Re: links

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From: peter (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: links
Date: 12:31 on 21 May 2005
> Um, actually I find most things work that way.  Certainly in 'Pine',
> 'SLRN', 'Vim', and any other terminal app which snags the mouse for
> itself, holding down shift gets back bypasses the app and gets back the
> terminal's X selection operations.

Oh, good, we're back to the topic of hateful software. Terminal mouse
support is so badly implemented and designed, and you can't depend on
it even if it wasn't... because sometimes it's compiled in, sometimes
it isn't, sometimes it's allergic to screen or telnet, sometimes it's
not... that the only rational thing to do is turn it off. Except that
there's no way to just do that globally, you have to fiddle with each
app's configuration until you find its "no mouse" option, or you have
to figure out a TERM for each shell on each machine that'll leave you
enough capabilities to let the app work without making it go "Whoa! I
can use the mouse!".

So I generally find that the best way to deal with terminal apps that
snag the mouse is to use something else that doesn't.

Compounding this is the fact that XTerm sucks so badly that only the
fact that every other X11 terminal program sucks so much more keeps
me using it. I know a lot of people like rxvt, but I'm damned if I can
tell why: it's managed to be even less user friendly than XTerm, which
is a pretty amazing thing by itself. And extended versions of rxvt
aren't any better... you'd think that improving the user interface
would be the first thing people would do, but NO, they extend it to
do things like putting a unique backdrop picture in each window, or
something else I can't even imagine wanting.

And then there's newer replacements for XTerm. Some of them look like
they'd be pretty good, but you need to install about half a gigabyte of
Gnome or KDE, most of which was written by people who never used anything
but Linux and unless someone's already ported them to your platform
it's a major project to get them to work... and when you're done you've got
something with maybe 30 or 40 times the footprint of XTerm. Even the ones
described as "lightweight" are bloated things with half a dozen obscure
dependencies.

I don't want tabs or toolbars or menu bars, I just want something that
looks like xterm-without-tektronix-support to the application, looks
like xterm-without-athena-weirdness to me, and doesn't require me to
exit it, fiddle with configuration and command line, and restart it just
to change a simple option.

But is there anything like that? Hell no. Hateful things.

And to get back on topic, that means that if the app has grabbed the mouse
it provides a visible indication of that fact, AND it lets me override that
grab RIGHT NOW, FOR THIS WINDOW or ALL THE TIME, FOR ALL WINDOWS.

A menu time to locate the develope of the app and apply jwz's patented
audio-cock technology would be a nice extra.

There's stuff above here

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