
In praise of xlogo - Tomte
https://simont.dreamwidth.org/242297.html
======
scbrg
TIL: xrdb translations.

25 years of X usage, and that one has somehow managed to evade me. Such an
awesome (and now that I learned about it - obvious) thing.

~~~
teddyh
These only work with programs written using (and linked to) Xt, the X Toolkit,
or something which uses Xt internally, like the X Athena Widgets. More modern
toolkit libraries like GTK or Qt are _not_ using Xt, since Xt is ancient;
modern toolkit libraries are written directly on top of Xlib or the even more
modern XCB.

~~~
mhd
I don't see age being the prime factor here. The X Toolkit Intrinsics (Xt) are
actually a quite nice framework if you want to have an abstraction over Xlib,
want some nice event loop functionality or OO features in C. I think I even
remember someone writing a paper about using it without a GUI way back when.

Not using it was mostly done because you want to be cross-platform at that
level, aren't using C as your core language (Qt, Tk) or just the usual case of
NIH you get everywhere (Gtk, which rather invented glib).

~~~
oso2k
I did Xt in college for a Unix Graphics Programming class and it felt so alien
to me. The examples in the books (3 or 4 books) we had never seemed to work
right. When compared to plain Xlib, OpenGL immediate mode and 3D mode, Java’s
AWT and Swing, or even the tiny bit of Win32 I picked up via
NanoX/Microwindows, Xt always just felt like dereference vomit, arcane
property setting in unrelated objects or contexts and an event loop that
magically picked up some events but not others. It was like there was some
undocumented state machines that backed the event loop.

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pfranz
I deal with OpenGL a lot so glxgears has been my standby. If it's just X I'm
testing I've always used xclock.

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djsumdog
I always used xeyes to test X connections in the past.

I wonder if we'll see a wleyes for Wayland, to test Wayland only and not the
x11 comparability layer.

~~~
jasonjayr
As a totally uninformed guess -- no?

Part of wayland's security design decisions is that one program cannot receive
events from another program.

An app like xeyes would need cooperation from the compositor otherwise.

~~~
snazz
It could use a large window and get input from that entire area, right? Not
quite the same thing, of course.

~~~
koolba
Wouldn't that only work when it has focus?

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chrisperkins
> As a ruler. Want to know how big something on your screen is in pixels? Fire
> up an xlogo, line it up with one edge of the thing, resize until the
> opposite edge lines up too, and if your window manager puts up a tooltip
> during window resizing (which I think all the ones I've ever used do), then
> you know the size.

I don't see a tooltip that shows the window size. I am using Xfce.

~~~
smhenderson
Yeah, I wondered about that too. I remember older, traditional window managers
like TWM, FVWM, OpenBOX, etc. show this but most newer "Desktop" environment's
window managers like XFCE's and Gnome's do not.

Interestingly when sizing a terminal window these WM's show the size in
columns and rows and when sizing a "real" window it shows the size in pixels.

Probably an option somewhere to turn it on in newer environments but it's been
a while since I used anything but cwm[1] (which does show the window size on
resize) so I can't be sure.

[1] calm window manager -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cwm_%28window_manager%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cwm_%28window_manager%29)

~~~
gilesgate
Are you using cwm on OpenBSD or on something else? (Just curious.)

~~~
smhenderson
OpenBSD is where I discovered it and started using it. First on a laptop that
I use to install Beta's and then a few machines at home.

I use a Slackware box at work and was delighted when I found a Linux port[1],
now I use it everywhere except on Windows.

[1] [https://github.com/zenlinux/cwm](https://github.com/zenlinux/cwm)

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enriquto
xlogo is one of my favourite programs. I have it as the exec line on my
xinitrc, so that the only way to logout is by killing xlogo.

~~~
comboy
or ctrl+alt+backspace unless you disabled it

~~~
merlincorey
In my experience, that typically needs to be enabled.

Different distros of course have different defaults.

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jmclnx
When a service kicks off, a small XLogo appears to let me know it is active,
it goes away when it ends.

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wces
Long time back (when xhost by default accepted all connections) in my college
lab, I used to redirect DISPLAY to an unsuspecting user sitting on my favorite
machine and and bombard them with `while true; do xlogo & done;`

~~~
jmuhlich
I once used a computer lab where the AIX workstations each had their local
filesystems exported to the entire campus via AFS. Even /dev. Including
/dev/audio. Which was world-writeable. And there was no apparent volume
control for the chassis speaker.

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buzzert
I prefer xeyes

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yellowapple
> This [using xlogo as an alarm] is better than an audible alert because it's
> less antisocial in an open-plan office

And here I am with a loud clicky keyboard and my notifications very much not
on mute in protest of my open office.

