Custom fonts [LWN.net]

Custom fonts

Posted Jun 11, 2004 2:17 UTC (Fri) by pimlott (guest, #1535)
In reply to: Custom fonts by neilbrown
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

Life changing. However, it strikes me as more the Plan 9 way than the Unix way, as it's similar to the method of executing commands in acme. Is there another Unix program that makes use of the selection for anything other than paste?

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Custom fonts

Posted Jun 11, 2004 9:35 UTC (Fri) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]

By "The Unix Way", I mean the "one task, one tool" paradym (sp?).
Most commonly in Unix they communicate over pipes, but I don't see that
as essential to idea. Communicating via X selections is just as valid.

It is quite likely that Plan 9 follows this "unix way" more than other derivatives.

I think it would make a lot of sense to have just one font picker, just one
colour picker, just one file picker (... are there any others), that each
app communicates with via the X server. After all, each app doesn't do it's
own window management (with some annoying exceptions like xmms). Why should
they each have their own pickers?

I don't know of any other apps that us the selection in interesting ways,
which is a shame.