On Sunday, 15 September 2013 at 18:24:11 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
> On Sunday, 15 September 2013 at 18:21:35 UTC, Michael wrote:
>> KDE, Gnome, Unity, Xfce.... wtf?
>>
>> Win 8.1 rocks)
>
> I was astonished when had a look at Win 8 preview and have noticed basically Shell / Unity overview as a start screen with only major difference that they have managed to make it ugly as hell :P

When I working as usual I don't care about UI of OS.
I care about a OS API. Win 8.1 maybe come with something disturbing changes, so I'm waiting a final release.

In Win 8.1 UI is better than 8.0.
On Debian - Xfce ;)

On 15/09/13 19:28, Dicebot wrote:
> Probably :) Well, Unity uses similar principles in many directions though I do
> like Gnome 3 decision to remove system tray completely and focus on robust
> notification system instead - that was the main decision factor for me when
> trying both it and Unity. (also default style aesthetics but that is
> configurable and hardly that important)

I confess that I've never actually used Gnome 3 ... who knows, I might love it :-)

I was a long-standing KDE user but I started getting curious about Unity round-about the Ubuntu 11.10 release -- I tried it out and thought "OK, this is interesting, I see where they're going, but it's not quite usable for me."  When 12.04 came out it had been really well polished, I fell in love with it and switched over.

Initially the relative lack of config options felt a bit irritating, but I was surprised how quickly I ceased to miss them.

I'm quite excited about the whole "convergence" idea that Ubuntu is pushing for a common UI and operating system across multiple devices, which is another good motivation for me to stick with Unity.

On Sunday, 15 September 2013 at 18:44:21 UTC, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> I'm quite excited about the whole "convergence" idea that Ubuntu is pushing for a common UI and operating system across multiple devices, which is another good motivation for me to stick with Unity.

Haha, guess what Gnome developers say? "We want it to become Gnome OS" :P

On 15/09/13 20:50, Dicebot wrote:
> Haha, guess what Gnome developers say? "We want it to become Gnome OS" :P

Yes, and this is something I hope they really succeed at.  The computing world is going to be much more fun if it's based around different competing free operating systems rather than proprietary ones.

Am 15.09.2013 20:21, schrieb Michael:
> KDE, Gnome, Unity, Xfce.... wtf?
>
> Win 8.1 rocks)

Workbench

On Sun, 15 Sep 2013 16:52:40 +0200
Jacob Carlborg <doob@me.com> wrote:

> On 2013-09-14 11:43, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> 
> > I've tried Total Commander on Windows, which is another program modeled after Norton Commander. It's probably the only file manager in the world that's even less to my taste than OSX's Finder. However, I do keep it around because its multiple-file-renaming tool is freaking awesome.
> 
> Finder in Mac OS X sucks. In the next version of Mac OS X it's going to get tabs, finally. Actually who cares, I'm already using Path Finder since many years:
> 
> http://www.cocoatech.com/pathfinder/
> 

Nice. If I ever end up with another Mac for one reason or another, I'm totally getting that program.

On Sun, 15 Sep 2013 13:56:52 +0200
Jacob Carlborg <doob@me.com> wrote:

> On 2013-09-15 13:12, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> 
> > The windows version is (for directories only):
> > $ explorer .
> 
> Didn't know about that.
> 

I didn't either until I tried it a few seconds before writing that ;) But I had a hunch!

On Sun, 15 Sep 2013 19:18:14 +0200
Joseph Rushton Wakeling <joseph.wakeling@webdrake.net> wrote:

> On 13/09/13 21:48, Namespace wrote:
> > Just out of interest.
> >
> > I use Sublime 2, Notepad++ and as IDE currently Mono-D. But I will try this evening VisualD.
> 
> Vim, on Ubuntu. :-)
> 
> The actual reason is rather trivial.  I've always favoured a mixed tab-space indent style for code ("tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment"), as described here: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SmartTabs
> 

I love that comic!

I actually did the same tab/space thing for awhile. But my editors didn't really have a native understanding of it so it became manual editing of invisible characters, so now I just avoid that style of alignment regardless of tabs or spaces. Ie, instead of:

foobar(aaaaa, bbbbb, ccccc,
       dddd, eeeee, fffff);

I'll just do:

foobar(
    aaaaa, bbbbb, ccccc,
    dddd, eeeee, fffff
);

Not as pretty, but it works, it makes things simpler, Plus it avoids the former style's tendency to wind up with gigantically-sized indents.

On Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 12:53:24AM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On Sat, 14 Sep 2013 03:08:32 -0700
> "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
[...]
> > It's one of the many reasons I have an aversion to all things GUI. In fact, in *my* book, a proper GUI program should automatically detach itself from the terminal at startup -- there are well-known, standard ways of doing this, but alas, most GUI developers don't care enough to do it.)
> > 
> 
> I would buy that book ;) Actually though, do you have a link regarding that auto-detaching?

Well... it's actually very simple:

	int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
		if (fork()==0) {
			/* debugMode gets all the spewage, since
			 * presumably the GUI developer actually cares
			 * about that stuff. */
			if (!debugMode) {
				/* Swallow all spewage */
				fclose(stdin);
				fclose(stdout);
				fclose(stderr);
			}

			/* GUI code doesn't need to run in terminal */
			startGui();
		}

		/* So return control back to shell immediately. */
		exit(0);
	}

:)

Though, granted, you probably want to reopen stdin/stdout/stderr (possibly as /dev/null) in case something chokes on errors caused by writing to a closed file descriptor. But in C, nobody cares about the return code of printf anyway, so this is mostly a non-issue.

(Of course, Unix does have a few dark corners, and here is one of them that catches most people unaware. Consider what happens after you call fclose on stdin/stdout/stderr. Unix, by convention, assigns them to file descriptors 0, 1, and 2. Since they are now closed, if you then open other resource files, say, a database file (via whatever DB library you're using), it gets assigned the lowest unused file descriptor, that is, 0, then 1, etc.. Now consider what happens when there are random printf's scattered all over the code, and you're unlucky enough to have your DB file's fd assigned to 1.)


T

-- 
First Rule of History: History doesn't repeat itself -- historians merely repeat each other.

On Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 07:32:48PM +0200, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Sunday, 15 September 2013 at 16:50:50 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
> >After I have switched to Gnome Shell I can't use any other desktop manager comfortably.
> 
> This is actually feel about my custom setup based on the Blackbox window manager. It has a lot of little differences from the other common options:
> 
> 1) sloppy focus. omg it is so much better than click to focus

Back when I was still using a GUI, sloppy focus was one of the only things that made it tolerable to use.

<rant>
Have you ever tried to configure sloppy focus on Windows? I have. I
don't know if it's still possible, but there used to be a setting for
this. Unfortunately... EVERYTHING breaks once you turn it on. And by
everything, I mean, literally, EVERYTHING. You've no idea how much
click-to-focus is unconsciously assumed by just about every Windows app
that ever existed. When that assumption breaks, all the flaws and
misdesigns of typical badly-written GUI code come to the forefront.
Don't try it at home; it will leave you scarred for life.
</rant>


> 2) no click to raise. omg it is so much better, I actually have control over the window's z-order! And alt+click to move windows is soooo convenient.
> 
> 3) my hotkeys rock. Keyboard control over moving, sizing, hiding, etc., and a one press hotkey to launch my beloved rxvt.

In ratpoison it's a two-key combination to launch a terminal, and of course I have that defaulted to rxvt-unicode.


> 4) I have both the roll up (shading) option and the disappearing (iconification/minimize) option, as well as multiple workspaces. KDE did the workspaces too, they aren't that special, but being able to get a window off the taskbar when I want to is pretty sweet.

<rant about inability to do this in Windows deleted/> ;-)


> also shading it while keeping focus and being able to manipulate another window with the mouse at the same time can be pretty boss.

Cool.


> 5) The menu, which I rarely use since rxvt rox, is on right click anywhere on the background. No space used by a start button or quick launch, so I can have my typical 20+ windows open at once and not crowd up the taskbar to uselessness.
[...]

Heh. I just use 'bg', 'jobs', and 'fg' on a single terminal. :) Usually, though, I have a bunch of terminals open, each dedicated to a specific purpose, and within each a number of suspended jobs managed by the aforementioned commands.


T

-- 
All men are mortal. Socrates is mortal. Therefore all men are Socrates.