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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!




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


Xev is super useful when messing with keybindings.

I also use xmag (not in this list) when I want to inspect something on screen or as a makeshift color picker.


If anybody uses kwin, you can set mouse-wheel bindings for zooming with a keyboard modifier using xbindkeys like this:

    "qdbus6  org.kde.kglobalaccel /component/kwin invokeShortcut view_zoom_in"
      Mod4 + Super_L + b:4
    "qdbus6  org.kde.kglobalaccel /component/kwin invokeShortcut view_zoom_out"
      Mod4 + Super_L + b:5
You can change Mod4+Super_L to whatever modifier keys you like.


xdotool sits that the heart of a few useful keyboard macros I have set up, e.g.

    ZOOM=$(xdotool search --limit 1 --name "Zoom Meeting" || xdotool search --limit 1 --name "Zoom Webinar")
    
    if [ -n "${ZOOM}" ]; then
        xdotool windowactivate --sync "${ZOOM}"
        sleep 0.1
        xdotool key --clearmodifiers "alt+a"
    fi
Finds the zoom meeting or webinar I'm in, brings it to top, and unmutes it. Very useful


I recently discovered xdotool and it's fantastic. I'm using it with lirc to run a special media TV for my mom, who has Alzheimer's.


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...


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?


Yes.


With great power comes great responsibility. If you don't want the responsibility, that's fine, but someone else gets the power.


Last time I had to do that, it was on Windows 11 on a friends PC that was unexpectedly using 1024x768 on his 4k HDR monitor.

Glad I don't have to deal with that, Arch just works


Shades of my old Vic20.


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.


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.


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)


I don't know... Sometimes I've to pull Windows into safe mode and run DDU. The reasons are varied. I assume macOS might run into similar things, all software has bugs


glxgears was/is useful if you use a proprietary graphics driver. Those are prone to getting broken when you update to a new kernel. With in-kernel drivers for most GPUs this is much less of a problem today. Probably still a problem for Nvidia owners.


Same for xkill? Who needs to kill a graphical application every day and what kind of distro parent commenter is using to need to do that in 2023?


i'm happy for you if you never have any application that hangs and ends as a zombie process but for me it happens very, very regularly (generally because of some stuff being on a network share or some hardware being plugged in an out a bit too much.. like unplugging an USB soundcard when it's being actively used, this one always causes some mess)


Not OP, but I use xkill semi regularly (like 1-2 times a week) to check whether an app is running in xwayland or natively...


xeyes can check that too, without killing the application.


aha, I just used it for a very simple reason: it was simpler for me to type "<meta+d> xkill" and point & shoot than to go through the save & exit confirm dialogs of a GUI app I was about to close


who runs js in a web browser every day in 2023.


> 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...

In my experience it's got nothing to do with the operating system and everything to do with who wrote your graphics card driver. (NVidia is stable everywhere, AMD is... not).


>AMD is not...

We are not in the Radeon times with GATOS project any more. Since the radeon(4) driver, Radeon cards might work much better with open drivers and a current MESA release than NVIDIA except for machine learning.


I use XEyes all the time to find out if an app is running in Wayland or XWayland.


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.


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. :-)


> 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.


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.


The xv guy might still be accepting payment. I wonder how much he gets these days

http://www.trilon.com/xv/


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!


xv runs perfectly on linux (Slackware 64)


Thanks!


right, xterm is obscure?

but xmosaic should count of obscure today because now it only works on old and obscure websites ;-)


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.)


> 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.


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.


I used to use

xterm -fn 24 &

on HP-UX workstations and servers. Even on Linux maybe, earlier.


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 :)


Heidi Stettner's dog, at the Berkeley CSRG.

(Ok, I had to look up her last name. I'm getting old.)


xkill is frequently useful at my work, unfortunately


It's a UNIX system! I know this!


Is there an xkill equivalent for Wayland yet?


Most Linux users these days run GNOME or KDE and have never heard of these janky little apps linked directly against xlib.


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.


it's a bit of fun running them in wsl




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