16 ms·

Cool, but obscure X11 tools (2019)

311 points by RalfWausE 3y ago

alangibson 3y ago
FWIW GLXGears is still in common use by those stress testing LinuxCNC systems
_fat_santa 3y ago
Actually I hear about GLX Gears pretty often, usually as a test step in setting up graphics drivers. But personally I am super fond of TiEmu because that's what I used all through college. As I got more and more into my CS coursework I found that I really didn't need my TI-84 _most_ of the time but I still needed it _some_ of the time. TiEmu helped shave about 1lb off my heavy backpack and let my brother use my Ti-84 for HS/College.
- fullstop 3y ago
  I used a lot of these in the late 90s and early 2000s. I guess I'm just old, but a lot of them don't seem that obscure.
kuschkufan 3y ago
Some not so obscure ones too. Seems like a general app listing of the X11 days. Who doesn't remember XEyes, XBiff, XClock, XEdit, Xev, XKill (!), Xv (!!), XMosaic (!!!) ... many others on there. Granted I did not know FSV2 and some others. Nice collection, glad to not have to run any of them. Not saying they weren't useful for their time!
- pkulak 3y ago
  I use XEyes all the time to find out if an app is running in Wayland or XWayland.
  - em-bee 3y ago
    how does xeyes help with that? does it fail to track the mouse on wayland apps? i can see that would be useful. i actually have problems with XWayland, it frequently (every few days), goes to a 100% CPU and locks up the screen. then i have to remote login and kill it, at which point i see which apps die, so i know what is using XWayland from that. :-)
    - bcrescimanno 3y ago
      > does it fail to track the mouse on wayland apps? Exactly. It will work properly if the app is using XWayland and fail for native Wayland.
  - hollerith 3y ago
    Another way to do it is the xlsclients command. Also, I can reliably tell based on the fact that the contents of the XWayland windows are fuzzier. I can do that because I have had lots of practice discerning fuzziness, because I am using a old monitor (as opposed to a HiDPI display) and because I have a fractional (non-integral) scaling factor declared in my monitors.xml file--when the scaling factor is set to 1.0 there is no difference in fuzziness as far as I can tell.
- jcelerier 3y ago
  I still use xev regularly and xkill pretty much everyday? Along with xclip (everyday too), xdotool (for automation workflows)... glxgears very often too to check if for some reason the GPU driver bailed out
  - bzzzt 3y ago
    It's 2023 and there are stable graphical operating systems that don't make you check 'if the GPU driver bailed out' every 15 minutes...
    - Krssst 3y ago
      Do they also not include telemetry or forcefully installed software you never asked for but cannot remove anyway and will remind you of their existence ar every opportunity?
      - dgfitz 3y ago
        Yes.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - failuser 3y ago
      It’s more of the driver’s fault, right? BTE, Windows has a Ctrl+Shift+Win+B shortcut to restart the graphics driver if it bails out.
      - reaperducer 3y ago
        Windows has a Ctrl+Shift+Win+B shortcut to restart the graphics driver if it bails out. The fact that Windows has a built-in shortcut to restart the graphics driver illustrates that graphics drivers are not as faultless as the parent poster believes.
      - jcelerier 3y ago
        ohhhh I didn't know this one (as I have of course the same problem on windows regularly on that machine but then I just reboot)
- drewg123 3y ago
  I still use xv to look at images, GLXGears to debug GL issues, and xev to debug any weird keymapping issues, and xterm as a visually different terminal for things like monitoring console output.
  - kristopolous 3y ago
    The xv guy might still be accepting payment. I wonder how much he gets these days http://www.trilon.com/xv/ http://www.trilon.com/xv/
  - ttctciyf 3y ago
    It's such a quick and handy tool that I became habituated to xv over a decade of use. Some years ago though, I found it was no longer available to install after an upgrade. I was eventually able to fudge a working version from old code and patches and taking hints (iirc) from some patches for MacOS, but now that has suffered bitrot. So I'm curious what OS you're running and where your xv is from? Still miss it!
    - hulitu 3y ago
      xv runs perfectly on linux (Slackware 64)
      - ttctciyf 3y ago
        Thanks!
- foobarbecue 3y ago
  xkill is frequently useful at my work, unfortunately
- em-bee 3y ago
  right, xterm is obscure? but xmosaic should count of obscure today because now it only works on old and obscure websites ;-)
  - II2II 3y ago
    For those who are relatively new to X, it is likely very obscure. People seem to be using desktop environments these days, and desktop environments come with their own terminal application. Those seeking out replacement terminals would probably stumble across xterm, but how many would actually try it? It's feature list isn't exactly designed for those with modern sensibilities. (I was using xterm until very recently, mostly because it used sharp rasterized display fonts. Now that I have a reasonably high DPI display, it is easier to use nearly anything else.)
    - em-bee 3y ago
      with that argument every X11 app that isn't gnome/gtk or kde/qt is obscure. but then that is pretty much what the list shows, so maybe that's the authors definition as well.
    - lelanthran 3y ago
      > For those who are relatively new to X, it is likely very obscure. People seem to be using desktop environments these days, and desktop environments come with their own terminal application. Those seeking out replacement terminals would probably stumble across xterm, but how many would actually try it? It's really very configurable. My problem with mate-terminal and similar is that they don't often let me set a cursor color independent of the foreground color. I like to code C projects in a single vim session running in a terminal; by having a bright green fast-blinking block cursor I can visually locate where my cursor is after reading code in a different split. So, yeah, I use xterm (or uxterm) because of this single feature that I value of any other feature it might be missing.
  - fuzztester 3y ago
    I used to use xterm -fn 24 & on HP-UX workstations and servers. Even on Linux maybe, earlier.
- bitwize 3y ago
  Most Linux users these days run GNOME or KDE and have never heard of these janky little apps linked directly against xlib.
  - Brian_K_White 3y ago
    I wanted to test something on a "normal" system so I started a new Fedora 38 vm. gnome 44.2. What an incredibly obtuse, unhelpful, un-useful interface. I don't know about kde but definitely gnome does not get to charge anyone else with any words like janky.
- morsch 3y ago
  Is there an xkill equivalent for Wayland yet?
- wkat4242 3y ago
  I always thought xbiff was named after the back to the future character. Turns out it was named after one of the campus dogs instead :)
  - mcguire 3y ago
    Heidi Stettner's dog, at the Berkeley CSRG. (Ok, I had to look up her last name. I'm getting old.)
- evilotto 3y ago
  It's a UNIX system! I know this!
- stOneskull 3y ago
  it's a bit of fun running them in wsl
darkwater 3y ago
TIL about XLennart, which it's somehow funny but I still think is undeserved On the other hand I knew XBill for decades and that was totally deserved.
- maxmalkav 3y ago
  I did not find the XLennart very graceful neither. I admit I am also biased about the original XBill one.
- greggh 3y ago
  As strongly as anyone can disagree with something, I disagree with the "undeserved" part of this.
- prosody 3y ago
  It’s a little bit interesting to me that XBill has the eponymous figure replacing a diverse ecosystem of OSes, not just Linuxen, with his own. That probably is a sign of the times, when that diversity existed in fact and you might be playing that game on an HP-UX or another prediluvian machine. Maybe not though, maybe the waters were already rising. You might even imagine with some fairness an XTorvalds in which you vainly try to save the BSDs and proprietary Unixen from a Linux monoculture. It makes it easier for me to charitably accept how some systemd detractors describe themselves as for init diversity, even if non-systemd and non-sysvinit inits on Linux seem like a curiosity, rather than assuming that they are just contrarian. It is part of a tradition of valuing a variety of ideas and implementations of ideas, even when it becomes quixotic.
camel-cdr 3y ago
Not that obscure but I recently started doing "xeyes debugging". We have so many debug logs that trying to find your log of a background task, takes a non zero amount of time. So just inserting system("xeyes"); is actually way easier, to get instant feedback, and you can just use system("xmessage msg"), if you need a message.
- epilys 3y ago
  I read somewhere, don't remember where, that xeyes can be used with xwayland to see if a window is wayland or X11: because the cursor position is private in Wayland windows, the xeyes will stop moving.
KingOfCoders 3y ago
XPilot! And my favorite X11 game: XBattle
- arethuza 3y ago
  xtank as well!
  - KingOfCoders 3y ago
    Yes I remember playing that one too.
- tpoindex 3y ago
  Adding two of my favorites: XMorph - blends two images together: https://xmorph.sourceforge.net/home/gourlay/public_html/Xmorph/ https://xmorph.sourceforge.net/home/gourlay/public_html/Xmor... ACM - Aerial Combat Simulator: https://www.gnu.org/software/acm/ https://www.gnu.org/software/acm/
  - em-bee 3y ago
    xmorph was awesome. i'd love to see a more modern version of that that produces better quality results.
- NelsonMinar 3y ago
  XBattle is a great game and seems ripe for re-discovery and re-implementing, maybe as a mobile game. It shares some elements with RTS games but had its own vibe. There've been a few XBattle clones in the last 20 years, mostly Flash games, but none really took off. It's a great game mechanic.
- evilotto 3y ago
  And xconq
  - euroderf 3y ago
    Bringing the grognard experience to computers.
swayvil 3y ago
This is why easy coding is important. It opens the floodgates of creative production. In the fine arts we call it a plastic medium. A medium that's easy to edit. It's why we sculpt out of clay instead of beercans.
- marcus0x62 3y ago
  I don't know if I'm missing your point, you're overly nostalgic, or you just never had to write a substantial X Window app back when most of these apps were developed, but nothing about that development environment was easy. It was full of incredibly verbose, buggy API calls with a bunch of platform-specific bugs and everything was manual.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
eager_noob 3y ago
GNUJump doesn't really belong in a list that suggests installing packages with pkg, but that's the one this brings to the mind.
swayvil 3y ago
I love Angband deeply.
dark-star 3y ago
How can a page like this miss out on Xaos, one of the coolest fractal programs for X11 :-D https://xaos-project.github.io/ https://xaos-project.github.io/
- evilotto 3y ago
  don't forget xfractint
naillo 3y ago
Hey gvim isn't obscure..
- mike_hock 3y ago
  Nor is xterm. Or xcalc. Or xclock.
JackFr 3y ago
What about XTartan and Xrisk???
- timthorn 3y ago
  Many happy hours playing XRisk and XPilot at work 25 years ago :)
- jghn 3y ago
  And XTank! Loved XTank. My friends & I wound up getting the source as we found out the version we had deployed on our university's system was older and missed out on a lot of cool tanks & features.
renox 3y ago
I wouldn't put NEdit in the 'obscure X11 Apps' category. It's very useful, for example to visualise logs.
bee_rider 3y ago
Is x2x considered obscure? I always thought it was remnant of a much cooler alternative branch we could have gone down for UI, but didn’t.
- mikecoles 3y ago
  I've been using Barrier as a shared keyboard and mouse for a couple of years. Works well. I haven't played with x2x. Thank you for the tip.
oaththrowaway 3y ago
XBill is one I had forgotten about for a long time
NoboruWataya 3y ago
Surprised not to see Xpdf on this list. I actually used it until fairly recently as I just wanted a simple, no-frills PDF viewer (I now use Zathura instead).
- philsnow 3y ago
  I loved Xpdf, it was part of my weird "tex->pdf REPL", which was just % xpdf -remote work output.pdf & [1] % inotifywait --monitor ... | \ while read; do \ make && xpdf -remote work -reload done At the time, xpdf was the only PDF reader that wouldn't eagerly try to re-read the PDF file the instant it noticed a change. ps2pdf / latexpdf etc don't write the file atomically, so other PDF readers would display garbage (and then not re-display after latexpdf was finished) and usually lose the page that I was looking at. With xpdf I could do xpdf -reload after my build finished, and it would retain my place (as long as I hadn't `\if 0`ed the place I was looking at out of existence).
- hulitu 3y ago
  xpdf was updated. It is terrible now.
lelanthran 3y ago
Strangely enough, I have run and used every single item on that list, with the exception of xwpe. How did I not know that this existed? TIL that: sudo apt-get install xwpe actually works! Will have to play with this later.
- Aachen 3y ago
  xwpe being a > Borland-like integrated development environment (IDE)
  - zerr 3y ago
    There was also RHIDE.
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      Which was deadly slow, it used delay loops for timing IIRC. Not a bad product otherwise. The Borland IDE still feels like home to me.
kristopolous 3y ago
It says last updated in 2022 but I swear this list reads like it's from 1997. I appreciate it nonetheless. I browsed around the site and I found this collection which I like a bit more https://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/index3.html https://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/index3.html It appears to be in roughly alphabetical order by topic, which is quite an accomplishment
- klooney 3y ago
  The cool kids don't make x11 apps anymore.
- codetrotter 3y ago
  Well then again, some things are timeless yk
- AnonCoward42 3y ago
  You might be onto something > Dock app that simply counts down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds left until 00:00 January 1, 2000. https://cyber.dabamos.de/unix/x11/#wmy2k https://cyber.dabamos.de/unix/x11/#wmy2k
  - codetrotter 3y ago
    What does it do now? Count increasingly negative numbers?
    - koprulusector 3y ago
      Random thought: should they be “decreasingly negative numbers,” since technically moving left of 0 is a decrease?
      - codetrotter 3y ago
        Possibly. To me, sign and absolute value are often separate concerns. The series 1, 2, 3, … is increasingly positive. The series -1, -2, -3, … is increasingly negative. But I understand, and accept, that others may think differently about numbers.
ralferoo 3y ago
Somehow missing XDaliClock which has around seemingly forever. It's better than most of the clocks they included.
- buildsjets 3y ago
  If they did list or link to it, JWZ would probably revert all the graphics to hairy testicles.
- mikecoles 3y ago
  `xdaliclock -cycle -transparent ` was my favorite way of running it. Hide the window decorations and it was lovely.
kangalioo 3y ago
In what way are these "X11 apps"? Aren't those just "GUI apps that support X11"? Which is not a particularly special trait, because it applies to every Linux compatible Desktop app?
- tmalsburg2 3y ago
  You interpret X11 apps as a technical descriptor, but I think it's more a description of the ecosystem in which these apps evolved and whose culture they represent.
  - kangalioo 3y ago
    I see, thanks for explaining
- koprulusector 3y ago
  X is the client and server for rendering pixels on to a screen, which is mapped to one of more monitors. It provides the most basic, bare bones way to draw a window to the screen, and that’s about it. It’s not even a GNU/Linux thing, X predates Linux, it’s more of the standard system to draw a window on Unix-like systems. X11 apps are GUI apps uncontrolled by/unaware of a desktop environment, theme engine, or window manager. They appear in a minimalist, maybe even brutalist, aesthetic. You can launch a single X11 app from the console, and the resulting window will be your entire graphical display/instance, returning you to the console after the program terminates execution. Maybe another way to think about your question might be, think of X vs Wayland.
  - kangalioo 3y ago
    Interesting > You can launch a single X11 app from the console, and the resulting window will be your entire graphical display/instance, returning you to the console after the program terminates execution. Is this not possible with GUI apps using e.g. Qt or Electron?
- saint_yossarian 3y ago
  Also most (all?) of these apps use xlib directly, rather than going through a toolkit like Gtk or Qt.
codetrotter 3y ago
> XLennart > XLennart is a modification of the arcade game XBill. An evil and unpopular computer hacker named “Lennart” 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 machines. Hah! Poor Poettering tho. He really gets a lot of hate '=(
- supriyo-biswas 3y ago
  The hate towards Lennart is truly regrettable. I like how systemd has enabled managing and securing daemons easy (Before=, After=, CPUQuota=, ProtectSystem=, ReadWritePaths= to name a few of them.)
  - panzi 3y ago
    Never had any problem with systemd, but I did have problems with PulseAudio — the high latency audio server. (These days it seems to work good enough, still looking forward to PipeWire.)
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      Pipewire is ready. Solved all my bluetooth headphone troubles too, I haven't had a single audio frustration since I switched. I believe pipewire is already the default in Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora
      - yakubin 3y ago
        Yeah. It's actually funny how Pipewire and Wayland turned out. Wayland was supposed to be ready for general use "any day now" since 2011. It's 2023 and the situation looks thus: <https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers>. Whereas Pipewire seemed to have scarcely any marketing, instead it just happened. I remember reading about it for the first time at some point and started wondering whether Debian, a conservative distro, turned it on or whether I should change a setting to opt into it. I looked at htop and lo and behold: Pipewire was there. So it happened before I even heard about it, without a single hiccup, so smoothly that I didn't even notice the sound system changed.
r9550684 3y ago
I remember spending some non-insignificant amount of time playing 3dpong, because that was the first time I got exposed to a wireframe game. I thought the formalism was delightful, it felt very cyberpunk. My first 3d game was probably Stunts, a racing game that used flat shading (there was also Abrahams tank, but I never got into it as much as some of the older people in my circle), and then there was a lot of games that used a kind of hybrid sprite, flat shading, texturing mapping approach, from wolfenstein to Daggerfall. I got 3dpong from a Slackware cd, which was also my first linux install, back when linux was cool :> I was democoding, so probably implementing phong reflection on a sierpinski cube which was a style at the time, and here was a game that established an entire 3d experience space with just a handful of lines. (some might ask "how the hell did you not know about Elite or Tempest??" before pervasive internet discovery was a non-linear process, I think I learned about these games in the early 2000s, from the internet)
- pizzapill 3y ago
  Feel like Stunts is such a sleeper retro game so many played and nobody ever talks about. Incredible fully customizable levels with massive obstacles rendered in 3D. In 1990, 3 years before doom.
  - pengaru 3y ago
    Stunts was fun but would often send my vehicle infinitely skyward from bugs in the tracks having jumps... that kind of ruined the simulation
    - pizzapill 3y ago
      You got a flight simulator for free and you are complaining? :)
  - r9550684 3y ago
    I sometimes think we collectively rewrite our past for the common denominator. have people always been doing that, or it's an internet phenomenon? like maybe you listened to Andy gibb or The Bee Gees in the 70s, but you retrospectively remember that you somehow was Black Sabbath's biggest fan, even though that wasn't the circles you've spent time in at all. I sometimes have to consciously remind myself that I haven't played chrono trigger until 2005, or that I clocked some unreasonable amount of hours playing rise of the triad, Star Wars dark forces and Ultima underworld, rather than the whatever's on the list of top 90s video games.
okasaki 3y ago
sunclock is a favourite of mine, and I can't find any newer alternative.
nmstoker 3y ago
When I see screenshots with window decorators like that I always wonder if there's someone actually using an ancient computer or if the screenshots are just really really old. I tend to guess it's the latter.
- msla 3y ago
  It's entirely possible to run that window manager on a modern system.
- koprulusector 3y ago
  This is how modern X applications look by default. It’s gtk, compositors, and window managers that add/change the aesthetics.
  - josephcsible 3y ago
    If you're just running an X server and a single program, I thought you didn't get any decorations at all.
  - asveikau 3y ago
    Window decorator has a specific meaning in X terminology, referring to the frame of the window done by the window manager. The screenshots are using some commercial Unix wm (mwm?) or one of the free ones that copies their look (fvwm?) I use fvwm on one of my machines in 2023, in part because I found myself on a retro kick a few years ago, so I don't think it's that weird, though it is extremely dated.
    - LeFantome 3y ago
      Super fast and light.
- timthorn 3y ago
  That's just CDE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment
- 3y ago
phkahler 3y ago
Xpilot, xanim, xterm?
- hulitu 3y ago
  Xanim was the first free video player.
jghn 3y ago
`xneko` brings back memories. My freshman year at university we were on X terminals where they came in a little pack of several stations. Each of them had X authority on the others within the same pack. People quickly learned they could open a billion `xneko`s on another person's screen to completely lock them up.
- supportengineer 3y ago
  Someone did it to me with a single Xeyes window. I was in my dorm room by myself at the time!
  - jghn 3y ago
    At some point people figured out they could plaster another person's screen with porn via `xv`. But then someone else discovered that meant you could go in and Save File to the original user's directory. Once people realized that giving people write access to their directory wasn't a wise idea, this practice stopped.
    - em-bee 3y ago
      xv was the wrong tool, there are others that would have been able to project images without giving the receiver the ability to write to your directory. the most obnoxious would have been to set the background, because that's not easy to undo if you don't know how. when i was a student i used to hang out in the computer halls until late at night. being one of the last ones there i was often able to get use of the one sun workstation that had a color screen. one night the sysadmin logged remotely into the machine i was using and played "always look on the bright side of life"
- watersb 3y ago
  There was a mode, included with the After Dark screen saver for classic macOS, that was basically an xneko port, named “Neko Neko”.
Brendinooo 3y ago
The first item on the list (3D Pong) looks like it could have been the inspiration for Strong Bad's famous "your head a splode" game
LispSporks22 3y ago
I never got a chance to write UIs using Motif. Was it pleasant to work with?
- coliveira 3y ago
  It is similar to write win32 apps. Of course the C compilers were way better than MS, but on the other hand no IDE with autocompletion was available. Similar to the MS world, people did anything to avoid writing C apps, so Tcl/TK was born.
dumdumchan 3y ago
Did anyone ever create a video player titled xvideo?
- helb 3y ago
  not a player, but there was (is?) xvideo extension: https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.5/doc/man/man3/Xv.3.html https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.5/doc/man/man3/Xv.3.html i remember it as an mplayer output option mplayer -vo xv [file]
gsliepen 3y ago
A great list, although I'm not seeing xteddy, xkoules and spellcast in it.
vzaliva 3y ago
I used to run Xroach to freak out colleagues. You move a window and they scramble! Tiling window manager I am using nowadays made it obsolette :)
ceving 3y ago
Xterm obscure? I use it all the day.
boredumb 3y ago
Seeing GLXGears is giving me a panic attack thinking about setting up linux on a shitty old laptop years ago and trying to get world of warcraft to boot up.
rwl4 3y ago
OpenBSD has a ton of obscure x11 games and apps in their ports collection if you want to play with a different subset than FreeBSD's ports includes. I spent a whole evening enjoying the UNIX archaeology contained in their repo.
marinhero 3y ago
GLXGears was my command of choice to verify if my graphics drivers were installed. Either they would run smoothly (when installed) or choppy and broken. Can’t use that anymore because the APUs and generic drivers got so good that everything runs smoothly. Good times.
- squarefoot 3y ago
  Yes, I recall using GLXInfo in a xterm window to check whether I correctly installed graphics drivers or not. "Direct Rendering: Yes" would confirm that. Good old times indeed.
  - CamouflagedKiwi 3y ago
    And you could tell based on whether it ran at ~100FPS or several thousand. I assume that doesn't work so well any more...
    - sitzkrieg 3y ago
      it used to be slideshow vs 30fps on some cards back in the day
  - Inhibit 3y ago
    That'll still work to see which driver is running. Might want to append "| head -30" so you don't get all the unnecessary debug for your answer, though. Or grep for what you're expecting (i.e. "| grep -i nvidia").
  - sgt 3y ago
    Was it using xdpyinfo or driconf or something? Muscle memory tells me it's somewhere around there.
- anthk 3y ago
  glxgears -info | less
panzi 3y ago
gvim and xterm are obscure now? O_o
haolez 3y ago
I sometimes wonder what a modern desktop would look like if every app had the Motif look. I wonder if the consistency of this experience would surpass the subjective ugliness of it.
- mixmastamyk 3y ago
  The SGI Irix 4dwm used it and was pleasing to the eye. Also had vector icons. Add 4k, text antialiasing, and an updated terminal and I think would look and work quite well.
- hulitu 3y ago
  I find Motif good looking and practical. I like visual feedback when i press a button. Using modern UI without borders, with cluttered title bars, with tiny scrollbars is a PITA.
ptx 3y ago
> A simple RTF editor for X11. [...] Prone to crashing. That makes is pretty useless as a word processor, unless it has a really robust auto-save system. Anyway, the Plan calendar thing looked neat, but I don't think it's packaged in Arch.
- anthk 3y ago
  The GTK2 port of Ted it's better.
wkat4242 3y ago
For me xfishtank would top the list. I still use it sometimes. Xblast was also cool. It would transform the mouse pointer into a crosshairs and if you clicked it would shoot a hole in the window that you could actually see through. It was really fun to annoy first year students at uni before xauth was implemented. Xeyes too of course with some --geometry to make it full screen. Did that with a huge video wall once (nearly got me fired but I was just an intern. So worth it)
- hawflakes 3y ago
  Wow. I remember a different Xblast. This was a multiplayer Bomberman clone: https://xblast.sourceforge.net https://xblast.sourceforge.net
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Hmm maybe it was called xblaster. Not so sure now. But blast and x were definitely part of the name.
Thrymr 3y ago
Free42 is also available as an iOS app!
rcarmo 3y ago
Wow. I know most of those (and used a CDE desktop environment, so the window decorations really take me back). Kind of weird to realise so much time has past.
rdtsc 3y ago
Speaking of FSV2, I remember randomly discovering fsn on the SGI Irix as an intern and realizing it was the cool 3D file browser from Jurassic park. I thought it was a special effect prop for the movie and then to my surprise it was an actual working application.
- timetraveller26 3y ago
  I just wish the VR UI from Community were real too <https://youtu.be/z4FGzE4endQ https://youtu.be/z4FGzE4endQ>
metrix 3y ago
I'm sad that xsnow doesn't work on modern environments. Having Snow fall on top of windows was really cool
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  Still werks for me, I use it every year. I think it even has some wayland support, but I haven't tried that.
- hulitu 3y ago
  1.42 version works flawlessly. The new version is a disaster.
guessbest 3y ago
NEdit was perfect when I was transitioning from Windows to Linux in the late 90s early 2000s. It was even in Slackware. Also, I miss the large clear, 16/256 color icons from the win 3.0 and 1990's unix era.
- chris_j 3y ago
  NEdit was my main editor for a few years after I started using UNIX in the late 90s but couldn't get the hang of vi and emacs. I have fond memories of using it and I'm pretty sad that it was so tied to Motif that it never developed further. I used it on Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and even Windows (via Cygwin). I kind of miss using an editor so uncomplicated.
  - nequo 3y ago
    Wouldn't gedit do this today? It looks like gedit works on Windows too: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Gedit#Installation https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Gedit#Installation
    - chris_j 3y ago
      Many thanks. I did use gedit for a while, though I confess I never became as fond of it as I had been of NEdit. It does tick the "uncomplicated text editor" box though.
- anthk 3y ago
  https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1920644 https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1920644 and https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Solaris-8 https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Solaris-8 Change the GTK settings as always. Or use lxappearance.
somat 3y ago
This list is how I discovered xsunclock. which quickly became my poster child for everything I love about computing. It is very clearly a labor of love. It follows no ui guideline known to man(I like to refer to these sort of programs as following the R'llyeh school of design). It is just barely on this side of usable but offers an unmatched set of timekeeping options. It is pretty great.
- shrubble 3y ago
  The program xsunclock uses the look and feel of the Open Look toolkit, which is a programming toolkit from Sun that pre-dates Motif and others, but it definitely looks quite different from other GUI toolkits.
ben7799 3y ago
Definitely a blast from the past. I haven't really been using a linux desktop the last 10 years. Especially in college in the late 90s I remember using/trying a lot of these application. Some of these like XBiff were standard things almost all of us setup as we configured out desktops. Mostly we were using FVWM but you had to basically build your own environment. When I was in school the campus computers were basically a mix of Sun, IBM RS6000, and SGI, and the IT department had everything configured extremely nicely where you could log onto any machine and your desktop appeared and all your files were there and everything just kind of transparently worked as if you were always using the same computer, even though the machines were all different versions of Unix. For non programming work it just worked. For my CS stuff you would just have to recompile on the current arch you were on. Gnome and KDE didn't appear till about my 3rd year.. I don't think any of them were really available on the school machines unless you built it yourself and did the work to configure your environment to use them. So we used a lot of these old school X11 programs. I never had any money for a TV, game console, etc.. at that point and actually played some of these amateurish X11 games for fun. None of them were good enough to hold your attention very long but there were a lot of them to try. Some were really good for the time, like Netrek. The graphics were not amazing but the multiplayer gameplay was well ahead of it's time.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > Gnome and KDE didn't appear till about my 3rd year.. I don't think any of them were really available on the school machines unless you built it yourself and did the work to configure your environment to use them. That brings back painful memories of getting Gnome (v1, perhaps) compiled and running properly; was it "the Gnu Network Object Model Environment" or similar?
Brian_K_White 3y ago
I was working on a small bash notification client, and I wanted some simple universal apps to use in the examples for actions (run a command when a notification, or a button on it, is clicked) and was shocked to discover that xterm is no longer a safe assumption.
urinotherapist 3y ago
XPilot is missing. https://www.xpilot.org/ https://www.xpilot.org/
- ttctciyf 3y ago
  Also xlander ( apparently maintained! https://github.com/ac000/xlander https://github.com/ac000/xlander )
mzd348 3y ago
I also remember a lot of these from the 90s. But I didn't see xphoon, that was a pretty cool one to display a (fairly) detailed picture of the current phase of the moon in your root window/desktop.
squarefoot 3y ago
Possibly not old enough to be included in that list, but my oldest piece of desktop software I always run on my main machine is GKrellm with BubbleFishyMon as system load monitor. http://gkrellm.srcbox.net/ http://gkrellm.srcbox.net/
- philsnow 3y ago
  This is giving me strong nostalgia, I loved gkrellm ~20 years ago because of how densely it showed information. I stopped using it eventually because it used a non-trivial amount of CPU just displaying stuff.
  - squarefoot 3y ago
    I noticed this too, but setting refresh to low values, like 5 per second, reduces considerably the CPU use.
froseph 3y ago
One I dont see mentioned is Xnest (or its successor Xephyr). In a previous life, used it all the time to debug apps in multiple desktop environments.
- xioxox 3y ago
  I like xvfb-run which runs GUI X11 applications in a headless mode.
  - philsnow 3y ago
    One of my favorite bits of software is Xpra [0], "screen for X". You'd run it and it would start another X server (start apps in it with `DISPLAY=:1 xterm` or whatever), and you would "attach" it to your running X server with `xpra attach`. You can attach to e.g. `ssh://hostname/:1`, so I ran a firefox instance on a homelab server and attached to it from my laptop and my desktop to not have to bother keeping bookmarks, tabs etc in sync. [0] https://xpra.org/ https://xpra.org/
- lelanthran 3y ago
  Good one. I recall, around 2004, using it on Windows, under Cygwin, to run cygwin-compiled X apps on Windows. I'm not sure how that worked at all, to be honest. I hope my memory is not playing tricks on me again.
- philsnow 3y ago
  My (less-than-half-baked) master's thesis has a screenshot of Xnest, which I was using to demonstrate some ridiculously primitive precursor to kernel namespaces, IIRC
fuzztester 3y ago
There was one called xlsfonts which would list all the available fonts. https://www.x.org/archive/X11R7.5/doc/man/man1/xlsfonts.1.html https://www.x.org/archive/X11R7.5/doc/man/man1/xlsfonts.1.ht...
- zbuf 3y ago
  If you're thinking of an X11 GUI, I think perhaps you mean xfontsel?
  - fuzztester 3y ago
    No, I meant xlsfonts, as in the above man page I linked to. It is a command line tool and can be used without a GUI. You can even query for the fonts on another X server's display (1). See this excerpt: -display host:dpy This option specifies the X server to contact. (1) - where the meaning of server and client is the reverse of that of traditional client server.
    - zbuf 3y ago
      Fair, I was thinking that because its not actually an X11 GUI (though it is X11 of course) Its fun to query or set information on a remote. The same applies to xdpyinfo, xset, xrandr and many more support the -display option (if they don't then set the DISPLAY environment variable).
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
29athrowaway 3y ago
A missing one: ddd debugger A debugger that can represent data structures like linked lists graphically.
- db48x 3y ago
  Sadly, changes to gdb have made ddd somewhat unreliable. Also, it has a lot of trouble dealing with programs written in Rust :)
  - 29athrowaway 3y ago
    Because it is unmaintained
    - db48x 3y ago
      Yep.
      - 29athrowaway 3y ago
        For educational purposes it is still useful.
mcpackieh 3y ago
xev is extremely useful; a natural counterpart to xbindkeys and very useful when you're trying to reconfigure your keyboard mappings. xsnow is maybe my favorite from this list, I install it every winter for the holidays.
krylon 3y ago
I'm not sure I would describe gvim as obscure. But this is certainly an interesting list.
pjmlp 3y ago
I guess it is time for some beers, I recognise like 60% of those applications.
elkos 3y ago
nedit was awesome I really enjoyed using it on my old scrapy computer
cbsmith 3y ago
I feel old.
tildef 3y ago
Ah, I love these posts. There's always some gems popping up in the comments. My top 3 are Xaos (previously mentioned above), XEphem (https://github.com/XEphem/XEphem); https://github.com/XEphem/XEphem); an absolutely lovely ephemeris, and predict (https://www.qsl.net/kd2bd/predict.html); https://www.qsl.net/kd2bd/predict.html); the satellite tracker--which has a bunch GUI versions--for example gpredict, which I guess is more relevant for this story.
ISL 3y ago
To that list, I'd add xdiskusage.
sigio 3y ago
I'm missing XMMS, basically X winamp ;)
- lelanthran 3y ago
  I'm using qmmp (it's in the debian/ubuntu or mint repo, not sure) which is visually and functionally identical.
arethuza 3y ago
When I first learned about xmosaic in 1993 my first reaction was "nice hypertext tool though not sure why anyone would want to load documents over the Internet"....
sebastianconcpt 3y ago
Oh gee, I still have my TI-92 Plus in some drawer! So many memories, what do I do what that? So obsolete now but can't just throw away that piece of working hardware.
- mikecoles 3y ago
  Sell it. The calculators I had decades ago are still being manufactured, at a higher price than I originally paid.
dang 3y ago
Related: Cool, but Obscure X11 Tools - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29681507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29681507 - Dec 2021 (128 comments) Cool but obscure X11 tools - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20713003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20713003 - Aug 2019 (246 comments)
watersb 3y ago
Mad props for Hans Ecke’s XPlanet Resources page: http://hans.ecke.ws/xplanet/ http://hans.ecke.ws/xplanet/ For a year or three, I ran this setup on my Linux background desktop. Our team was returning to the United States after working with our colleagues at the European Southern Observatory https://www.eso.org/public/ https://www.eso.org/public/ and a flight attendant noticed the image of Earth, Moon, sun on my computer. She asked if I were interested or involved in space exploration, and I told her that we looked at stars from the ground, but could get pretty far. She bent closer to me and murmured, “The pilots have just heard from the radio, there has been an explosion of the Space Shuttle.” 2003, somewhere over Greenland. Anyway: XPlanet rocks. https://xplanet.sourceforge.net/maps.php https://xplanet.sourceforge.net/maps.php
NikkiA 3y ago
Back in 1994 I remember playing an X11 clone of missile command that alternated the traditional defense wave with an offensive wave when you attacked the attacker's cities. I've long since forgotten what it was called. I was kind of hoping it might have been on this list, but sadly it wasn't.
zbuf 3y ago
Not necessarily obscure, still rather useful. xterm & xv remain my daily tools, and xosview is still maintained here: https://www.pogo.org.uk/~mark/xosview/ https://www.pogo.org.uk/~mark/xosview/
wesapien 3y ago
Anyone here use https://github.com/google/xsecurelock https://github.com/google/xsecurelock? I found it while going through reddit.com/r/unixporn and looking at other peoples tiling window manager setups.
michaelcampbell 3y ago
I used an array of XBiff's at $previousjob on Sun Sparcs. And procmail. Good times.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

311 points by RalfWausE 3y ago

FWIW GLXGears is still in common use by those stress testing LinuxCNC systems

Actually I hear about GLX Gears pretty often, usually as a test step in setting up graphics drivers. But personally I am super fond of TiEmu because that's what I used all through college. As I got more and more into my CS coursework I found that I really didn't need my TI-84 _most_ of the time but I still needed it _some_ of the time. TiEmu helped shave about 1lb off my heavy backpack and let my brother use my Ti-84 for HS/College.

fullstop 3y ago
I used a lot of these in the late 90s and early 2000s. I guess I'm just old, but a lot of them don't seem that obscure.

kuschkufan 3y ago

Some not so obscure ones too. Seems like a general app listing of the X11 days. Who doesn't remember XEyes, XBiff, XClock, XEdit, Xev, XKill (!), Xv (!!), XMosaic (!!!) ... many others on there. Granted I did not know FSV2 and some others. Nice collection, glad to not have to run any of them. Not saying they weren't useful for their time!

pkulak 3y ago
I use XEyes all the time to find out if an app is running in Wayland or XWayland.
- em-bee 3y ago
  how does xeyes help with that? does it fail to track the mouse on wayland apps? i can see that would be useful. i actually have problems with XWayland, it frequently (every few days), goes to a 100% CPU and locks up the screen. then i have to remote login and kill it, at which point i see which apps die, so i know what is using XWayland from that. :-)
  - bcrescimanno 3y ago
    > does it fail to track the mouse on wayland apps? Exactly. It will work properly if the app is using XWayland and fail for native Wayland.
- hollerith 3y ago
  Another way to do it is the xlsclients command. Also, I can reliably tell based on the fact that the contents of the XWayland windows are fuzzier. I can do that because I have had lots of practice discerning fuzziness, because I am using a old monitor (as opposed to a HiDPI display) and because I have a fractional (non-integral) scaling factor declared in my monitors.xml file--when the scaling factor is set to 1.0 there is no difference in fuzziness as far as I can tell.
jcelerier 3y ago
I still use xev regularly and xkill pretty much everyday? Along with xclip (everyday too), xdotool (for automation workflows)... glxgears very often too to check if for some reason the GPU driver bailed out
- bzzzt 3y ago
  It's 2023 and there are stable graphical operating systems that don't make you check 'if the GPU driver bailed out' every 15 minutes...
  - Krssst 3y ago
    Do they also not include telemetry or forcefully installed software you never asked for but cannot remove anyway and will remind you of their existence ar every opportunity?
    - dgfitz 3y ago
      Yes.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - failuser 3y ago
    It’s more of the driver’s fault, right? BTE, Windows has a Ctrl+Shift+Win+B shortcut to restart the graphics driver if it bails out.
    - reaperducer 3y ago
      Windows has a Ctrl+Shift+Win+B shortcut to restart the graphics driver if it bails out. The fact that Windows has a built-in shortcut to restart the graphics driver illustrates that graphics drivers are not as faultless as the parent poster believes.
    - jcelerier 3y ago
      ohhhh I didn't know this one (as I have of course the same problem on windows regularly on that machine but then I just reboot)
drewg123 3y ago
I still use xv to look at images, GLXGears to debug GL issues, and xev to debug any weird keymapping issues, and xterm as a visually different terminal for things like monitoring console output.
- kristopolous 3y ago
  The xv guy might still be accepting payment. I wonder how much he gets these days http://www.trilon.com/xv/ http://www.trilon.com/xv/
- ttctciyf 3y ago
  It's such a quick and handy tool that I became habituated to xv over a decade of use. Some years ago though, I found it was no longer available to install after an upgrade. I was eventually able to fudge a working version from old code and patches and taking hints (iirc) from some patches for MacOS, but now that has suffered bitrot. So I'm curious what OS you're running and where your xv is from? Still miss it!
  - hulitu 3y ago
    xv runs perfectly on linux (Slackware 64)
    - ttctciyf 3y ago
      Thanks!
foobarbecue 3y ago
xkill is frequently useful at my work, unfortunately
em-bee 3y ago
right, xterm is obscure? but xmosaic should count of obscure today because now it only works on old and obscure websites ;-)
- II2II 3y ago
  For those who are relatively new to X, it is likely very obscure. People seem to be using desktop environments these days, and desktop environments come with their own terminal application. Those seeking out replacement terminals would probably stumble across xterm, but how many would actually try it? It's feature list isn't exactly designed for those with modern sensibilities. (I was using xterm until very recently, mostly because it used sharp rasterized display fonts. Now that I have a reasonably high DPI display, it is easier to use nearly anything else.)
  - em-bee 3y ago
    with that argument every X11 app that isn't gnome/gtk or kde/qt is obscure. but then that is pretty much what the list shows, so maybe that's the authors definition as well.
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    > For those who are relatively new to X, it is likely very obscure. People seem to be using desktop environments these days, and desktop environments come with their own terminal application. Those seeking out replacement terminals would probably stumble across xterm, but how many would actually try it? It's really very configurable. My problem with mate-terminal and similar is that they don't often let me set a cursor color independent of the foreground color. I like to code C projects in a single vim session running in a terminal; by having a bright green fast-blinking block cursor I can visually locate where my cursor is after reading code in a different split. So, yeah, I use xterm (or uxterm) because of this single feature that I value of any other feature it might be missing.
- fuzztester 3y ago
  I used to use xterm -fn 24 & on HP-UX workstations and servers. Even on Linux maybe, earlier.
bitwize 3y ago
Most Linux users these days run GNOME or KDE and have never heard of these janky little apps linked directly against xlib.
- Brian_K_White 3y ago
  I wanted to test something on a "normal" system so I started a new Fedora 38 vm. gnome 44.2. What an incredibly obtuse, unhelpful, un-useful interface. I don't know about kde but definitely gnome does not get to charge anyone else with any words like janky.
morsch 3y ago
Is there an xkill equivalent for Wayland yet?
wkat4242 3y ago
I always thought xbiff was named after the back to the future character. Turns out it was named after one of the campus dogs instead :)
- mcguire 3y ago
  Heidi Stettner's dog, at the Berkeley CSRG. (Ok, I had to look up her last name. I'm getting old.)
evilotto 3y ago
It's a UNIX system! I know this!
stOneskull 3y ago
it's a bit of fun running them in wsl

darkwater 3y ago

TIL about XLennart, which it's somehow funny but I still think is undeserved On the other hand I knew XBill for decades and that was totally deserved.

maxmalkav 3y ago
I did not find the XLennart very graceful neither. I admit I am also biased about the original XBill one.
greggh 3y ago
As strongly as anyone can disagree with something, I disagree with the "undeserved" part of this.
prosody 3y ago
It’s a little bit interesting to me that XBill has the eponymous figure replacing a diverse ecosystem of OSes, not just Linuxen, with his own. That probably is a sign of the times, when that diversity existed in fact and you might be playing that game on an HP-UX or another prediluvian machine. Maybe not though, maybe the waters were already rising. You might even imagine with some fairness an XTorvalds in which you vainly try to save the BSDs and proprietary Unixen from a Linux monoculture. It makes it easier for me to charitably accept how some systemd detractors describe themselves as for init diversity, even if non-systemd and non-sysvinit inits on Linux seem like a curiosity, rather than assuming that they are just contrarian. It is part of a tradition of valuing a variety of ideas and implementations of ideas, even when it becomes quixotic.

camel-cdr 3y ago

Not that obscure but I recently started doing "xeyes debugging". We have so many debug logs that trying to find your log of a background task, takes a non zero amount of time. So just inserting system("xeyes"); is actually way easier, to get instant feedback, and you can just use system("xmessage msg"), if you need a message.

epilys 3y ago
I read somewhere, don't remember where, that xeyes can be used with xwayland to see if a window is wayland or X11: because the cursor position is private in Wayland windows, the xeyes will stop moving.

KingOfCoders 3y ago

XPilot! And my favorite X11 game: XBattle

arethuza 3y ago
xtank as well!
- KingOfCoders 3y ago
  Yes I remember playing that one too.
tpoindex 3y ago
Adding two of my favorites: XMorph - blends two images together: https://xmorph.sourceforge.net/home/gourlay/public_html/Xmorph/ https://xmorph.sourceforge.net/home/gourlay/public_html/Xmor... ACM - Aerial Combat Simulator: https://www.gnu.org/software/acm/ https://www.gnu.org/software/acm/
- em-bee 3y ago
  xmorph was awesome. i'd love to see a more modern version of that that produces better quality results.
NelsonMinar 3y ago
XBattle is a great game and seems ripe for re-discovery and re-implementing, maybe as a mobile game. It shares some elements with RTS games but had its own vibe. There've been a few XBattle clones in the last 20 years, mostly Flash games, but none really took off. It's a great game mechanic.
evilotto 3y ago
And xconq
- euroderf 3y ago
  Bringing the grognard experience to computers.

swayvil 3y ago

This is why easy coding is important. It opens the floodgates of creative production. In the fine arts we call it a plastic medium. A medium that's easy to edit. It's why we sculpt out of clay instead of beercans.

marcus0x62 3y ago
I don't know if I'm missing your point, you're overly nostalgic, or you just never had to write a substantial X Window app back when most of these apps were developed, but nothing about that development environment was easy. It was full of incredibly verbose, buggy API calls with a bunch of platform-specific bugs and everything was manual.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

eager_noob 3y ago

GNUJump doesn't really belong in a list that suggests installing packages with pkg, but that's the one this brings to the mind.

swayvil 3y ago

I love Angband deeply.

dark-star 3y ago

How can a page like this miss out on Xaos, one of the coolest fractal programs for X11 :-D https://xaos-project.github.io/ https://xaos-project.github.io/

evilotto 3y ago
don't forget xfractint

naillo 3y ago

Hey gvim isn't obscure..

mike_hock 3y ago
Nor is xterm. Or xcalc. Or xclock.

JackFr 3y ago

What about XTartan and Xrisk???

timthorn 3y ago
Many happy hours playing XRisk and XPilot at work 25 years ago :)
jghn 3y ago
And XTank! Loved XTank. My friends & I wound up getting the source as we found out the version we had deployed on our university's system was older and missed out on a lot of cool tanks & features.

renox 3y ago

I wouldn't put NEdit in the 'obscure X11 Apps' category. It's very useful, for example to visualise logs.

bee_rider 3y ago

Is x2x considered obscure? I always thought it was remnant of a much cooler alternative branch we could have gone down for UI, but didn’t.

mikecoles 3y ago
I've been using Barrier as a shared keyboard and mouse for a couple of years. Works well. I haven't played with x2x. Thank you for the tip.

oaththrowaway 3y ago

XBill is one I had forgotten about for a long time

NoboruWataya 3y ago

Surprised not to see Xpdf on this list. I actually used it until fairly recently as I just wanted a simple, no-frills PDF viewer (I now use Zathura instead).

philsnow 3y ago
I loved Xpdf, it was part of my weird "tex->pdf REPL", which was just % xpdf -remote work output.pdf & [1] % inotifywait --monitor ... | \ while read; do \ make && xpdf -remote work -reload done At the time, xpdf was the only PDF reader that wouldn't eagerly try to re-read the PDF file the instant it noticed a change. ps2pdf / latexpdf etc don't write the file atomically, so other PDF readers would display garbage (and then not re-display after latexpdf was finished) and usually lose the page that I was looking at. With xpdf I could do xpdf -reload after my build finished, and it would retain my place (as long as I hadn't `\if 0`ed the place I was looking at out of existence).
hulitu 3y ago
xpdf was updated. It is terrible now.

lelanthran 3y ago

Strangely enough, I have run and used every single item on that list, with the exception of xwpe. How did I not know that this existed? TIL that: sudo apt-get install xwpe actually works! Will have to play with this later.

Aachen 3y ago
xwpe being a > Borland-like integrated development environment (IDE)
- zerr 3y ago
  There was also RHIDE.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Which was deadly slow, it used delay loops for timing IIRC. Not a bad product otherwise. The Borland IDE still feels like home to me.

kristopolous 3y ago

It says last updated in 2022 but I swear this list reads like it's from 1997. I appreciate it nonetheless. I browsed around the site and I found this collection which I like a bit more https://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/index3.html https://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/index3.html It appears to be in roughly alphabetical order by topic, which is quite an accomplishment

klooney 3y ago
The cool kids don't make x11 apps anymore.
codetrotter 3y ago
Well then again, some things are timeless yk
AnonCoward42 3y ago
You might be onto something > Dock app that simply counts down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds left until 00:00 January 1, 2000. https://cyber.dabamos.de/unix/x11/#wmy2k https://cyber.dabamos.de/unix/x11/#wmy2k
- codetrotter 3y ago
  What does it do now? Count increasingly negative numbers?
  - koprulusector 3y ago
    Random thought: should they be “decreasingly negative numbers,” since technically moving left of 0 is a decrease?
    - codetrotter 3y ago
      Possibly. To me, sign and absolute value are often separate concerns. The series 1, 2, 3, … is increasingly positive. The series -1, -2, -3, … is increasingly negative. But I understand, and accept, that others may think differently about numbers.

ralferoo 3y ago

Somehow missing XDaliClock which has around seemingly forever. It's better than most of the clocks they included.

buildsjets 3y ago
If they did list or link to it, JWZ would probably revert all the graphics to hairy testicles.
mikecoles 3y ago
`xdaliclock -cycle -transparent ` was my favorite way of running it. Hide the window decorations and it was lovely.

kangalioo 3y ago

In what way are these "X11 apps"? Aren't those just "GUI apps that support X11"? Which is not a particularly special trait, because it applies to every Linux compatible Desktop app?

tmalsburg2 3y ago
You interpret X11 apps as a technical descriptor, but I think it's more a description of the ecosystem in which these apps evolved and whose culture they represent.
- kangalioo 3y ago
  I see, thanks for explaining
koprulusector 3y ago
X is the client and server for rendering pixels on to a screen, which is mapped to one of more monitors. It provides the most basic, bare bones way to draw a window to the screen, and that’s about it. It’s not even a GNU/Linux thing, X predates Linux, it’s more of the standard system to draw a window on Unix-like systems. X11 apps are GUI apps uncontrolled by/unaware of a desktop environment, theme engine, or window manager. They appear in a minimalist, maybe even brutalist, aesthetic. You can launch a single X11 app from the console, and the resulting window will be your entire graphical display/instance, returning you to the console after the program terminates execution. Maybe another way to think about your question might be, think of X vs Wayland.
- kangalioo 3y ago
  Interesting > You can launch a single X11 app from the console, and the resulting window will be your entire graphical display/instance, returning you to the console after the program terminates execution. Is this not possible with GUI apps using e.g. Qt or Electron?
saint_yossarian 3y ago
Also most (all?) of these apps use xlib directly, rather than going through a toolkit like Gtk or Qt.

codetrotter 3y ago

> XLennart > XLennart is a modification of the arcade game XBill. An evil and unpopular computer hacker named “Lennart” 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 machines. Hah! Poor Poettering tho. He really gets a lot of hate '=(

supriyo-biswas 3y ago
The hate towards Lennart is truly regrettable. I like how systemd has enabled managing and securing daemons easy (Before=, After=, CPUQuota=, ProtectSystem=, ReadWritePaths= to name a few of them.)
- panzi 3y ago
  Never had any problem with systemd, but I did have problems with PulseAudio — the high latency audio server. (These days it seems to work good enough, still looking forward to PipeWire.)
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    Pipewire is ready. Solved all my bluetooth headphone troubles too, I haven't had a single audio frustration since I switched. I believe pipewire is already the default in Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora
    - yakubin 3y ago
      Yeah. It's actually funny how Pipewire and Wayland turned out. Wayland was supposed to be ready for general use "any day now" since 2011. It's 2023 and the situation looks thus: <https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers>. Whereas Pipewire seemed to have scarcely any marketing, instead it just happened. I remember reading about it for the first time at some point and started wondering whether Debian, a conservative distro, turned it on or whether I should change a setting to opt into it. I looked at htop and lo and behold: Pipewire was there. So it happened before I even heard about it, without a single hiccup, so smoothly that I didn't even notice the sound system changed.

r9550684 3y ago

I remember spending some non-insignificant amount of time playing 3dpong, because that was the first time I got exposed to a wireframe game. I thought the formalism was delightful, it felt very cyberpunk. My first 3d game was probably Stunts, a racing game that used flat shading (there was also Abrahams tank, but I never got into it as much as some of the older people in my circle), and then there was a lot of games that used a kind of hybrid sprite, flat shading, texturing mapping approach, from wolfenstein to Daggerfall. I got 3dpong from a Slackware cd, which was also my first linux install, back when linux was cool :> I was democoding, so probably implementing phong reflection on a sierpinski cube which was a style at the time, and here was a game that established an entire 3d experience space with just a handful of lines. (some might ask "how the hell did you not know about Elite or Tempest??" before pervasive internet discovery was a non-linear process, I think I learned about these games in the early 2000s, from the internet)

pizzapill 3y ago
Feel like Stunts is such a sleeper retro game so many played and nobody ever talks about. Incredible fully customizable levels with massive obstacles rendered in 3D. In 1990, 3 years before doom.
- pengaru 3y ago
  Stunts was fun but would often send my vehicle infinitely skyward from bugs in the tracks having jumps... that kind of ruined the simulation
  - pizzapill 3y ago
    You got a flight simulator for free and you are complaining? :)
- r9550684 3y ago
  I sometimes think we collectively rewrite our past for the common denominator. have people always been doing that, or it's an internet phenomenon? like maybe you listened to Andy gibb or The Bee Gees in the 70s, but you retrospectively remember that you somehow was Black Sabbath's biggest fan, even though that wasn't the circles you've spent time in at all. I sometimes have to consciously remind myself that I haven't played chrono trigger until 2005, or that I clocked some unreasonable amount of hours playing rise of the triad, Star Wars dark forces and Ultima underworld, rather than the whatever's on the list of top 90s video games.

okasaki 3y ago

sunclock is a favourite of mine, and I can't find any newer alternative.

nmstoker 3y ago

When I see screenshots with window decorators like that I always wonder if there's someone actually using an ancient computer or if the screenshots are just really really old. I tend to guess it's the latter.

msla 3y ago
It's entirely possible to run that window manager on a modern system.
koprulusector 3y ago
This is how modern X applications look by default. It’s gtk, compositors, and window managers that add/change the aesthetics.
- josephcsible 3y ago
  If you're just running an X server and a single program, I thought you didn't get any decorations at all.
- asveikau 3y ago
  Window decorator has a specific meaning in X terminology, referring to the frame of the window done by the window manager. The screenshots are using some commercial Unix wm (mwm?) or one of the free ones that copies their look (fvwm?) I use fvwm on one of my machines in 2023, in part because I found myself on a retro kick a few years ago, so I don't think it's that weird, though it is extremely dated.
  - LeFantome 3y ago
    Super fast and light.
timthorn 3y ago
That's just CDE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment
3y ago

phkahler 3y ago

Xpilot, xanim, xterm?

hulitu 3y ago
Xanim was the first free video player.

jghn 3y ago

`xneko` brings back memories. My freshman year at university we were on X terminals where they came in a little pack of several stations. Each of them had X authority on the others within the same pack. People quickly learned they could open a billion `xneko`s on another person's screen to completely lock them up.

supportengineer 3y ago
Someone did it to me with a single Xeyes window. I was in my dorm room by myself at the time!
- jghn 3y ago
  At some point people figured out they could plaster another person's screen with porn via `xv`. But then someone else discovered that meant you could go in and Save File to the original user's directory. Once people realized that giving people write access to their directory wasn't a wise idea, this practice stopped.
  - em-bee 3y ago
    xv was the wrong tool, there are others that would have been able to project images without giving the receiver the ability to write to your directory. the most obnoxious would have been to set the background, because that's not easy to undo if you don't know how. when i was a student i used to hang out in the computer halls until late at night. being one of the last ones there i was often able to get use of the one sun workstation that had a color screen. one night the sysadmin logged remotely into the machine i was using and played "always look on the bright side of life"
watersb 3y ago
There was a mode, included with the After Dark screen saver for classic macOS, that was basically an xneko port, named “Neko Neko”.

Brendinooo 3y ago

The first item on the list (3D Pong) looks like it could have been the inspiration for Strong Bad's famous "your head a splode" game

LispSporks22 3y ago

I never got a chance to write UIs using Motif. Was it pleasant to work with?

coliveira 3y ago
It is similar to write win32 apps. Of course the C compilers were way better than MS, but on the other hand no IDE with autocompletion was available. Similar to the MS world, people did anything to avoid writing C apps, so Tcl/TK was born.

dumdumchan 3y ago

Did anyone ever create a video player titled xvideo?

helb 3y ago
not a player, but there was (is?) xvideo extension: https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.5/doc/man/man3/Xv.3.html https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.5/doc/man/man3/Xv.3.html i remember it as an mplayer output option mplayer -vo xv [file]

gsliepen 3y ago

A great list, although I'm not seeing xteddy, xkoules and spellcast in it.

vzaliva 3y ago

I used to run Xroach to freak out colleagues. You move a window and they scramble! Tiling window manager I am using nowadays made it obsolette :)

ceving 3y ago

Xterm obscure? I use it all the day.

boredumb 3y ago

Seeing GLXGears is giving me a panic attack thinking about setting up linux on a shitty old laptop years ago and trying to get world of warcraft to boot up.

rwl4 3y ago

OpenBSD has a ton of obscure x11 games and apps in their ports collection if you want to play with a different subset than FreeBSD's ports includes. I spent a whole evening enjoying the UNIX archaeology contained in their repo.

marinhero 3y ago

GLXGears was my command of choice to verify if my graphics drivers were installed. Either they would run smoothly (when installed) or choppy and broken. Can’t use that anymore because the APUs and generic drivers got so good that everything runs smoothly. Good times.

squarefoot 3y ago
Yes, I recall using GLXInfo in a xterm window to check whether I correctly installed graphics drivers or not. "Direct Rendering: Yes" would confirm that. Good old times indeed.
- CamouflagedKiwi 3y ago
  And you could tell based on whether it ran at ~100FPS or several thousand. I assume that doesn't work so well any more...
  - sitzkrieg 3y ago
    it used to be slideshow vs 30fps on some cards back in the day
- Inhibit 3y ago
  That'll still work to see which driver is running. Might want to append "| head -30" so you don't get all the unnecessary debug for your answer, though. Or grep for what you're expecting (i.e. "| grep -i nvidia").
- sgt 3y ago
  Was it using xdpyinfo or driconf or something? Muscle memory tells me it's somewhere around there.
anthk 3y ago
glxgears -info | less

panzi 3y ago

gvim and xterm are obscure now? O_o

haolez 3y ago

I sometimes wonder what a modern desktop would look like if every app had the Motif look. I wonder if the consistency of this experience would surpass the subjective ugliness of it.

mixmastamyk 3y ago
The SGI Irix 4dwm used it and was pleasing to the eye. Also had vector icons. Add 4k, text antialiasing, and an updated terminal and I think would look and work quite well.
hulitu 3y ago
I find Motif good looking and practical. I like visual feedback when i press a button. Using modern UI without borders, with cluttered title bars, with tiny scrollbars is a PITA.

ptx 3y ago

> A simple RTF editor for X11. [...] Prone to crashing. That makes is pretty useless as a word processor, unless it has a really robust auto-save system. Anyway, the Plan calendar thing looked neat, but I don't think it's packaged in Arch.

anthk 3y ago
The GTK2 port of Ted it's better.

wkat4242 3y ago

For me xfishtank would top the list. I still use it sometimes. Xblast was also cool. It would transform the mouse pointer into a crosshairs and if you clicked it would shoot a hole in the window that you could actually see through. It was really fun to annoy first year students at uni before xauth was implemented. Xeyes too of course with some --geometry to make it full screen. Did that with a huge video wall once (nearly got me fired but I was just an intern. So worth it)

hawflakes 3y ago
Wow. I remember a different Xblast. This was a multiplayer Bomberman clone: https://xblast.sourceforge.net https://xblast.sourceforge.net
- wkat4242 3y ago
  Hmm maybe it was called xblaster. Not so sure now. But blast and x were definitely part of the name.

Thrymr 3y ago

Free42 is also available as an iOS app!

rcarmo 3y ago

Wow. I know most of those (and used a CDE desktop environment, so the window decorations really take me back). Kind of weird to realise so much time has past.

rdtsc 3y ago

Speaking of FSV2, I remember randomly discovering fsn on the SGI Irix as an intern and realizing it was the cool 3D file browser from Jurassic park. I thought it was a special effect prop for the movie and then to my surprise it was an actual working application.

timetraveller26 3y ago
I just wish the VR UI from Community were real too <https://youtu.be/z4FGzE4endQ https://youtu.be/z4FGzE4endQ>

metrix 3y ago

I'm sad that xsnow doesn't work on modern environments. Having Snow fall on top of windows was really cool

mcpackieh 3y ago
Still werks for me, I use it every year. I think it even has some wayland support, but I haven't tried that.
hulitu 3y ago
1.42 version works flawlessly. The new version is a disaster.

guessbest 3y ago

NEdit was perfect when I was transitioning from Windows to Linux in the late 90s early 2000s. It was even in Slackware. Also, I miss the large clear, 16/256 color icons from the win 3.0 and 1990's unix era.

chris_j 3y ago
NEdit was my main editor for a few years after I started using UNIX in the late 90s but couldn't get the hang of vi and emacs. I have fond memories of using it and I'm pretty sad that it was so tied to Motif that it never developed further. I used it on Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and even Windows (via Cygwin). I kind of miss using an editor so uncomplicated.
- nequo 3y ago
  Wouldn't gedit do this today? It looks like gedit works on Windows too: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Gedit#Installation https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Gedit#Installation
  - chris_j 3y ago
    Many thanks. I did use gedit for a while, though I confess I never became as fond of it as I had been of NEdit. It does tick the "uncomplicated text editor" box though.
anthk 3y ago
https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1920644 https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1920644 and https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Solaris-8 https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Solaris-8 Change the GTK settings as always. Or use lxappearance.

somat 3y ago

This list is how I discovered xsunclock. which quickly became my poster child for everything I love about computing. It is very clearly a labor of love. It follows no ui guideline known to man(I like to refer to these sort of programs as following the R'llyeh school of design). It is just barely on this side of usable but offers an unmatched set of timekeeping options. It is pretty great.

shrubble 3y ago
The program xsunclock uses the look and feel of the Open Look toolkit, which is a programming toolkit from Sun that pre-dates Motif and others, but it definitely looks quite different from other GUI toolkits.

ben7799 3y ago

Definitely a blast from the past. I haven't really been using a linux desktop the last 10 years. Especially in college in the late 90s I remember using/trying a lot of these application. Some of these like XBiff were standard things almost all of us setup as we configured out desktops. Mostly we were using FVWM but you had to basically build your own environment. When I was in school the campus computers were basically a mix of Sun, IBM RS6000, and SGI, and the IT department had everything configured extremely nicely where you could log onto any machine and your desktop appeared and all your files were there and everything just kind of transparently worked as if you were always using the same computer, even though the machines were all different versions of Unix. For non programming work it just worked. For my CS stuff you would just have to recompile on the current arch you were on. Gnome and KDE didn't appear till about my 3rd year.. I don't think any of them were really available on the school machines unless you built it yourself and did the work to configure your environment to use them. So we used a lot of these old school X11 programs. I never had any money for a TV, game console, etc.. at that point and actually played some of these amateurish X11 games for fun. None of them were good enough to hold your attention very long but there were a lot of them to try. Some were really good for the time, like Netrek. The graphics were not amazing but the multiplayer gameplay was well ahead of it's time.

lelanthran 3y ago
> Gnome and KDE didn't appear till about my 3rd year.. I don't think any of them were really available on the school machines unless you built it yourself and did the work to configure your environment to use them. That brings back painful memories of getting Gnome (v1, perhaps) compiled and running properly; was it "the Gnu Network Object Model Environment" or similar?

Brian_K_White 3y ago

I was working on a small bash notification client, and I wanted some simple universal apps to use in the examples for actions (run a command when a notification, or a button on it, is clicked) and was shocked to discover that xterm is no longer a safe assumption.

urinotherapist 3y ago

XPilot is missing. https://www.xpilot.org/ https://www.xpilot.org/

ttctciyf 3y ago
Also xlander ( apparently maintained! https://github.com/ac000/xlander https://github.com/ac000/xlander )

mzd348 3y ago

I also remember a lot of these from the 90s. But I didn't see xphoon, that was a pretty cool one to display a (fairly) detailed picture of the current phase of the moon in your root window/desktop.

squarefoot 3y ago

Possibly not old enough to be included in that list, but my oldest piece of desktop software I always run on my main machine is GKrellm with BubbleFishyMon as system load monitor. http://gkrellm.srcbox.net/ http://gkrellm.srcbox.net/

philsnow 3y ago
This is giving me strong nostalgia, I loved gkrellm ~20 years ago because of how densely it showed information. I stopped using it eventually because it used a non-trivial amount of CPU just displaying stuff.
- squarefoot 3y ago
  I noticed this too, but setting refresh to low values, like 5 per second, reduces considerably the CPU use.

froseph 3y ago

One I dont see mentioned is Xnest (or its successor Xephyr). In a previous life, used it all the time to debug apps in multiple desktop environments.

xioxox 3y ago
I like xvfb-run which runs GUI X11 applications in a headless mode.
- philsnow 3y ago
  One of my favorite bits of software is Xpra [0], "screen for X". You'd run it and it would start another X server (start apps in it with `DISPLAY=:1 xterm` or whatever), and you would "attach" it to your running X server with `xpra attach`. You can attach to e.g. `ssh://hostname/:1`, so I ran a firefox instance on a homelab server and attached to it from my laptop and my desktop to not have to bother keeping bookmarks, tabs etc in sync. [0] https://xpra.org/ https://xpra.org/
lelanthran 3y ago
Good one. I recall, around 2004, using it on Windows, under Cygwin, to run cygwin-compiled X apps on Windows. I'm not sure how that worked at all, to be honest. I hope my memory is not playing tricks on me again.
philsnow 3y ago
My (less-than-half-baked) master's thesis has a screenshot of Xnest, which I was using to demonstrate some ridiculously primitive precursor to kernel namespaces, IIRC

fuzztester 3y ago

There was one called xlsfonts which would list all the available fonts. https://www.x.org/archive/X11R7.5/doc/man/man1/xlsfonts.1.html https://www.x.org/archive/X11R7.5/doc/man/man1/xlsfonts.1.ht...

zbuf 3y ago
If you're thinking of an X11 GUI, I think perhaps you mean xfontsel?
- fuzztester 3y ago
  No, I meant xlsfonts, as in the above man page I linked to. It is a command line tool and can be used without a GUI. You can even query for the fonts on another X server's display (1). See this excerpt: -display host:dpy This option specifies the X server to contact. (1) - where the meaning of server and client is the reverse of that of traditional client server.
  - zbuf 3y ago
    Fair, I was thinking that because its not actually an X11 GUI (though it is X11 of course) Its fun to query or set information on a remote. The same applies to xdpyinfo, xset, xrandr and many more support the -display option (if they don't then set the DISPLAY environment variable).

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29athrowaway 3y ago

A missing one: ddd debugger A debugger that can represent data structures like linked lists graphically.

db48x 3y ago
Sadly, changes to gdb have made ddd somewhat unreliable. Also, it has a lot of trouble dealing with programs written in Rust :)
- 29athrowaway 3y ago
  Because it is unmaintained
  - db48x 3y ago
    Yep.
    - 29athrowaway 3y ago
      For educational purposes it is still useful.

mcpackieh 3y ago

xev is extremely useful; a natural counterpart to xbindkeys and very useful when you're trying to reconfigure your keyboard mappings. xsnow is maybe my favorite from this list, I install it every winter for the holidays.

krylon 3y ago

I'm not sure I would describe gvim as obscure. But this is certainly an interesting list.

pjmlp 3y ago

I guess it is time for some beers, I recognise like 60% of those applications.

elkos 3y ago

nedit was awesome I really enjoyed using it on my old scrapy computer

cbsmith 3y ago

I feel old.

tildef 3y ago

Ah, I love these posts. There's always some gems popping up in the comments. My top 3 are Xaos (previously mentioned above), XEphem (https://github.com/XEphem/XEphem); https://github.com/XEphem/XEphem); an absolutely lovely ephemeris, and predict (https://www.qsl.net/kd2bd/predict.html); https://www.qsl.net/kd2bd/predict.html); the satellite tracker--which has a bunch GUI versions--for example gpredict, which I guess is more relevant for this story.

ISL 3y ago

To that list, I'd add xdiskusage.

sigio 3y ago

I'm missing XMMS, basically X winamp ;)

lelanthran 3y ago
I'm using qmmp (it's in the debian/ubuntu or mint repo, not sure) which is visually and functionally identical.

arethuza 3y ago

When I first learned about xmosaic in 1993 my first reaction was "nice hypertext tool though not sure why anyone would want to load documents over the Internet"....

sebastianconcpt 3y ago

Oh gee, I still have my TI-92 Plus in some drawer! So many memories, what do I do what that? So obsolete now but can't just throw away that piece of working hardware.

mikecoles 3y ago
Sell it. The calculators I had decades ago are still being manufactured, at a higher price than I originally paid.

dang 3y ago

Related: Cool, but Obscure X11 Tools - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29681507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29681507 - Dec 2021 (128 comments) Cool but obscure X11 tools - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20713003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20713003 - Aug 2019 (246 comments)

watersb 3y ago

Mad props for Hans Ecke’s XPlanet Resources page: http://hans.ecke.ws/xplanet/ http://hans.ecke.ws/xplanet/ For a year or three, I ran this setup on my Linux background desktop. Our team was returning to the United States after working with our colleagues at the European Southern Observatory https://www.eso.org/public/ https://www.eso.org/public/ and a flight attendant noticed the image of Earth, Moon, sun on my computer. She asked if I were interested or involved in space exploration, and I told her that we looked at stars from the ground, but could get pretty far. She bent closer to me and murmured, “The pilots have just heard from the radio, there has been an explosion of the Space Shuttle.” 2003, somewhere over Greenland. Anyway: XPlanet rocks. https://xplanet.sourceforge.net/maps.php https://xplanet.sourceforge.net/maps.php

NikkiA 3y ago

Back in 1994 I remember playing an X11 clone of missile command that alternated the traditional defense wave with an offensive wave when you attacked the attacker's cities. I've long since forgotten what it was called. I was kind of hoping it might have been on this list, but sadly it wasn't.

zbuf 3y ago

Not necessarily obscure, still rather useful. xterm & xv remain my daily tools, and xosview is still maintained here: https://www.pogo.org.uk/~mark/xosview/ https://www.pogo.org.uk/~mark/xosview/

wesapien 3y ago

Anyone here use https://github.com/google/xsecurelock https://github.com/google/xsecurelock? I found it while going through reddit.com/r/unixporn and looking at other peoples tiling window manager setups.

michaelcampbell 3y ago

I used an array of XBiff's at $previousjob on Sun Sparcs. And procmail. Good times.

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