This would’ve been easy to do if people had stuck with Xt-based toolkits. They didn’t.
The X Window System provides “mechanisms, not policy” for windowing. There was no standard widget toolkit like there is/was in other windowing systems of the same vintage. To make the writing of toolkits easier, the X Toolkit Intrinsics (Xt) library was created. This was a “toolkit toolkit” to allow GUI toolkits to be easily implemented. The most popular toolkits built on top of Xt were Motif and Athena.
One of the things that Xt provided was the concept of “Actions” and “Translations”. You could specify a sequence of X events (e.g. “this key press, followed by this one, then a mouse click”) and an action (e.g. “paste buffer”) and the application would just understand it. Applications were written to understand an abstract set of actions and then have the default key/mouse sequences wired up.
Users could trivially change the input sequences bound to a given command, and it would just work. These settings were stored in the X Resources Database, which Xt-based widgets would read from. Thus you could say “all Motif Text Widgets, I want you to go to the beginning of the line when I press Ctrl-A” and it would just work everywhere (well, everywhere that application/toolkit developers followed the Xt paradigm).
You could probably do something similar with a Gtk+ input method or something, but I’m not really sure.
X had some really good ideas that “modern” toolkits kinda abandoned.
I think spectral and fractal are two great native chat clients but they’re both supported by the matrix protocol, and that comes with its own set of problems and assumptions. I’m right there with you about Things 3. Probably the only productivity app I’ve stick with over a decade of trying different ones.
Interesting, that looks like a refurbished one. Amazon also doesn’t seem to have new models, and doesn’t seem to carry the 15” (refurbished or not). I guess we can thank the trade war for this.
It’s been a good experience so far. I’ve never done Prolog. My Mercury experience has all been working on Prince. Most of my time as YesLogic has been writing font handling code in Rust and integrating that with the Mercury code.
I want to install arch on my 2018 macbook pro really bad but I dont think its a good idea after past experiences… at least in 2015 there was docs on the Arch wiki. Looks dead now.
I’m going to ask the boss for a non-Mac next year…
I don’t understand why they removed the Installation Guide from the Arch Wiki. It used to be such a comprehensive resource to guide you through the installation process. Now all that information is spread across multiple wiki articles and you have to somehow piece it together.
I think all the content is still there it just got split up. It’s a bit of a shame since that install page used to be mostly standalone, now it’s a bit more of a choose your own adventure that branches off at various points.
I’ve been running Void Linux (the ‘normal’ variant, not musl) for a couple of years now both at home (gaming with Steam, Lutris (Diablo 3)) and at work as workhorse and I’ve been really enjoying it as a BSD’ish Linux.
I’m a little too used to certain Linux conveniences like Docker, native sync clients (Dropbox, pCloud) and Steam to make the switch to OpenBSD for my main machines. (Yes, this does not reflect well on the sad state of Unix caused by people focussing on Linux instead of making things cross-platform.)
I’d love to know the reasoning for the musl variant on a desktop. Also I’m surprised it seems to be working so good as it does. I only tested the void-musl variant for a server briefly and gave up because of the inherent problems.
If “running it on your desktop” is showing support, then yes - otherwise I don’t get how this would answer my question, although I’m not disagreeing with your sentiment per se.
I know about musl, I like musl, I use Alpine sometimes. I just had a not-great experience of using Void-musl on a full-blown VM (as in, like bare metal, not a container) - and I think it has to do with scope. It’s not a drop-in replacement for glibc in all cases, but it’s fine in certain modes of usage.
Somehow it never clicked for me before how dedicated a design ripoff this laptop is. Starting from the name.
Since Apple dropped the ball on their own laptops I don’t see this as a bad thing.
Yeah, I’m getting more and more bummed out by this. For now I’m saved by rarely needing my laptop away from my desk.
I’m not tied to MacOS / iOS for traditional vendor lock in reasons. More like feature lock in. I’ll switch back to Linux when it has:
What do you mean by that?
macOS input fields support emacs-like keyboard shortcuts:
https://jblevins.org/log/kbd
I wonder if this is doable through configuring the right kind of things in Qt and GTK+, because this is also a huge deal for me
This would’ve been easy to do if people had stuck with Xt-based toolkits. They didn’t.
The X Window System provides “mechanisms, not policy” for windowing. There was no standard widget toolkit like there is/was in other windowing systems of the same vintage. To make the writing of toolkits easier, the X Toolkit Intrinsics (Xt) library was created. This was a “toolkit toolkit” to allow GUI toolkits to be easily implemented. The most popular toolkits built on top of Xt were Motif and Athena.
One of the things that Xt provided was the concept of “Actions” and “Translations”. You could specify a sequence of X events (e.g. “this key press, followed by this one, then a mouse click”) and an action (e.g. “paste buffer”) and the application would just understand it. Applications were written to understand an abstract set of actions and then have the default key/mouse sequences wired up.
Users could trivially change the input sequences bound to a given command, and it would just work. These settings were stored in the X Resources Database, which Xt-based widgets would read from. Thus you could say “all Motif Text Widgets, I want you to go to the beginning of the line when I press Ctrl-A” and it would just work everywhere (well, everywhere that application/toolkit developers followed the Xt paradigm).
You could probably do something similar with a Gtk+ input method or something, but I’m not really sure.
X had some really good ideas that “modern” toolkits kinda abandoned.
Edit: @iswrong commented before me, and posted an excellent link.
I think spectral and fractal are two great native chat clients but they’re both supported by the matrix protocol, and that comes with its own set of problems and assumptions. I’m right there with you about Things 3. Probably the only productivity app I’ve stick with over a decade of trying different ones.
I actually read the title as saying MacBook Pro and only realised it wasn’t after a second reading.
Does anyone know if it’s even possible to buy this laptop in the US?
I bought mine from the Microsoft Store a year or two ago but that was before the trade war. Looks like they’re not selling it right now though.
Think so.
Interesting, that looks like a refurbished one. Amazon also doesn’t seem to have new models, and doesn’t seem to carry the 15” (refurbished or not). I guess we can thank the trade war for this.
Cool that you’re using Mercury, by the way – how is it working for you, in comparison to Prolog?
It’s been a good experience so far. I’ve never done Prolog. My Mercury experience has all been working on Prince. Most of my time as YesLogic has been writing font handling code in Rust and integrating that with the Mercury code.
Good writeup. I have the same impression of Void Linux, after giving Void Linux (musl) a quick spin.
Thanks :-)
Question, could you elaborate some more on why you don’t like the gpl?
I want to install arch on my 2018 macbook pro really bad but I dont think its a good idea after past experiences… at least in 2015 there was docs on the Arch wiki. Looks dead now.
I’m going to ask the boss for a non-Mac next year…
I don’t understand why they removed the Installation Guide from the Arch Wiki. It used to be such a comprehensive resource to guide you through the installation process. Now all that information is spread across multiple wiki articles and you have to somehow piece it together.
Is it not this?
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installation_guide
It is. I meant to say it’s much less comprehensive now than it used to be.
I think all the content is still there it just got split up. It’s a bit of a shame since that install page used to be mostly standalone, now it’s a bit more of a choose your own adventure that branches off at various points.
Yep, exactly. It’s up to you now to piece together all the info spread across multiple pages.
I’ve been running Void Linux (the ‘normal’ variant, not musl) for a couple of years now both at home (gaming with Steam, Lutris (Diablo 3)) and at work as workhorse and I’ve been really enjoying it as a BSD’ish Linux.
I’m a little too used to certain Linux conveniences like Docker, native sync clients (Dropbox, pCloud) and Steam to make the switch to OpenBSD for my main machines. (Yes, this does not reflect well on the sad state of Unix caused by people focussing on Linux instead of making things cross-platform.)
I’d love to know the reasoning for the musl variant on a desktop. Also I’m surprised it seems to be working so good as it does. I only tested the void-musl variant for a server briefly and gave up because of the inherent problems.
I think the creator of Zig make some good points as to why musl is a great project to support. https://andrewkelley.me/post/why-donating-to-musl-libc-project.html
If “running it on your desktop” is showing support, then yes - otherwise I don’t get how this would answer my question, although I’m not disagreeing with your sentiment per se.
I know about musl, I like musl, I use Alpine sometimes. I just had a not-great experience of using Void-musl on a full-blown VM (as in, like bare metal, not a container) - and I think it has to do with scope. It’s not a drop-in replacement for glibc in all cases, but it’s fine in certain modes of usage.
The GCC bug should be fixed with GCC 9.2, which Void has.
Cool I haven’t tried building Mercury since initially hitting the bug a month or so ago.