Tag: X

Awesome window manager

I'm officially a convert. I finally went from a floating-only window manager to a tiling window manager. And it does floating too! Awesome seems to be everything that Window Maker just couldn't be for me. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 9 years ago, on May 02, 2010, at 21:05 | 1 comment

XSel, for command-line operations on X selections

Since I first learned that Windowmaker installs two command-line tools, wxcopy and wxpaste, to play around with X selections, I have wanted to be able to make and use X selections from my Bash shell. wxcopy and wxpaste never did what I expected them to do, so I gave up until recently I learned about all the different X selections. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 9 years ago, on January 31, 2010, at 23:01 | 3 comments

Copy-pasting to and from XTerms

By default, XTerms only supports the PRIMARY selection for copy and paste. The PRIMARY selection is the one that is used by most ‘modern’ X application when you select text. This text can then usually be pasted by clicking the middle/second mouse button. Because this selection is set whenever you select, it's easily overwritten, often accidentally. That's why most newer X apps offer a parallel copy/paste mechanism where the selection is only explicitly set by choosing “Cut” or “Copy” from the application's “Edit” menu or from its context menu (or with the Control-X/C/V keyboard shortcuts). In X, this selection is called CLIPBOARD, just like in Windows where it's the only selection. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 9 years ago, on January 31, 2010, at 20:01 | 3 comments

Old Window Maker screenshot from April 2004

While cleaning up old images, I came across a screenshot of an old Window Maker configuration that I ran in 2004. It looks a bit different from my current configuration, but not that different, which just goes to say how little Window Maker has changed in the last five years. The main difference I see in terms of Window Maker capabilities is that Window Maker now has font anti-aliasing support. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 9 years ago, on November 10, 2009, at 13:11 | Comments closed

Configuring X input devices through HAL

When I went from X.org < 7.3 to X.org > 7.3, I had to make some changes to my X input configuration. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 10 years ago, on September 20, 2009, at 15:09 | 1 comment

XKB compose sequences

I just ended a post about inserting special characters in VIM with the remark that I should find out how to insert special punctuation marks using just XKB, so I set out to find out how to add these to the list of existing compose options for XKB. Turns out that I should have simply taken another look at the configuration file for Compose mode (/usr/X11R6/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose on my system). Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 10 years ago, on September 07, 2009, at 13:09 | 2 comments

VIM tips for editing prose

I was transcribing a draft for a manuscript. Using VIM, of course. But, I found my VIM skills to be lacking somewhat, enough to become sufficiently annoyed to investigate the holes. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 10 years ago, on September 07, 2009, at 12:09 | Comments closed

wmsystray, a notification area DockApp for WindowMaker

Many X apps these days require a system tray. GNOME and KDE have system tray applets enabled in their panels by default. WindowMaker doesn't have a panel. It supports DockApps, which are, of course, much cooler. :-P Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 10 years ago, on April 08, 2009, at 22:04 | Comments closed

My Window Maker “desktop” configuration

During the ten years of my love-hate relationship with X-Windows, I've often tried and enjoyed using full-fledged desktop environment (starting with KDE and later sometimes GNOME too), but, given time, I always gravitate back to WindowMaker. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 10 years ago, on March 30, 2009, at 13:03 | 7 comments