LWN: Comments on "wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator"

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

jnareb — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 21:14:22 +0000

> Unless its names you cannot sensibly search the web for like 'perf'.

I agree that 'perf' subsystem is a stupidly unsearchable name... so try searching for 'perf events' instead.

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

juliank — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 12:21:49 +0000

I can't even see Chinese characters in my browser... Just boxes, maybe with numbers in them.

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

juliank — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 12:16:56 +0000

Searching for golang usually works good enough.

Naming conventions

BenHutchings — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 18:45:34 +0000

'axi-cache search r' works a lot better.

I love the K thing

mpr22 — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 10:59:14 +0000

It seems to me that sorpigal (a) is perfectly aware of this (b) is raising a valid point regarding the overloading of the single-letter prefix 'k'.

I love the K thing

hummassa — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 10:22:47 +0000

> great, but tell me what part of KDE is kthreadd from?

That's from the kernel, not kde...

http://www.linuxvox.com/2012/06/what-is-the-kthreadd-proc...

I love the K thing

Cyberax — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 04:11:57 +0000

Kill them all and the init sort 'em out!

I love the K thing

tnoo — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 04:07:33 +0000

Like, for example, kthreadd, khelper, and many others? This occasionally would have bitten me when I was trying to get rid of all jobs related to KDE. The main distinction is the permissions needed to kill these jobs.

Now, who was first, KDE or Kernel?

I love the K thing

sorpigal — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 14:14:03 +0000

It's great, but tell me what part of KDE is kthreadd from? I don't use it and I wish to terminate this application.

But seriously, names mean what people want them to mean. A thing's names does not represent it's function, its function represents its name.

> There are a whole lot of other apps that begin with "gnome-", so if I'm trying to open the application with the run command dialogue, I have to type 7 characters before I have any hope of identification for successful completion.

But on the plus side, I can list all GNOME apps by typing gnome-[tab][tab], except for the ones that don't follow the convention. If it were applied universally the {gnome-,g,k} prefix would be much more useful, but it's inconsistent and you still have to guess.

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

pboddie — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 12:22:58 +0000

Recent experience suggests that it's pretty difficult to explain to people how to use it (1) over the telephone and (2) from memory of how it actually behaves, especially when a normal menu would be obvious enough. There's also the issue of navigating through a keyhole when the door is already open, but I know that the other extreme is full-screen menus, and that menu navigation can also be an exercise in applying finely tuned motor skills.

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

njd27 — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 09:34:54 +0000

librecad is another example.

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

niner — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 09:17:57 +0000

Tried your tests on konsole out of curiousity and can report that at least version 4.9.1 passed all your tests without problems.

I love the K thing

marcH — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 07:17:43 +0000

Single letter prefixes like 'k' also show some humility: these applications don't assume everyone is using KDE (or else)

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

nix — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 10:30:22 +0000

I actually find the new menu really useful, because it minimizes the number of mouse motions necessary to get to any given item, and minimizes the distance you need to travel. But it's definitely sufficiently unusual that it probably turns off quite a lot of people.

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

nix — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 10:29:16 +0000

And he was right! At the time. If he could look twenty years forward I think he might perhaps have chosen another name, *any* other name. :)

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

marcH — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 10:13:34 +0000

In 2012, does software highly specific to recent versions of Linux still need to depend on the autotools nightmare?

(BTW you could just start autgen.sh with 'set -e')

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

marcH — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 09:45:08 +0000

How can you expect any single letter to be searchable?

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

quanstro — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 07:07:48 +0000

i'd be happy if we stopped emulating terminals,
complete with baud rate and other anachronisms.

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

lindi — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 00:17:50 +0000

It wasn't very robust when I tried it. Just typing

echo -en "\e[2147483647L"

caused it to spend a few minutes wasting CPU time and not responding to anything (CVE-2012-2385, has now been fixed).

I love the K thing

blackbelt_jones — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 23:11:05 +0000

I don't expect the name of an application to entertain me. I expect the name of an application to it tell me what it is, as succinctly as possible. I know it seems korny, but I think the k prefix is genius, because of its economy. It identifies an application as being part of KDE, often without making the application name longer, not by a single character. The KDE terminal emulator in konsole. Easy Peasy.

This is yet another thing I hate about Gnome. What's the name of the terminal emulator in gnome? "Gnome-terminal". There are a whole lot of other apps that begin with "gnome-", so if I'm trying to open the application with the run command dialogue, I have to type 7 characters before I have any hope of identification for successful completion.

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

drag — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 22:17:35 +0000

It works very well when combined as a pager for things like mutt. I know lots of people take a hardcore stance on html email, but it is (and has been) a valid internet standard for a very long time and a lot of people use it. So w3m is nice for this.

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

deepfire — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 20:33:31 +0000

Good luck with not missing the rare pages which are actually apropos to your needs this way..

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

sjj — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 20:16:17 +0000

+1 :) Are you going to open a bug for Wayland to fix their naming convention? Might take some time to convince the devs.

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

drag — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 19:59:33 +0000

Should name it 'weasel-term'. That would be awesome, completely memorable, and very google-friendly.

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

mathstuf — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 19:08:46 +0000

> Now, try w3m (w3m-img) locally.

How did I not know about this before? /me searches for webkit-based terminal browser.

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

martinfick — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 15:12:22 +0000

I'd rather my SPAM stay garbled.

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

Seegras — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 14:05:49 +0000

I switched to urxvt (rxvt-unicode-256color) after I switched to UTF8 (and wterm and aterm couldn't handle it). Right now, it's probably the best terminal in terms of features and compatibility.

And I can't absolutely imagine anything rewritten to only come near it within 5 years.

Try this: Use utf8; ssh to some host and start Midnight Commander, Do all characters and line-characters look right? Do all keyboard-shortcuts work? Does clicking with the mouse on menu-items work? If not, your terminal is trash and totally unuseable.
Start mutt, read your spamfolder, can you see russian and chinese characters in the spam or are there garbled characters? If garbled, either your terminal is broken or misconfigured.
Now, try w3m (w3m-img) locally. Where are the images displayed? If they're not inline, you've still got some work to do.

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

pboddie — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 13:56:07 +0000

the KDE start menu looks like it was designed by and for middle schoolers

The one that pretends to be an iPod or the old one that behaved like a normal menu? The former's behaviour is surely less tolerable than any potential renaming of the shutdown option as "Kthxbye".

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

tzafrir — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 13:41:22 +0000

Not that long before the WEB. C was invented in 1972. In 1984 Knuth reported in an article about his Pascal program(PDF):

I chose the name WEB partly because it was one of the few three-letter words of English that hadn’t already been applied to computers.

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

madscientist — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 12:28:09 +0000

You guys do know that you can use more than one word at a time with Google, right? I mean, you can type "programming language go" and ... amazing! ... first hit.

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

farnz — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 12:10:05 +0000

Better than that - there are two terminal emulators. This one, and the one that's shipped with Weston as a demo application.

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

mariuz — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 11:54:16 +0000

Now i should look for a stable wayland ppa

or i will recompile it over the weekend

http://wayland.freedesktop.org/building.html

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

andresfreund — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 11:15:36 +0000

C has a pretty good excuse with being around before the web, universally available search engines and all but I still cannot grok what made the go designers choose that name.
Its as if the respective authors have desire of not being used/searched/found.

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

nix — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 11:07:19 +0000

Language names are much worse. Clojure is a nice searchable name. Haskell is OK on this front (though it's both a personal and family name so is somewhat ambiguous); Java is tolerable, but C? Go? Not much chance of finding *that*.

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

cmccabe — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 06:41:23 +0000

There's a terminal emulator? Great, now Wayland has all the functionality I'll ever need ;)

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

mgedmin — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 06:34:58 +0000

> there is a package I can't recall with a name that has lib in it but it's not a library

libreoffice?

The binary names in it are also fun: I kept parsing 'localc' as 'local-c' and trying to understand what it was (a local C compiler?) before I understood it was actually 'l-o-calc'.

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

sjj — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 22:23:42 +0000

Sure, I can see why you would defend names starting with K ;-) Don't take this the wrong way, I appreciate your input here on all things K and Krita. You've done much more for the community than I have. I even understand how we ended up here, but nowadays _to me_, the KDE start menu looks like it was designed by and for middle schoolers*. Application naming is part of a DE's user interface and kuteness becomes tiring after a while.

Like I said, it's a pet peeve, or "minor annoyance that an individual identifies as particularly annoying to them". So, not earth shattering importance. I consider "small-minded" more of an insult. But this is not the place or time for a flamefest. Peace out, bro!

* in the US, 11-13 year olds.

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

teknohog — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 20:46:26 +0000

> I could get used to saying wayterm.

waybackmachine (for backups)
waynesworld (nintendo emulator)

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

andresfreund — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 20:44:58 +0000

Unless its names you cannot sensibly search the web for like 'perf'.

wlterm: the native Wayland terminal emulator

halla — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 20:22:12 +0000

Well, my pet peeve is people whining about application naming. It's petty and small-minded.