8 ms·

Nah, e is great! It works just fine - it's better at a lot of things because it's fairly low-spec and doesn't require a terabyte of ram and 47 quintillion float

by antisol 6mo ago

Nah, e is great! It works just fine - it's better at a lot of things because it's fairly low-spec and doesn't require a terabyte of ram and 47 quintillion floating point operations just to open a menu. And if you're using a current version they're responsive to bug reports and whatnot. It does most everything you could want. And it looks damn fine while it's doing it. Someone showed me the kitty terminal emulator a while ago. They made a big deal about how it can display images! Right there in the terminal! Wow! I was compelled to point out that terminology has had that (and video playback, too) for a LONG time. One of my favourite features of enlightenment is that it has this thing from back in the day called "configurability", where behaviours tend to be optional and you can decide for yourself whether you want them enabled or not. I know it's not fashionable anymore and maybe not for everyone but personally I think it's a better approach than the gnome-style "You'll take what we give you and be happy about it" approach which is in vogue these days.

pino83 6mo ago
In a lot of cases, configurability is just a workaround for the issue that devs were unable to implement sth that just works 'fine'. So you could turn it on and live with its defects, or you turned it off and live without the feature. Linux Desktop was always full of that. But yeah, I also do not like Gnome, because they more and more just removed the switches, but without spending effort to make things fine for everyone. Plasma is so configurable, I've never seen anything more configurable. On any OS that I've seen. My personal experience: Yes, you can also build your own environment out of blocks. And then you configure a lot. But not in order to customize it better, but in order to somehow glue these components together in a way that somehow remotely makes sense. :-/ And what's the point of video clips in the terminal? What weakness are you trying to workaround with that? E is a graphical desktop, no? Based on X11 or Wayland. There are actual media players!! A lot. Not a single one is really great, but most will be better than the terminal, I guess. VLC is that bad?
- rasterman 6mo ago
  well why video in a terminal? 1. it's "free" because the toolkit already offers video objects - feature is there... why not expose it. you just call 2 lines of code or so and and tell it to play. it's similar amount of code for an image, so it's basically free really. why do still images and NOT video? why stop there when video is only a little more code. sure. if you want a movie as a background: probably a bad choice, but if it's one of those zen videos with just trees swaying in the breeze as a background or a mountain lake rippling in the wind with very little motion but enough to make it "come to life", why not? but ok - for real usability? example: you're browsing through your dirs. cd ~/xxx/yyy; ls; cd zz; ls ... oh there's cat-sunning.mp4 there... i have 87 videos of cats sunning themselves.. which was that? tycat cat-sunning.jpg -> boom. video appears in terminal - you cat'd it.. it plays (tycat is just a tiny cmdline tool that emits the right escapes to terminology. you could make it a shell alias or script too and not use tycat. escapes are documented in the readme. this works even in a dumb framebuffer without wayland or x display systems (because the toolkit handles auto-detecting its environment and if in just a tty/vt it'll fall back to fbcon or kms/drm and render there). so you get a mouse and a full-screen graphical terminal that can do splits/tiles/tabs and so on with no windowing system and you can happily still explore all your files there even if they are videos... you aren't forced to use the feature... but it's there if you need it or want it.
  - pino83 6mo ago
    I have absolutely no doubt that this is possible to do, particularly if you assume that you already have all kinds of libraries available, and if you don't care at all about the terminal ecosystem in general. And then you only need access to the mouse position in pixel granularity, and you basically have the foundation for a graphical environment. We can implement Qt and GTK for that new thingy. So there is finally a usable text editor available in a Unix terminal! Email clients that don't make you sad! You can finally navigate your files in a less lousy way! And, of course, we can then also port these E libraries, so we can start their terminal app inside their terminal app inside their terminal app! But: What is it for? Why not use your graphical environment in a direct way? The existence of terminal emulators is the proof for it being at least as strong (or stronger) as your terminal can ever get. Right? So what's the point of this indirection? I just don't get it... Yes... Let's imagine I regularly look through my files. And these files aren't plain text (otherwise it would just be cat or mcedit) and aren't ODT files, kdenlive projects, Gimp files, ..., ..., but they are particularly png or jpeg or mpeg (or whatever the tycat thingy understands). And I want to do that via ssh. And I always have this E terminal in range. Then this is one valid option to do so imho. Still a very weird, freaky, odd one. But it would somehow make some sense to me...
- hulitu 6mo ago
  > that devs were unable to implement sth that just works 'fine'. Just like today. But we lost the option to make it work.
- antisol 6mo ago
  > In a lot of cases, configurability is just a workaround for the issue that devs were unable to implement sth that just works 'fine'. No - You're making the assumption that everyone wants everything to be the same. Which is the same faulty assumption responsible for so many horrible horrible user interface choices made since smartphones became a thing. For instance, there's a setting in enlightenment to allow you to choose how scrollbars work - you can: a) Have sensible scrollbars like graphical applications have had for 40+ years, or b) Have 'hover at the right to show the scrollbar and make it virtually impossible to select the last item in a list' behaviour, like the gtk-bros insist you want, or c) Have no scrollbars at all if you prefer. Maybe you've got a touchscreen or a wheel mouse and a tiny screen, or whatever. In e, this is just a setting where the user gets to choose what their computer does. I know, it's a pretty revolutionary idea. So I'll just say it again: the user is the one who chooses what their computer does. I haven't played with KDE seriously since the days of Corel Linux. I tried KDE4 back when it was a new thing, observed my desktop running at <1fps for the 10 minutes it took me to exit, and never tried it again. I've since heard good things about plasma. One day maybe I'll try it. > And what's the point of video clips in the terminal? What weakness are you trying to workaround with that? Aha, I can tell you haven't tried it! :) It's a fantastic way to preview videos. You type "ls", and it gives you a list of files. And you say to yourself "Huh, I don't remember what 'video_clip_1280p.mp4' is. So you right-click on the filename and choose 'preview', and the video pops up in your terminal window and starts playing. And once I know what the file is I press escape and I'm back to where I was. It's marvellous! The only way I could think of improving this would be if there was some way to do it without any mouse interaction... like for example by typing 'typop video_clip_1280p.mp4'. I do watch my movies in either vlc or mpv, usually - nobody is actually sitting around watching movies in their terminal (I hope!). For that, you use a media player. But for quickly previewing videos / images / audio (yes, audio too!), it's :chef-kiss: I also have a custom command_not_found_handle which displays a randomly-chosen animated gif from a list I've built up (things like picard facepalming and people shaking their heads), along with a nice ascii art message in the vein of "You suck!" when I type an invalid command [1]. The reason I have that is........................................because it's fun! [1] https://imgur.com/a/tL9h8Xs https://imgur.com/a/tL9h8Xs
  - pino83 6mo ago
pino83 6mo ago
PS: When can terminal apps get mouse coordinates in pixel granularity? Then Qt and GTK can have backends for terminal( emulator)s and I can finally run a graphical terminal emulator inside a terminal emulator? tmux and screen will be dead!!! :D And when do the terminal hacks for AR glasses start to appear? I still cannot walk through vimacs? Doing ":q!" with just some head gesture? Why not?? SCNR

by antisol 6mo ago

pino83 6mo ago

In a lot of cases, configurability is just a workaround for the issue that devs were unable to implement sth that just works 'fine'. So you could turn it on and live with its defects, or you turned it off and live without the feature. Linux Desktop was always full of that. But yeah, I also do not like Gnome, because they more and more just removed the switches, but without spending effort to make things fine for everyone. Plasma is so configurable, I've never seen anything more configurable. On any OS that I've seen. My personal experience: Yes, you can also build your own environment out of blocks. And then you configure a lot. But not in order to customize it better, but in order to somehow glue these components together in a way that somehow remotely makes sense. :-/ And what's the point of video clips in the terminal? What weakness are you trying to workaround with that? E is a graphical desktop, no? Based on X11 or Wayland. There are actual media players!! A lot. Not a single one is really great, but most will be better than the terminal, I guess. VLC is that bad?

rasterman 6mo ago
well why video in a terminal? 1. it's "free" because the toolkit already offers video objects - feature is there... why not expose it. you just call 2 lines of code or so and and tell it to play. it's similar amount of code for an image, so it's basically free really. why do still images and NOT video? why stop there when video is only a little more code. sure. if you want a movie as a background: probably a bad choice, but if it's one of those zen videos with just trees swaying in the breeze as a background or a mountain lake rippling in the wind with very little motion but enough to make it "come to life", why not? but ok - for real usability? example: you're browsing through your dirs. cd ~/xxx/yyy; ls; cd zz; ls ... oh there's cat-sunning.mp4 there... i have 87 videos of cats sunning themselves.. which was that? tycat cat-sunning.jpg -> boom. video appears in terminal - you cat'd it.. it plays (tycat is just a tiny cmdline tool that emits the right escapes to terminology. you could make it a shell alias or script too and not use tycat. escapes are documented in the readme. this works even in a dumb framebuffer without wayland or x display systems (because the toolkit handles auto-detecting its environment and if in just a tty/vt it'll fall back to fbcon or kms/drm and render there). so you get a mouse and a full-screen graphical terminal that can do splits/tiles/tabs and so on with no windowing system and you can happily still explore all your files there even if they are videos... you aren't forced to use the feature... but it's there if you need it or want it.
- pino83 6mo ago
  I have absolutely no doubt that this is possible to do, particularly if you assume that you already have all kinds of libraries available, and if you don't care at all about the terminal ecosystem in general. And then you only need access to the mouse position in pixel granularity, and you basically have the foundation for a graphical environment. We can implement Qt and GTK for that new thingy. So there is finally a usable text editor available in a Unix terminal! Email clients that don't make you sad! You can finally navigate your files in a less lousy way! And, of course, we can then also port these E libraries, so we can start their terminal app inside their terminal app inside their terminal app! But: What is it for? Why not use your graphical environment in a direct way? The existence of terminal emulators is the proof for it being at least as strong (or stronger) as your terminal can ever get. Right? So what's the point of this indirection? I just don't get it... Yes... Let's imagine I regularly look through my files. And these files aren't plain text (otherwise it would just be cat or mcedit) and aren't ODT files, kdenlive projects, Gimp files, ..., ..., but they are particularly png or jpeg or mpeg (or whatever the tycat thingy understands). And I want to do that via ssh. And I always have this E terminal in range. Then this is one valid option to do so imho. Still a very weird, freaky, odd one. But it would somehow make some sense to me...
hulitu 6mo ago
> that devs were unable to implement sth that just works 'fine'. Just like today. But we lost the option to make it work.
antisol 6mo ago
> In a lot of cases, configurability is just a workaround for the issue that devs were unable to implement sth that just works 'fine'. No - You're making the assumption that everyone wants everything to be the same. Which is the same faulty assumption responsible for so many horrible horrible user interface choices made since smartphones became a thing. For instance, there's a setting in enlightenment to allow you to choose how scrollbars work - you can: a) Have sensible scrollbars like graphical applications have had for 40+ years, or b) Have 'hover at the right to show the scrollbar and make it virtually impossible to select the last item in a list' behaviour, like the gtk-bros insist you want, or c) Have no scrollbars at all if you prefer. Maybe you've got a touchscreen or a wheel mouse and a tiny screen, or whatever. In e, this is just a setting where the user gets to choose what their computer does. I know, it's a pretty revolutionary idea. So I'll just say it again: the user is the one who chooses what their computer does. I haven't played with KDE seriously since the days of Corel Linux. I tried KDE4 back when it was a new thing, observed my desktop running at <1fps for the 10 minutes it took me to exit, and never tried it again. I've since heard good things about plasma. One day maybe I'll try it. > And what's the point of video clips in the terminal? What weakness are you trying to workaround with that? Aha, I can tell you haven't tried it! :) It's a fantastic way to preview videos. You type "ls", and it gives you a list of files. And you say to yourself "Huh, I don't remember what 'video_clip_1280p.mp4' is. So you right-click on the filename and choose 'preview', and the video pops up in your terminal window and starts playing. And once I know what the file is I press escape and I'm back to where I was. It's marvellous! The only way I could think of improving this would be if there was some way to do it without any mouse interaction... like for example by typing 'typop video_clip_1280p.mp4'. I do watch my movies in either vlc or mpv, usually - nobody is actually sitting around watching movies in their terminal (I hope!). For that, you use a media player. But for quickly previewing videos / images / audio (yes, audio too!), it's :chef-kiss: I also have a custom command_not_found_handle which displays a randomly-chosen animated gif from a list I've built up (things like picard facepalming and people shaking their heads), along with a nice ascii art message in the vein of "You suck!" when I type an invalid command [1]. The reason I have that is........................................because it's fun! [1] https://imgur.com/a/tL9h8Xs https://imgur.com/a/tL9h8Xs
- pino83 6mo ago

pino83 6mo ago

PS: When can terminal apps get mouse coordinates in pixel granularity? Then Qt and GTK can have backends for terminal( emulator)s and I can finally run a graphical terminal emulator inside a terminal emulator? tmux and screen will be dead!!! :D And when do the terminal hacks for AR glasses start to appear? I still cannot walk through vimacs? Doing ":q!" with just some head gesture? Why not?? SCNR