• 2 Posts
  • 36 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 6th, 2023

help-circle





  • donio@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mlThe cost of maintaining Xorg
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    20
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    11 months ago

    Autotype is already solved - ydotool, wtype and dotool exists (and possibly others as well).

    These tools work by creating a virtual keyboard so they don’t let you send input to a specific window. The input goes to whatever happens to be focused at the moment. This makes them less reliable than the X11 equivalents and unusable for tasks where you need to guarantee that the right window gets the input.











  • Maybe other tools support this too but one thing I like about xdiskusage is that you can pipe regular du output into it. That means that I can run du on some remote host that doesn’t have anything fancy installed, scp it back to my desktop and analyze it there. I can also pre-process the du output before feeding it into xdiskusage.

    I also often work with textual du output directly, just sorting it by size is very often all I need to see.


  • I am on Gentoo. It's not really a goal for me to stick with it, I am pretty pragmatic about these choices. What I value about Gentoo is the flexibility and the lack of magic. The ability to fully own and understand my system. I know what's installed, what's running and why. It's up to me if I want to use systemd or something else, do I want pulseaudio, pipewire or just plain ALSA, X11 or Wayland, what type of desktop environment to use (if any). I can easily apply local patches if needed, I can build a package from git or stick to some old version if I prefer. I know how I want things to work and Gentoo lets me get there. If I found a better way to do it I'd switch. Maybe something like NixOS someday but I am not ready for those trade-offs yet.

    The reason I've been maintaining the same image for so long is that I didn't have a reason to rebuild it. I've always been able to make the changes I needed. I re-did the image when going from 32 to 64 bit because it was less work.




  • I use parcellite. Sensible UI, has all the functionality I need and it's not tied to any desktop environment.
    The functionality I care about:

    • history, including customizable persistent entries
    • customizable key bindings
    • handles both primary and selection and can sync them
    • can trim whitespace
    • can launch customizable actions on the active entry