movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (1y ago)

(#boiotxq) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org ā€œAdvancedā€, well, probably more ā€œmatureā€. There arenā€™t a ton of crazy features and that icon thing is the largest code addition in the last 10 years. %)

Speaking of OS/2 ā€¦ I just realized that Windows 3.x didnā€™t have icons, either. If Iā€™m not mistaken, this only got added in Windows 95. In other words, OS/2 had this feature before Windows did, because at least OS/2 2.1 from 1993 had icons. Who would have thunk.

(Now I kind of want to know which system really introduced this feature.)

#meg2xwa
movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (1y ago)

(#boiotxq) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh, huh, maybe it was just my GNOME 2 themes back then that didnā€™t show the icon. šŸ¤”

I like the looks of your window manager. Thatā€™s using Wayland, right?

Oh, no. Itā€™s still X11. All my recent Wayland comments resulted from me trying to switch, but I think itā€™s still too early. Being unable to use QEMU (because it canā€™t capture the mouse pointer) is a pretty big blocker for me. This is completely broken, it just happens to be unnoticeable with modern guest OSes, so itā€™s probably not a priority for devs.

(Not to mention that I would have to fork and substantially extend dwl in order to ā€œreplicateā€ my X11 WM. And then, after having done that, Iā€™d have to follow upstream Wayland development, for which I donā€™t have the resources. Things would need to slow down before I can do that.)

all that wasted space of the windows not making use of the full screen!!!1

Heh. Iā€™ve been using tiling WMs for ~15 years now, so itā€™s actually kind of refreshing to see something different for a change. šŸ˜…

Probably close to the older Windowses.

That particular theme is a ripoff of OS/2 Warp 3: https://movq.de/v/6c2a948882/s.png šŸ˜…

We ran some similar brownish color scheme (donā€™t recall its name) on Win95 or Win98

Oh god. Yeah, I wasnā€™t a fan of those, either. šŸ„“

#g6im5yq
lyse @lyse.isobeef.org
 (1y ago)

(#boiotxq) @movq@www.uninformativ.de According to this screenshot, KDE still shows good old application icons: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/KDE_Plasma_5.21_Breeze_Twilight_screenshot.png

And GNOME used to have them, too: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Gnome-2-22_%284%29.png

I like the looks of your window manager. Thatā€™s using Wayland, right? The only thing on this screenshot to critique is all that wasted space of the windows not making use of the full screen!!!1 At least the file browser. 8-)

This drives me nuts when my workmates share their screens. I really donā€™t get it how people can work like that. You canā€™t even read the whole line in the IDE or log viewer with all the expanded side bars. And then thereā€™s 200 pixels on the left and another 300 pixels on the right where the desktop wallpaper shows. Gnaa! Thereā€™s the other extreme end when somebody shares their ultra wide screen and I just have a ā€œregularishā€ 16:10 monitor and donā€™t see shit, because itā€™s resized way too tiny to fit my width. Good times. :-D

Sorry for going off on a tangent here. :-) Back to your WM: It has the right mix of being subtle and still similar to motif. Probably close to the older Windowses. My memory doesnā€™t serve me well, but I think they actually got it fairly good in my opinion. Your purple active window title looks killer. It just fits so well. This brown one (https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-07-22/0/leafpads.png) gives me also classic vibes. Awww. We ran some similar brownish color scheme (donā€™t recall its name) on Win95 or Win98 for some time on the family computer. I remember other people visting us not liking these colors. :-D

#xdkmw4a
movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (1y ago)

(#boiotxq) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org True, at least old versions of KDE had icons:

https://movq.de/v/0e4af6fea1/s.png

GNOME, on the other hand, didnā€™t, at least to my old screenshots from 2007:

https://www.uninformativ.de/desktop/2007%2D05%2D25%2D%2Dgnome2%2Dlaptop.png

I switched to Linux in 2007 and no window manager I used since then had icons, apparently. Crazy. An icon-less existence for 18 years. (But yeah, everything is keyboard-driven here as well and there are no buttons here, either.)

Anyway, my draft is making progress:

https://movq.de/v/5b7767f245/s.png

I do like this look. šŸ˜Š

#7ybumjq
lyse @lyse.isobeef.org
 (1y ago)

(#boiotxq) @movq@www.uninformativ.de I havenā€™t used KDE or GNOME for ages, but Iā€™m sure KDE at least used to show application icons in the title bars. They proabably still do. But then, one could argue that KDE is mimicking Windows. I never thought like that, I always found KDE way superior, because I was able to configure it like a madman.

In i3, I donā€™t have any application icons. I remember missing them at the beginning. But I donā€™t even have the classical minimize, maximize and close buttons in the title bar either. Just the title. Being mostly keyboard driven and a tiling window manager, these buttons are not super useful, anyway.

#2odssda
movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (1y ago)

Hereā€™s an example of X11/Xlib being old and archaic.

X11 knows the data type ā€œcardinalā€. For example, the window property _NET_WM_ICON (which holds image data for icons) is an array of ā€œcardinalā€. I am already not really familiar with that word and Iā€™m assuming that it comes from mathematics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_number

(It could also be a bird, but probably not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinalidae)

We would probably call this an ā€œintegerā€ today.

EWMH says that icons are arrays of cardinals and that theyā€™re 32-bit numbers:

https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/latest-single/#id-1.6.13

So itā€™s something like 0x11223344 with 0x11 being the alpha channel, 0x22 is red, and so on.

You would assume that, when you retrieve such an array from the X11 server, youā€™d get an array of uint32_t, right?

Nope.

Xlib is so old, they use char for 8-bit stuff, short int for 16-bit, and long int for 32-bit:

https://x.org/releases/current/doc/libX11/libX11/libX11.html#Obtaining_and_Changing_Window_Properties

That is congruent with the general C data types, so it does make sense:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_data_types

Now the funny thing is, on modern x86_64, the type long int is actually 64 bits wide.

The result is that every pixel in a Pixmap, for example, is twice as large in memory as it would need to be. Just because Xlib uses long int, because uint32_t didnā€™t exist, yet.

And this is something that I wouldnā€™t know how to fix without breaking clients.

#xnfrmlq
movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (1y ago)

(#lnzctjq) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org They are optional dependencies and listed as such:

$ pacman -Qi pinentry
Name            : pinentry
Version         : 1.3.1-5
Description     : Collection of simple PIN or passphrase entry dialogs which
                  utilize the Assuan protocol
Optional Deps   : gcr: GNOME backend [installed]ā€Ø                      gtk3: GTK backend [installed]ā€Ø                      qt5-x11extras: Qt5 backend [installed]ā€Ø                      kwayland5: Qt5 backend
                  kguiaddons: Qt6 backend
                  kwindowsystem: Qt6 backend

And itā€™s probably a good thing that theyā€™re optional. I wouldnā€™t want to have all that installed all the time.

#iaa2bza
lyse @lyse.isobeef.org
 (1y ago)

We finally got a caliper donated for this yearā€™s scout flea market. We didnā€™t sell it, but kept it ourselves. It will come in very handy every now and then in our material store. For example, I missed having a caliper in the past when sorting our random assortment of screws or measuring the depth of a hole. Itā€™s a wee bit banged up (probably happened during transport) and didnā€™t come with a box, but the latter is now solved.

The lid and bottom came from a wardrobe back panel I got from a mate, the sides were rocket sticks in their former lives. I found some scrap of felt in our material store and some hinges laying around in the drawers of my own workshop.

Unfortunately, the table saw teared up the plywood veneer fibres badly, even though I put tape around to prevent that. This is the first time it didnā€™t work. At. All. To cover that up, I painted the box with some decades old tinting paint (price tag says Deutsche Mark, not Euro!) from my paint cabinet. Itā€™s awesome, works absolutely perfectly and doesnā€™t smell the slightest bit. I reckon, this caliper box is plenty good enough for occasional use at our scout material store.

#6lhcl5a
movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (1y ago)

I was drafting support for showing ā€œapplication iconsā€ in my window manager, i.e. the Firefox icon in the titlebar:

https://movq.de/v/0034cc1384/s.png

Then I realized: Wait a minute, lots of applications donā€™t set an icon? And lots of other window managers donā€™t show these icons, either? Openbox, pekwm, Xfce, fvwm, no icons.

Looks like macOS doesnā€™t show them, either?!

Has this grown out of fashion? Is this purely a Windows / OS/2 thing?

#boiotxq
movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (1y ago)

(#euobsca) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I spent so much time in the past figuring out if something is a dict or a list in YAML, for example.

What are the types in this example?

items:
- part_no:   A4786
  descrip:   Water Bucket (Filled)
  price:     1.47
  quantity:  4
- part_no:   E1628
  descrip:   High Heeled "Ruby" Slippers
  size:      8
  price:     133.7
  quantity:  1

items is a dict containing ā€¦ a list of two other dicts? Right?

It is quite hard for me to grasp the structure of YAML docs. šŸ˜¢

The big advantage of YAML (and JSON and TOML) is that itā€™s much easier to write code for those formats, than it is with XML. json.loads() and youā€™re done.

#roh5fka
movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (1y ago)

Only figured this out yesterday:

pinentry, which is used to safely enter a password on Linux, has several frontends. Thereā€™s a GTK one, a Qt one, even an ncurses one, and so on.

GnuPG also uses pinentry. And you can configure your frontend of choice here in gpg-agent.conf.

But what happens when you donā€™t configure it? Whatā€™s the default?

Turns out, pinentry is a shellscript wrapper and itā€™s not even that long. Here it is in full:

#!/bin/bash

# Run user-defined and site-defined pre-exec hooks.
[[ -r "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}"/pinentry/preexec ]] && \
        . "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}"/pinentry/preexec
[[ -r /etc/pinentry/preexec ]] && . /etc/pinentry/preexec

# Guess preferred backend based on environment.
backends=(curses tty)
if [[ -n "$DISPLAY" || -n "$WAYLAND_DISPLAY" ]]; then
        case "$XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP" in
        KDE|LXQT|LXQt)
                backends=(qt qt5 gnome3 gtk curses tty)
                ;;
        *)
                backends=(gnome3 gtk qt qt5 curses tty)
                ;;
        esac
fi

for backend in "${backends[@]}"
do
        lddout=$(ldd "/usr/bin/pinentry-$backend" 2>/dev/null) || continue
        [[ "$lddout" == *'not found'* ]] && continue
        exec "/usr/bin/pinentry-$backend" "$@"
done

exit 1

Preexec, okay, then some auto-detection to use a toolkit matching your desktop environment ā€¦

ā€¦ and then it invokes ldd? To find out if all the required libraries are installed for the auto-detected frontend?

Oof. I was sitting here wondering why it would use pinentry-gtk on one machine and pinentry-gnome3 on another, when both machines had the exact same configs. Yeah, but different libraries were installed. One machine was missing gcr, which is needed for pinentry-gnome3, so that machine (and that one alone) spawned pinentry-gtk ā€¦

#lnzctjq
lyse @lyse.isobeef.org
 (1y ago)

I have a Python script that transforms the original YouTube channel Atom feed into a more useful Atom feed by removing the spam description and replacing it with the video duration, filtering out videos by title, duration, etc. I just updated it to exclude the damn Shorts garbage more efficiently. Finally, YouTube updated their Atom feed generation, so that the video URL contains /short/ if itā€™s of this useless kind. Never thought that they ever actually will improve their Atom feeds. Thank you, much appreciated!

#6u6yutq
lyse @lyse.isobeef.org
 (1y ago)

(#ijm24eq) @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I have absolutely no idea, but I wouldnā€™t be surprised if it uses the closest full image after your cut point and not the one before. Hence, the deltas between the two full images have nothing to really refer to. So, the video player just shows the first full image it finds and ā€œfreezesā€ the image until the video stream actually hits it.

Let me try to visualize it, | represent full images, . just subsequent deltas:

Original start of video
ā†“
|......|.....|........|......|..
   ā†‘                      ā†‘
   Cut point      Cut point

Resulting video:

   ....|.....|........|....
   ā†‘ā†‘ā†‘ā†‘
   This is where it freezes

Could be complete bullshit, though. Wouldnā€™t be the first time that Iā€™m wrong. :-)

Iā€™m just curious, what exact command line do you use to cut the video?

#r4ysira
movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (1y ago)

Since Wayland compositors handle input devices on a lower level than X11 window managers, every compositor has to figure out on their own what a ā€œmouse wheel clickā€ is:

(I think ā€œWayland compositorā€ is a misnomer. They are full-blown display servers that also do compositing, plus Wayland window management, plus X11 window management.)

One can only hope that all this eventually gets moved into the wlroots library. (Iā€™m not sure if thatā€™s possible, nor if people would want that.)

#4rdmeyq
movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (1y ago)

Xfce does one thing very right: It stores its settings in plain-text XML files. This allows me to easily read, track, and maybe even distribute these settings to other machines.

(Unlike GNOMEā€™s dconf, which uses some binary file format. Fun fact: The older and now deprecated gconf also used XML files.)

#euobsca
bender @twtxt.net
 (1y ago)

(#23mu5la) I think I understand now. Americans do not go camping, we do recreational activities. I donā€™t think campers are a thing here, but RVs (Recreational Vehicles) are. Thatā€™s why it would never cross my mind to get anything with fabric, that folds. No mate, we get a house on wheels, with a million miles engine. šŸ¤£

Other than that, it looks nice!

#5afiuya