[Techtalk] rxvt - was: Re: End key no longer goes to EOL

[Almut Behrens]

On Sun, Jan 13, 2002 at 12:27:54PM +0000, Telsa Gwynne wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 13, 2002 at 11:28:35AM +0100 or thereabouts, Almut Behrens wrote:
>
> > ...  And who uses these additional graphics
> > features that xterm offers, anyway? So far, I haven't seen anyone doing
> > tektronix grahics and stuff in xterm...
> 
> Oh boy. A good half of gnome-terminal bugs at times seem to be
> "xterm does this neat thing. Why doesn't gnome-terminal?" I have
> discovered xterm does tons and tons of things now!

Although I haven't been missing anything so far, maybe it's just that
I don't know what I'm (not) missing...

Can you provide a few highlights?

> 
> I believe there is long historical background to the backspace/delete 
> key thing and what each one does or should do;

yeah, dreadful, that, really!  Not only all the unnecessary flames, but
also the mere fact that it still usually just doesn't work consistently
(if at all) in a heterogeneous environment, independently of whichever
way you yourself decide to be the right one...
That would be another whole rant of its own... (maybe some other time :)

> but the reason I never
> really got going with rxvt was that in the FAQ for it, it's plain that 
> rxvt does it one way, and that I was used to it the other way.

That didn't bother me too much, because I usually build those things
from sources, and then, it's reasonably trivial to set it up the way
you want it to behave (feature.h) -- I don't even know any more if I
did change the default...
Anyway, I only reconfigure these things when a major new release of
rxvt comes out -- and even this is mainly only to deal with that uneasy
feeling of knowing that one might be using outdated stuff ;) 
Basically, I'm happy with the way it works.

> a personal thing, that. I am not au fait with fonts, and just live
> with most of them, which has people who mess with them asking me
> "But how can you put up with that?" 
> 
> I did play with wterm (same family as rxvt) a lot because I
> liked the little menu that popped up and let you change font
> sizes and colours and hadn't seen anything like it before.

Personally, I prefer to have just *one* font that I do like -- and that
automatically brings along with it, that I don't need to change them
on-the-fly ;)  (The only time I ever felt the need to fiddle with the
font size was when there were some people standing at the other end of
the room, who wanted to read what I was typing...)

I guess I'm just the "minimalist" type of user/geek.  I don't really
need much to interact with my computers.  OTOH, I want those few
programs I use regularly, to work *exactly* the way I like it -- and I
can go to great lengths to achieve that. There's hardly a single one of
my favorite programs without some "personalized" sections of code.
Being able to do that is one of the many things I love about linux and
open-source.
But that's *my* way of doing things -- no offence in any way...

> 
> > Okay, I'll stop rambling about stuff nobody has asked for...
> 
> Don't do that; I will have to stop too, then!

:-)

Almut