffee 7y ago
Ah Motif, XBill and Afterstep! My nostalgia bit just got set. My first experiences of GUI programming on Unix (HPUX on a Motorola 68040 machine) was with Motif, which was a pretty good toolkit after you got used to the very long function names.
- rjsw 7y ago
  I'm typing this on a desktop running mwm and emacs linked against motif.
notacoward 7y ago
My two favorites were xev, for finding out which key/event codes I needed to put in config files, and xnest, for trying out new window managers or containing window-happy applications in a single top-level window before workspaces became a common thing.
- ajross 7y ago
  Also xmag, for those "what is going on at the pixel level" questions that screenshots are poor at answering. Alas, this doesn't work on wayland for obvious (yet... deeply regrettable) security reasons.
  - natmaka 7y ago
    For Wayland there is now "wev" https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2019-August/040796.html https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2019-Au...
p4bl0 7y ago
I was expecting X11 tools such as xev, xdotool, wmctrl, etc. Not a list a more or less obscure graphical programs (some stuff are even using GTK in the list). Fun nonetheless.
ptx 7y ago
The GTK screenshots all use then ThinIce theme[1] – still my favorite, but sadly not available for GTK 3 or 4. And I guess it wouldn't fit with GNOME's current design direction anyway. [1] http://thinice.sourceforge.net/ http://thinice.sourceforge.net/
- davidcollantes 7y ago
  I don't think so. Those look like the original CDE Motif Window Manager[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_(software)
  - ptx 7y ago
    Sure, the window manager could be the Motif window manager, or perhaps FVWM. I meant the widgets inside the window. The blue-tinted ones are GTK+ with ThinIce; some of the darker grey ones are Motif.
fuball63 7y ago
Strange coincidence this appears on the front page, as I have been having system instability with freezes, and my hunch is that it's something with the QT library. So lately I've been running only X programs instead of KDE apps, and it hasn't frozen in a while. This list will give me some additional apps to play with.
irq-1 7y ago
oclock shows a shaped window. `oclock -transparent` shows only the clocks hands and border.
miohtama 7y ago
With the exception of local editors (gvim) and administration software (xload), the need for these applications is easier to satisfy with online HTML5 apps. These are historically exciting, but nowadays the web browser is your X11.
- powercf 7y ago
  The browser can't implement xeyes (the cursor position outside a window is surely not visible?), so it will never be a serious replacement for X11.
- coribuci 7y ago
  The web browser is the new OS. The biggest failure of Google is that they didn't hire Lennart. Imagine your Chrome running instead of SystemD. :)
slang800 7y ago
I didn't realize XArchiver was obscure. I use that pretty regularly.
JackFr 7y ago
Where is Xrisk? Networked version of the board game we used to play continuously at work.
xvilka 7y ago
Shameless plug - you can add also my tiny transset rewrite and enrichment - set_opacity[1]. It allows making X windows translucent, without any interaction required. Wrote it more than a decade ago, but still should be usable. This is how you can use it: set_opacity -o 0.5 -i `pgrep gkrellm` There is also a patched[2] xcompmgr with the colored shadows support: xcompmgr -fF -I-.002 -O-.003 -D6 -cC -t-5 -l-6 -r5 -R 1 -G 0.5333 -B 0 [1] https://github.com/XVilka/set_opacity/ https://github.com/XVilka/set_opacity/ [2] http://xvilka.narod.ru/files/xcompmgr-1.1.2.tar.bz2 http://xvilka.narod.ru/files/xcompmgr-1.1.2.tar.bz2
jfhufl 7y ago
xclip : https://github.com/astrand/xclip https://github.com/astrand/xclip (long pipeline that generates lots of output) | xclip Or even just xclip < /some/file Now paste where necessary.
gsruff 7y ago
This reminded me of xjump, a very addictive falling tower game where you must continue to jump to the next highest platform as the lower platforms collapse beneath you. https://linuxx.info/xjump/ https://linuxx.info/xjump/ https://github.com/hugomg/xjump https://github.com/hugomg/xjump
- jmclnx 7y ago
  I wish I could find game xjumpxjump, it was a small number puzzle I played a lot in FreeBSD. It was removed from ports years ago and I have yet to find the src :(
  - gsruff 7y ago
    http://ftp6.us.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-Archive/ports/distfiles/xjumpjump.tgz http://ftp6.us.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-Archive/ports/distfil...
    - jmclnx 7y ago
      Awesome, after a couple of easy mods it compiled on my syste. Thanks!
joezydeco 7y ago
Free42 is also available for iOS and Android. It's very handy, especially when I can keep my real 42S safe in a drawer at home. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/free42/id337692629 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/free42/id337692629 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thomasokken.free42&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thomasokke...
- libria 7y ago
  The rendering on that 42s is close enough that I can almost feel the buttons. Never thought I'd describe a calculator as sensual, but HP's of that era had such a distinct look and feel.
  - drivers99 7y ago
    This is a great find. I used a 42S heavily through high school and college. I was surprised at how some of the muscle memory of how I did certain things came back. Seeing the dot matrix answer after doing some calculations brought back the feeling of being bored in math class, when I would just play with all the functions and write little programs. I didn't have a phone or even a laptop to turn to in those days. Even now though, it will be useful to do calculations in RPN. Even the ability to swap X and Y, and store intermediate results in order to avoid parentheses or M buttons is nice.
    - joezydeco 7y ago
      I felt the same way. And once you're comfortable with RPN, it's really hard to go back. Painful, even.
dahart 7y ago
Boy does that bring back memories of the 1990s! Some of these are not obscure at all, but absolutely standard. Xterm was the shell, I’m not sure there were even alternatives in early X. Xbiff+Xload+Xclock used to be on everybody’s desktop. XV was the main image viewer on X for a long time. Anybody remember xvacuum? I guess it’s truly obscure since it didn’t make the list. One of my favorite tricks to play on other people in the lab, before X security was a thing, was to run xvacuum on other people’s displays ... it slowly sucks everything on the screen into the mouse cursor. If the page maintainer is reading, Xsnow has a calculator in the screenshot covering the snow. This one is a bit obscure, but I loved xsnow, so I think it deserves a calculator-less view! :)
- app4soft 7y ago
  What about AzPainter?[0] It's really cool image editor based on X11, that still is obscure competitor to GIMP and Krita ;-) [0] https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter
  - leafo 7y ago
    This is a great program, essentially PaintTool SAI recreated for Linux
    - app4soft 7y ago
      > recreated for Linux Not only for Linux, but for FreeBSD/OpenBSD and Mac OS too![0] [0] https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter/wiki/Packaging-status https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter/wiki/Packaging-status
jhallenworld 7y ago
xphoon is missing Also I seem to remember a multiuser 3d tank game, maybe xtank? I don't really remember.
- kbrackbill 7y ago
  bzflag?
  - jhallenworld 7y ago
    Maybe, it worked on Decstation 2100s and 3100s (black and white) around 1992. Everybody in the computer lab was playing it.
jhallenworld 7y ago
Oh xfig is missing. I still use this awesome program for drawings. It's primitive but in many ways faster to use than inkscape.
- jordigh 7y ago
  xfig also has one of the few implementations of x-splines (x means "cross" here, like "pedestrian xing", unrelated to the X window system). I find x-splines very nice and intuitive. Here's a little x-spline implementation I made: https://jordi.platinum.edu.pl/xsplines/splines.html https://jordi.platinum.edu.pl/xsplines/splines.html
rhabarba 7y ago
Vim is VERY obscure.
joshu 7y ago
how about xbattle?
donio 7y ago
xantfarm is another one I like, ant farm in your root window https://acme.com/software/xantfarm/ https://acme.com/software/xantfarm/
adrianmonk 7y ago
Fun point of trivia about XBill: you might not guess from XBill's (ahem) slick, beautiful user interface, but one of the two people who wrote XBill is Matias Duarte. Yes, that Matias Duarte, the guy in charge of UI for Android and who came up with Material Design.
- coribuci 7y ago
  There is not much of a GUI in XBill- just a bloody program with a menu and a window. The same can be said about Android - Windows 1.0 rereleased. From an engineering point of view XBill is a better achievement than the GUI of Android.
gramakri 7y ago
Let me add my own cool but obscure project KDocker. You can use kdocker to move any app to the system tray :) These days it's maintained by john at https://github.com/user-none/KDocker https://github.com/user-none/KDocker Edit: oh wow, I actually tried it again now and it actually works! Crazy, this was a tool I wrote like 12-13 years ago. I also found the initial sourceforge page - http://kdocker.sourceforge.net/ http://kdocker.sourceforge.net/
a3n 7y ago
Obscure today, but many of these were merely how things were done back then.
jansc 7y ago
I used XFontSel two days ago to find a font for my StumpWM mode line. Still works like a charm. Also, I miss XFig on the list. Still growing strong! The last release is from May 2018. I use it occasionally to create diagrams for presentations.
kfir 7y ago
To read that "editors/vim" is an obscure tool is nothing short of astonishing.
- ksangeelee 7y ago
  To be fair, it's Gvim that's listed, which presumably is bundled with the main vim package. I had some vague awareness there was a GUI version of Vim, but only just checked it out after spotting it in the list. The menus serve as a handy reference for common commands. Quite good really.
zbuf 7y ago
Does anyone know what happened to xpool?
billfruit 7y ago
Some more obscure games were there, for example Sun Microsystems once released a book about games available on Solaris, which included a flight simulator amongst many others. Though I am unable to recollect the name.
rconti 7y ago
I used xearth as my desktop for ages -- it doesn't have to be run in a window. Xeyes and xclock were my go-to tests to make sure x11 forwarding was working properly.
CalChris 7y ago
xcostena. It was an X application written at SGI which took an order and faxed it to La Costena, a taqueria on Rengstorff (at the time). It might have been the first case of e-commerce on the internet and this was pre-web.
- kijiki 7y ago
  La Costena is still around, it just moved further down Middlefield towards Sunnyvale, right before Ellis. Sun had a similar app that would fax orders to Tony and Alba's pizza, though that closed a few years ago.
  - CalChris 7y ago
    Yeah, tatool. https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-pizzatool-2a7992b4c797 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems...
Pete_D 7y ago
Not sure if it counts as obscure, but to add to the note on xclipboard: xclip, which lets you change and inspect the primary selection/clipboard from the command line.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
st3fan 7y ago
xeyes!
aap_ 7y ago
I have the catclock in my xinitrc.
mastrsushi 7y ago
I didn't know there was an Xgalaga. Linux Emulators aren't the best, inevitably. Hope it's fluid on limited hardware
- jhbadger 7y ago
  It was pretty good if I recall (from twenty years ago), but not exactly like like arcade game. I sort of miss games like that -- Xchomp (a Pac-Man game) is another. Before the advent of emulators, programmers used to make versions of arcade games that they hadn't seen in years, making them (intentionally or not) different from their inspirations.
zzo38computer 7y ago
Sometimes xterm is still used; I use xterm. It is still being maintained, too. I also sometimes use xfontsel. I do not think these are so obscure, isn't it? Some of them, although I do not use them, I would not think they are so obscure, such as xbiff, xload, xclock (I have the functions of all three programs in another program I wrote, to display on a status line).

368 points by navigaid 7y ago

Takes me back so many years to grad school. I still find myself using a few of the tools though, even after all these years. xload for one is a favourite.

pgtan 7y ago
my fvwm "desktop" consists for years only of FvwmPager, rclock, and multiple xload running on different machines.

mhd 7y ago

Oh my, that reminds me of my first year with Linux, discovering all those little utilities hidden on my Slackware install or available on Sunsite…

nineteen999 7y ago
Same. Also the games listed here were pretty much the fanciest games we had, apart from Doom (svgadoom and xdoom) and Abuse.
- otabdeveloper4 7y ago
  What?? How could you forget xevil?

pgtan 7y ago

One BIG thing missing: xteddy! It was xteddy shown in parallel on multiple HP 9000 screens in the early 90ies, which sparked my love for UNIX. http://weber.itn.liu.se/~stegu/xteddy/ http://weber.itn.liu.se/~stegu/xteddy/ see also https://xteddy.org/ https://xteddy.org/ Also xon (very handy for non-ssh users), jwz's xdaliclock and xkeycaps.

folkhack 7y ago
Oh man. This made my Friday - just an adorable bitmap bear on my Debian 10 desktop... get this - when you move him, the dragging cursor is a little heart <3 Only problem is now I feel slightly guilty sending a teddy bear a SIGINT.

tangus 7y ago

Nice nostalgia. Unfortunately most of the ones that deal with text are from before the 8bit to utf-8 move, which makes them unusable nowadays (unless you restrict yourself to ASCII).

reirob 7y ago

As well DDD the X11 front-end for GDB [1]. Helped me quite a lot around 2003. [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/ddd/ https://www.gnu.org/software/ddd/

raverbashing 7y ago
From what I remember when trying to use it, it looked nice but it was very buggy Not sure it even supported threads for a while
- nineteen999 7y ago
  Was it DDD that didn't support threads, or GDB though? I remember that GDB support for threads was horrific for a long time, especially back in the 90's.
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    I have not been tempted by ddd since I found cgdb.
gmueckl 7y ago
I still miss a good debugging GUI with useful data visualizations. Sometimes staring at pointers and (multidimensional) arrays of numbers just isn't enough.
- rjsw 7y ago
  Why do you miss that, I used ddd yesterday.
- Pete_D 7y ago
  For data visualizations I use gdb's Python API. For simple things that can be just adding pretty printers, for hairy things it can be a custom command that prints extra information or dumps it to a graphviz script. https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Python-API.html https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Python-API.html

bechampion 7y ago

xeyes isn't obscure , how else do you test that ssh x forwarding works otherwise :)

signa11 7y ago
launch an xterm, smh, kids ^^) /s
- gmueckl 7y ago
  Nah, big brother must keep watching ;).
toxik 7y ago
Glad to know I’m not the only one! That and glxgears.
- jhbadger 7y ago
  Exactly. Glxgears was (at least traditionally) how you tested whether your video driver was using any of the 3D acceleration!
gbrown_ 7y ago
Exactly! though I used xclock. A former co-worker used to always have xeyes open on his desktop to easily find his cursor. Maybe I'm getting old...
jhallenworld 7y ago
When my kids were infants, they loved xeyes.
bch 7y ago
Ha! Yes! I used to call xeyes a network testing tool.
teddyh 7y ago
I use xlogo for that and similar purposes; it’s even more minimalistic in its functionality than xeyes.

throwamay1241 7y ago

For those looking for obscure-but-useful, checkout xdotool. `sleep 2; xdotool type "foo"` is super handy for typing passwords into virtual machines which don't support guest additions. I'd rather not elaborate on the filthy things I've made it do, but rest assured you can use it to do some quick and dirty automation tasks if you really need to :)

naikrovek 7y ago
PLEASE elaborate on the filthy things you've made it do!
- throwamay1241 7y ago
  - Unit/Integration test X11 tools inside docker Xephyr sessions during CI - Transplant magnet links from ThePirateBay into a bittorrent client - Type stuff into virtual machines rather than install guest additions - Import data into remote desktop sessions for otherwise internet-isolated+Copypaste disabled remote hosts, complete with integrity checking powershell scripts which were also imported into the environment that were used to self-integrity check prior to integrity checking other files. The use of xdotool is probably an antipattern in a perfect world, but that doesn't mean that it's not damn handy from time to time.
Fnoord 7y ago
Autokey (Python) gives you similar power as AutoHotKey on Windows and Karabiner Elements/Hammerspoon on macOS. Problem is, that you might want Wayland support, as X is on the way out. [1] https://github.com/autokey/autokey https://github.com/autokey/autokey
- throwamay1241 7y ago
  > Problem is, that you might want Wayland support, as X is on the way out. I vaguely remember someone saying something similar about IPv6 once.
- toxik 7y ago
  Last time I tried Karabiner Elements, it was quite buggy and brought down the kernel. Not a happy camper. Then Apple blessed us with allowing Escape-Caps remapping out of the box (guess that Touch Bar resulted in something useful...) Did it improve? What do you remap?

sprash 7y ago

Many of those types of programs like XRoach, XSnow, XNeko as well as every program rendering to the root window will never be possible with wayland (unless you built them into the display server).

ktpsns 7y ago
You can run a virtual X-Server, like Xephyr or Xnest. They are pretty handy and will make it easy to use root painting programs. Fun Fact: The XScreensaver "preview" function works (worked?) as following: Start an instance of Xnest and run the screensaver rendering the root window there.
mhd 7y ago
First they came for the anime babes sitting on my window decorations and I said nothing…
rootbear 7y ago
XRoach doesn't work even on a modern X desktop. The background window on, say, gnome, isn't really the root window. I compiled XRoach a few years ago and didn't understand at first why it wasn't working. I don't know if any of the modern desktops have an actual root window that's visible.
- zzo38computer 7y ago
  Perhaps if you do not use a desktop environment, then the root window will be visible and usable. (I do not use a desktop environment myself.)
cycloptic 7y ago
Not necessarily true. With a wlroots compositor, you can use the layer-shell protocol and overlay surfaces.

Fnoord 7y ago

TIL there is a successor to xbill, called xlennart.

favadi 7y ago

How come gvim is obscure?

II2II 7y ago
Guess 1: this page was originally going to be "Cool X11 Tools from the 1990's." Guess 2: perhaps the X11 version of vim is obscure. I usually visualize vim users working in a terminal, with those interested in a GUI text editor using something else.
- buckminster 7y ago
  I used some of these in the 1980's!

dexen 7y ago

>XLennart is a modification of the arcade game XBill. >An evil and unpopular computer hacker named “Lennart”[1] 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 systems. [1] https://cyber.dabamos.de/unix/x11/poettering.gif https://cyber.dabamos.de/unix/x11/poettering.gif

microcolonel 7y ago
For clarity, Lennart Poettering is an extremely prolific guy that people somehow love to hate. At the end of the day, his critics either use his software begrudgingly, or use somebody else's to their own detriment, just to spite him. I take some time every year to thank Lennart for systemd and PulseAudio; I remember when the grass was parched brown on my side, green has been a welcome change!
- coribuci 7y ago
  For clarity, Bill Gates is also a very prolific guy that people love to hate. I take some time every day to curse both of them for the amount of dispair that they cause with their offsprings.
  - vnorilo 7y ago
    I've always wondered about this sentiment about software you are free to use or not. Or is it the fact that a majority of others, or those that have the power, choose for you by making life harder if you deviate? Shouldn't you curse those people, instead of the creators of the software?
    - ejefz 7y ago
      Red Hat controls both gnome and systemd. They made systemd a hard dependency for gnome. That's the only reason systemd "won".
      - scrollaway 7y ago

azaras 7y ago

I miss xev.

microcolonel 7y ago
It's still there, and now there's wev, for Wayland.
- azaras 7y ago
  I miss on the list.
  - ggg3 7y ago
    it's not obscure I'd guess

z3t4 7y ago

Cloud computing is becoming a thing ... eg. apps that runs "in the cloud" or in your browser. But with Xserver you can just ssh -X into any machine, run an app, and the front-end GUI will be visible on your machine! You can even play games that way. Technology keeps going in circles ...

brimstedt 7y ago
I find xforwarding extremely slow and sluggish. Can/Do you use it efficiently?
- z3t4 7y ago
  It works fine for me, but I can not really see any use cases, as I can just run the app locally. Use case's might be thin devices, like mobile phones and Chromebooks. Instead of running containers on Chromebooks, students could ssh into a computer that has all the apps they need; GUI apps like Photoshop, CAD, etc.
  - toast0 7y ago
    Just a couple days ago, I used remote X to show some coworkers some things: a) a (bad) NES emulator i wrote that was on my home machine, I didn't want to compile it on the work laptop b) chrome running on the home machine hitting a webcam pointed at a pressure gauge --- I didn't want to bother with proxying and prozy settings, and I don't let the webcam accept connections from public internet. I've also found it super useful for running java based KVM clients for IPMI --- run a VM with the properly old version of java so the webstart file works, and display it with remote X. xv or eog is nice for looking at images without the hassle of transferring them first (although, transferring them would probably use less bandwidth)
- toast0 7y ago
  It usually helps a bit to enable ssh compression. But, some toolkits are better than others at managing the X connection; in general, things have gotten worse and worse as X over network has gotten less and less popular. To some degree, you're never going to have a snappy experience when the program and the display have a 50+ms round trip, but it's much worse if the program makes lots of synchronous calls to the display while doing work. Most of the older tools discussed here should be pretty good at managing the X connection and are probably doing more things in an asynchronous manner.

acd 7y ago

Xsnow for christmas time and coding fun projects with christmas music :).

nailer 7y ago

No x2x? Control two separate networked computers with one keyboard and mouse. Cursor slides out of right on one side and enters in on the left of the other. Wayland folks is there a similar thing? I don't keep up with Linux desktop tech anymore.

TickleSteve 7y ago

What? no xdaliclock?? https://www.jwz.org/xdaliclock/ https://www.jwz.org/xdaliclock/

sjmulder 7y ago
Warning, clicking this link from here redirects to an NSFWish image on imgur. This guy has a problem with HN.
- ggg3 7y ago
  gotta love jwz. he is forever thankful by all the HN types that made him a millionaire and allowed him to live like an angst teenager forever, that he goes out of his way everytime to show it
- aidenn0 7y ago
  Apparently temporary containers prevents this from happening...
- mceachen 7y ago
  `Open link in new tab/window` avoids the referer header and JWZ's bile.
  - jwilk 7y ago
    It doesn't, at least in Firefox.
- asveikau 7y ago
  "This guy" happens also to be a pretty prolific developer of Netscape fame and others. (xscreensaver included.)

slu 7y ago

Tgif is one of my all-time favorite X11 programs. It's used to create vector drawings, and I could whip out nice infrastructure diagrams etc. so fast using it. See http://bourbon.usc.edu/tgif/index.html http://bourbon.usc.edu/tgif/index.html

brokensegue 7y ago

I would add xkill

muterad_murilax 7y ago
It's already in there...

krylon 7y ago

That grey-and-pink color scheme from the screenshots gives me such a wave of nostalgia. It is fascinating how this color scheme is both terribly, terribly ugly and gorgeous at the same time. ;-)

ggg3 7y ago
sadly window managers also abandoned proper borders. i mostly use windows-10 themes on gnome/kde because it at least gives me a single pixel border. nobody bothered porting the original motif window like in those screens to any moder wm.

arethuza 7y ago

XMosaic - I remember reading about that in '93 and thinking that it looked like a cool hypertext browser but why would anyone want to load documents over a network!

bump-ladel 7y ago

The 1994 xv codebase still compiles and runs on modern Macs with XQuartz! https://twitter.com/jmcd/status/1143629189817470977?s=20 https://twitter.com/jmcd/status/1143629189817470977?s=20

waynecochran 7y ago
Yep. I still use it. I have a headless Amazon EC2 GPU instance that generates images -- I tunnel X11 thru ssh and xv works like a charm!

drewg123 7y ago

I still use xv to open images from the command line. Its like muscle memory.

saltcured 7y ago
I switched to the "display" command from the various image/graphics magic packages years ago, and now am frustratingly finding it has become unstable. But, recently seeing some PBS specials on NASA and the planetary probes made me reminisce about "xv". I remember having downloaded images of the Shoemaker-Levy comet impact on Jupiter and browsing them with xv...

msla 7y ago

It mentions Neko, which has its own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_(software)

machinecoffee 7y ago

Ah Motif, XBill and Afterstep! My nostalgia bit just got set. My first experiences of GUI programming on Unix (HPUX on a Motorola 68040 machine) was with Motif, which was a pretty good toolkit after you got used to the very long function names.

rjsw 7y ago
I'm typing this on a desktop running mwm and emacs linked against motif.

notacoward 7y ago

My two favorites were xev, for finding out which key/event codes I needed to put in config files, and xnest, for trying out new window managers or containing window-happy applications in a single top-level window before workspaces became a common thing.

ajross 7y ago
Also xmag, for those "what is going on at the pixel level" questions that screenshots are poor at answering. Alas, this doesn't work on wayland for obvious (yet... deeply regrettable) security reasons.
- natmaka 7y ago
  For Wayland there is now "wev" https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2019-August/040796.html https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2019-Au...

p4bl0 7y ago

I was expecting X11 tools such as xev, xdotool, wmctrl, etc. Not a list a more or less obscure graphical programs (some stuff are even using GTK in the list). Fun nonetheless.

ptx 7y ago

The GTK screenshots all use then ThinIce theme[1] – still my favorite, but sadly not available for GTK 3 or 4. And I guess it wouldn't fit with GNOME's current design direction anyway. [1] http://thinice.sourceforge.net/ http://thinice.sourceforge.net/

davidcollantes 7y ago
I don't think so. Those look like the original CDE Motif Window Manager[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_(software)
- ptx 7y ago
  Sure, the window manager could be the Motif window manager, or perhaps FVWM. I meant the widgets inside the window. The blue-tinted ones are GTK+ with ThinIce; some of the darker grey ones are Motif.

fuball63 7y ago

Strange coincidence this appears on the front page, as I have been having system instability with freezes, and my hunch is that it's something with the QT library. So lately I've been running only X programs instead of KDE apps, and it hasn't frozen in a while. This list will give me some additional apps to play with.

irq-1 7y ago

oclock shows a shaped window. `oclock -transparent` shows only the clocks hands and border.

miohtama 7y ago

With the exception of local editors (gvim) and administration software (xload), the need for these applications is easier to satisfy with online HTML5 apps. These are historically exciting, but nowadays the web browser is your X11.

powercf 7y ago
The browser can't implement xeyes (the cursor position outside a window is surely not visible?), so it will never be a serious replacement for X11.
coribuci 7y ago
The web browser is the new OS. The biggest failure of Google is that they didn't hire Lennart. Imagine your Chrome running instead of SystemD. :)

slang800 7y ago

I didn't realize XArchiver was obscure. I use that pretty regularly.

JackFr 7y ago

Where is Xrisk? Networked version of the board game we used to play continuously at work.

xvilka 7y ago

Shameless plug - you can add also my tiny transset rewrite and enrichment - set_opacity[1]. It allows making X windows translucent, without any interaction required. Wrote it more than a decade ago, but still should be usable. This is how you can use it: set_opacity -o 0.5 -i `pgrep gkrellm` There is also a patched[2] xcompmgr with the colored shadows support: xcompmgr -fF -I-.002 -O-.003 -D6 -cC -t-5 -l-6 -r5 -R 1 -G 0.5333 -B 0 [1] https://github.com/XVilka/set_opacity/ https://github.com/XVilka/set_opacity/ [2] http://xvilka.narod.ru/files/xcompmgr-1.1.2.tar.bz2 http://xvilka.narod.ru/files/xcompmgr-1.1.2.tar.bz2

jfhufl 7y ago

xclip : https://github.com/astrand/xclip https://github.com/astrand/xclip (long pipeline that generates lots of output) | xclip Or even just xclip < /some/file Now paste where necessary.

gsruff 7y ago

This reminded me of xjump, a very addictive falling tower game where you must continue to jump to the next highest platform as the lower platforms collapse beneath you. https://linuxx.info/xjump/ https://linuxx.info/xjump/ https://github.com/hugomg/xjump https://github.com/hugomg/xjump

jmclnx 7y ago
I wish I could find game xjumpxjump, it was a small number puzzle I played a lot in FreeBSD. It was removed from ports years ago and I have yet to find the src :(
- gsruff 7y ago
  http://ftp6.us.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-Archive/ports/distfiles/xjumpjump.tgz http://ftp6.us.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-Archive/ports/distfil...
  - jmclnx 7y ago
    Awesome, after a couple of easy mods it compiled on my syste. Thanks!

joezydeco 7y ago

Free42 is also available for iOS and Android. It's very handy, especially when I can keep my real 42S safe in a drawer at home. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/free42/id337692629 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/free42/id337692629 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thomasokken.free42&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thomasokke...

libria 7y ago
The rendering on that 42s is close enough that I can almost feel the buttons. Never thought I'd describe a calculator as sensual, but HP's of that era had such a distinct look and feel.
- drivers99 7y ago
  This is a great find. I used a 42S heavily through high school and college. I was surprised at how some of the muscle memory of how I did certain things came back. Seeing the dot matrix answer after doing some calculations brought back the feeling of being bored in math class, when I would just play with all the functions and write little programs. I didn't have a phone or even a laptop to turn to in those days. Even now though, it will be useful to do calculations in RPN. Even the ability to swap X and Y, and store intermediate results in order to avoid parentheses or M buttons is nice.
  - joezydeco 7y ago
    I felt the same way. And once you're comfortable with RPN, it's really hard to go back. Painful, even.

dahart 7y ago

Boy does that bring back memories of the 1990s! Some of these are not obscure at all, but absolutely standard. Xterm was the shell, I’m not sure there were even alternatives in early X. Xbiff+Xload+Xclock used to be on everybody’s desktop. XV was the main image viewer on X for a long time. Anybody remember xvacuum? I guess it’s truly obscure since it didn’t make the list. One of my favorite tricks to play on other people in the lab, before X security was a thing, was to run xvacuum on other people’s displays ... it slowly sucks everything on the screen into the mouse cursor. If the page maintainer is reading, Xsnow has a calculator in the screenshot covering the snow. This one is a bit obscure, but I loved xsnow, so I think it deserves a calculator-less view! :)

app4soft 7y ago
What about AzPainter?[0] It's really cool image editor based on X11, that still is obscure competitor to GIMP and Krita ;-) [0] https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter
- leafo 7y ago
  This is a great program, essentially PaintTool SAI recreated for Linux
  - app4soft 7y ago
    > recreated for Linux Not only for Linux, but for FreeBSD/OpenBSD and Mac OS too![0] [0] https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter/wiki/Packaging-status https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter/wiki/Packaging-status

jhallenworld 7y ago

xphoon is missing Also I seem to remember a multiuser 3d tank game, maybe xtank? I don't really remember.

kbrackbill 7y ago
bzflag?
- jhallenworld 7y ago
  Maybe, it worked on Decstation 2100s and 3100s (black and white) around 1992. Everybody in the computer lab was playing it.

jhallenworld 7y ago

Oh xfig is missing. I still use this awesome program for drawings. It's primitive but in many ways faster to use than inkscape.

jordigh 7y ago
xfig also has one of the few implementations of x-splines (x means "cross" here, like "pedestrian xing", unrelated to the X window system). I find x-splines very nice and intuitive. Here's a little x-spline implementation I made: https://jordi.platinum.edu.pl/xsplines/splines.html https://jordi.platinum.edu.pl/xsplines/splines.html

rhabarba 7y ago

Vim is VERY obscure.

joshu 7y ago

how about xbattle?

donio 7y ago

xantfarm is another one I like, ant farm in your root window https://acme.com/software/xantfarm/ https://acme.com/software/xantfarm/

adrianmonk 7y ago

Fun point of trivia about XBill: you might not guess from XBill's (ahem) slick, beautiful user interface, but one of the two people who wrote XBill is Matias Duarte. Yes, that Matias Duarte, the guy in charge of UI for Android and who came up with Material Design.

coribuci 7y ago
There is not much of a GUI in XBill- just a bloody program with a menu and a window. The same can be said about Android - Windows 1.0 rereleased. From an engineering point of view XBill is a better achievement than the GUI of Android.

gramakri 7y ago

Let me add my own cool but obscure project KDocker. You can use kdocker to move any app to the system tray :) These days it's maintained by john at https://github.com/user-none/KDocker https://github.com/user-none/KDocker Edit: oh wow, I actually tried it again now and it actually works! Crazy, this was a tool I wrote like 12-13 years ago. I also found the initial sourceforge page - http://kdocker.sourceforge.net/ http://kdocker.sourceforge.net/

a3n 7y ago

Obscure today, but many of these were merely how things were done back then.

jansc 7y ago

I used XFontSel two days ago to find a font for my StumpWM mode line. Still works like a charm. Also, I miss XFig on the list. Still growing strong! The last release is from May 2018. I use it occasionally to create diagrams for presentations.

kfir 7y ago

To read that "editors/vim" is an obscure tool is nothing short of astonishing.

ksangeelee 7y ago
To be fair, it's Gvim that's listed, which presumably is bundled with the main vim package. I had some vague awareness there was a GUI version of Vim, but only just checked it out after spotting it in the list. The menus serve as a handy reference for common commands. Quite good really.

zbuf 7y ago

Does anyone know what happened to xpool?

billfruit 7y ago

Some more obscure games were there, for example Sun Microsystems once released a book about games available on Solaris, which included a flight simulator amongst many others. Though I am unable to recollect the name.

rconti 7y ago

I used xearth as my desktop for ages -- it doesn't have to be run in a window. Xeyes and xclock were my go-to tests to make sure x11 forwarding was working properly.

CalChris 7y ago

xcostena. It was an X application written at SGI which took an order and faxed it to La Costena, a taqueria on Rengstorff (at the time). It might have been the first case of e-commerce on the internet and this was pre-web.

kijiki 7y ago
La Costena is still around, it just moved further down Middlefield towards Sunnyvale, right before Ellis. Sun had a similar app that would fax orders to Tony and Alba's pizza, though that closed a few years ago.
- CalChris 7y ago
  Yeah, tatool. https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-pizzatool-2a7992b4c797 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems...

Pete_D 7y ago

Not sure if it counts as obscure, but to add to the note on xclipboard: xclip, which lets you change and inspect the primary selection/clipboard from the command line.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

st3fan 7y ago

xeyes!

aap_ 7y ago

I have the catclock in my xinitrc.

mastrsushi 7y ago

I didn't know there was an Xgalaga. Linux Emulators aren't the best, inevitably. Hope it's fluid on limited hardware

jhbadger 7y ago
It was pretty good if I recall (from twenty years ago), but not exactly like like arcade game. I sort of miss games like that -- Xchomp (a Pac-Man game) is another. Before the advent of emulators, programmers used to make versions of arcade games that they hadn't seen in years, making them (intentionally or not) different from their inspirations.

zzo38computer 7y ago

Sometimes xterm is still used; I use xterm. It is still being maintained, too. I also sometimes use xfontsel. I do not think these are so obscure, isn't it? Some of them, although I do not use them, I would not think they are so obscure, such as xbiff, xload, xclock (I have the functions of all three programs in another program I wrote, to display on a status line).