Banner Image

1 Terminals follow-up turned into a look at WMs and Wayland

While reading about terminals, I came across a thread from a few years ago where someone suggested their terminal supported the following command, but others did not. Unfortunately, I cannot find the link anymore.


      # This will break most shells or terminals
      echo -e "\033(0"

So I tried that terminal and it still broke. It broke in everything I tried. Moving on for now…

Along the way I tried several DEs and WMs I had not used in a while. Xfce has been my daily driver for the last two or three years. I mainly tried out IceWM and LXDE which I had previously used as my daily driver before Xfce.

1.1 IceWM

I spent quite a bit of time using IceWM. I mostly used the win95 theme. It reminded me of when I used Tails in the office because at the time some folks gave me flack for using "Linucks". That slowly stopped. And now I pretty much haven't used Tails since before the pandemic now.

I have pasted the output below, with a minor edit to the desktop background image path. Some of these combine things I pasted from a couple sources from the faq or forums. Note that every time I switched it mutated the theme dotfile, so I left it for posterity. My lockscreen did not work, but not a big deal when I have a door on my office. Not sure if another WM/DE config had clobbered it. I did notice some changes to xscreensaver.


      ~ $ tree .icewm/
      .icewm/
      ├── preferences
      ├── startup
      └── theme
      
      0 directories, 3 files
      ~ $ cat .icewm/startup 
      #!/usr/bin/env bash
      set -e
      set -u
      set -o pipefail
      
      
      xcompmgr -c &
      ~ $ cat .icewm/theme 
      Theme="win95/default.theme"
      #Theme="default/default.theme"
      #Theme="win95/default.theme"
      #Theme="default/default.theme"
      #Theme="win95/default.theme"
      ~ $ cat .icewm/preferences 
      # Display desktop background centered and not tiled
      DesktopBackgroundCenter=1 # 0/1
      
      # Support for semitransparent terminals like Eterm or gnome-terminal
      # SupportSemitransparency=1 # 0/1
      
      # Desktop background scaled to full screen
      DesktopBackgroundScaled=1 # 0/1
      
      # Desktop background color
      DesktopBackgroundColor="rgb:00/00/00"
      
      # Desktop background image
      DesktopBackgroundImage="/home/USERNAME/wallpapers/foo.jpg"

1.2 Wayland

I decided to look into DEs or WMs with Wayland support. Though I currently use Debian buster, I often take a look at other distros such as gnu guix system (formerly aka just guix aka guixsd) or arch just to see what they've packaged. I went down some more rabbit holes. I found this fun command to print out whether I had x11 or wayland.


      loginctl \
          show-session \
          $(loginctl | grep $(whoami) | awk '{print $1}') \
          -p Type

1.3 hikari

I haven't spent much time with hikari yet. But I did watch their video on why they chose darcs which seems like one of the best explanations I've heard for the whole "why not use git?" question.

That said, I want a compositing WM because I already do tiling inside emacs anyway. That said… sounds like an interesting massive spin-off project to write an elisp-extensible WM with emacs compatibility. Not that I have the time for that since I barely have time for my blog.

2 Folks who want to use Windows

Two well-seasoned staffers I work with asked for help this week. They do not feel comfortable using anything but Windows, but want to develop some CLI apps in Windows for use on bash.

A side note: Personally, I feel like if someone can survive the migration over the last decade from XP to Vista to 7 to 10, migrating to a Gnome or KDE or UbuntuDE shouldn't cause any more confusion. Though I didn't come here today to complain, so back to business.

I gave them several suggestions:

3 See also

4 Reading