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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (34w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » Speaking of manpages:

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Colorized manpages have been a thing for a very long time:

Problem is, hardly anybody knows this, because you configure this by ā€¦ drumroll ā€¦ overwriting TERMCAP entries of less in your ~/.bashrc:

export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\e[38;5;3m'      # Boldā€Ø    export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\e[0m'           # End Bold
export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\e[4;38;5;6m'    # Underlineā€Ø    export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\e[0m'           # End Underline
export GROFF_NO_SGR=1                     # Needed since groff 1.23

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mc
feeds.twtxt.net
 (34w ago)

37C3 and New Yearā€™s Eve 2023
Another one from the vaults. The 37C3 conference took place in
December, 2023. This report was mostly written in January, 2024.
Mostly finished it at night in my cottage between 28 and 29th
December, then edited and added some stuff in July, 2025. Soā€¦ Only
1.5 years late?

It was a little ironic, and a little sad, that I was finishing the
37C3 report during 38C3. I didnā€™t manage to get any tickets for me and
#3 for 38C3 and had to make do with watching the stream.

The links to the talks go to [C ā€¦ āŒ˜ Read more

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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (34w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » I was drafting support for showing ā€œapplication iconsā€ in my window manager, i.e. the Firefox icon in the titlebar:

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org ā€œAdvancedā€, well, probably more ā€œmatureā€. There arenā€™t a ton of crazy features and that icon thing is the largest code addition in the last 10 years. %)

Speaking of OS/2 ā€¦ I just realized that Windows 3.x didnā€™t have icons, either. If Iā€™m not mistaken, this only got added in Windows 95. In other words, OS/2 had this feature before Windows did, because at least OS/2 2.1 from 1993 had icons. Who would have thunk.

(Now I kind of want to know which system really introduced this feature.)

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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (34w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » I was drafting support for showing ā€œapplication iconsā€ in my window manager, i.e. the Firefox icon in the titlebar:

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh, huh, maybe it was just my GNOME 2 themes back then that didnā€™t show the icon. šŸ¤”

I like the looks of your window manager. Thatā€™s using Wayland, right?

Oh, no. Itā€™s still X11. All my recent Wayland comments resulted from me trying to switch, but I think itā€™s still too early. Being unable to use QEMU (because it canā€™t capture the mouse pointer) is a pretty big blocker for me. This is completely broken, it just happens to be unnoticeable with modern guest OSes, so itā€™s probably not a priority for devs.

(Not to mention that I would have to fork and substantially extend dwl in order to ā€œreplicateā€ my X11 WM. And then, after having done that, Iā€™d have to follow upstream Wayland development, for which I donā€™t have the resources. Things would need to slow down before I can do that.)

all that wasted space of the windows not making use of the full screen!!!1

Heh. Iā€™ve been using tiling WMs for ~15 years now, so itā€™s actually kind of refreshing to see something different for a change. šŸ˜…

Probably close to the older Windowses.

That particular theme is a ripoff of OS/2 Warp 3: šŸ˜…

We ran some similar brownish color scheme (donā€™t recall its name) on Win95 or Win98

Oh god. Yeah, I wasnā€™t a fan of those, either. šŸ„“

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lyse
lyse.isobeef.org
 (35w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » I was drafting support for showing ā€œapplication iconsā€ in my window manager, i.e. the Firefox icon in the titlebar:

@movq@www.uninformativ.de According to this screenshot, KDE still shows good old application icons:

Image

And GNOME used to have them, too:

Image

I like the looks of your window manager. Thatā€™s using Wayland, right? The only thing on this screenshot to critique is all that wasted space of the windows not making use of the full screen!!!1 At least the file browser. 8-)

This drives me nuts when my workmates share their screens. I really donā€™t get it how people can work like that. You canā€™t even read the whole line in the IDE or log viewer with all the expanded side bars. And then thereā€™s 200 pixels on the left and another 300 pixels on the right where the desktop wallpaper shows. Gnaa! Thereā€™s the other extreme end when somebody shares their ultra wide screen and I just have a ā€œregularishā€ 16:10 monitor and donā€™t see shit, because itā€™s resized way too tiny to fit my width. Good times. :-D

Sorry for going off on a tangent here. :-) Back to your WM: It has the right mix of being subtle and still similar to motif. Probably close to the older Windowses. My memory doesnā€™t serve me well, but I think they actually got it fairly good in my opinion. Your purple active window title looks killer. It just fits so well. This brown one (

Image

) gives me also classic vibes. Awww. We ran some similar brownish color scheme (donā€™t recall its name) on Win95 or Win98 for some time on the family computer. I remember other people visting us not liking these colors. :-D

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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (35w ago)

Hereā€™s an example of X11/Xlib being old and archaic.

X11 knows the data type ā€œcardinalā€. For example, the window property _NET_WM_ICON (which holds image data for icons) is an array of ā€œcardinalā€. I am already not really familiar with that word and Iā€™m assuming that it comes from mathematics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_number

(It could also be a bird, but probably not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinalidae)

We would probably call this an ā€œintegerā€ today.

EWMH says that icons are arrays of cardinals and that theyā€™re 32-bit numbers:

https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/latest-single/#id-1.6.13

So itā€™s something like 0x11223344 with 0x11 being the alpha channel, 0x22 is red, and so on.

You would assume that, when you retrieve such an array from the X11 server, youā€™d get an array of uint32_t, right?

Nope.

Xlib is so old, they use char for 8-bit stuff, short int for 16-bit, and long int for 32-bit:

https://x.org/releases/current/doc/libX11/libX11/libX11.html#Obtaining_and_Changing_Window_Properties

That is congruent with the general C data types, so it does make sense:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_data_types

Now the funny thing is, on modern x86_64, the type long int is actually 64 bits wide.

The result is that every pixel in a Pixmap, for example, is twice as large in memory as it would need to be. Just because Xlib uses long int, because uint32_t didnā€™t exist, yet.

And this is something that I wouldnā€™t know how to fix without breaking clients.

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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (35w ago)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org They are optional dependencies and listed as such:

$ pacman -Qi pinentry
Name            : pinentry
Version         : 1.3.1-5
Description     : Collection of simple PIN or passphrase entry dialogs which
                  utilize the Assuan protocol
Optional Deps   : gcr: GNOME backend [installed]
                  gtk3: GTK backend [installed]
                  qt5-x11extras: Qt5 backend [installed]
                  kwayland5: Qt5 backend
                  kguiaddons: Qt6 backend
                  kwindowsystem: Qt6 backend

And itā€™s probably a good thing that theyā€™re optional. I wouldnā€™t want to have all that installed all the time.

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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (35w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » Xfce does one thing very right: It stores its settings in plain-text XML files. This allows me to easily read, track, and maybe even distribute these settings to other machines.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I spent so much time in the past figuring out if something is a dict or a list in YAML, for example.

What are the types in this example?

items:
- part_no:   A4786
  descrip:   Water Bucket (Filled)
  price:     1.47
  quantity:  4
- part_no:   E1628
  descrip:   High Heeled "Ruby" Slippers
  size:      8
  price:     133.7
  quantity:  1

items is a dict containing ā€¦ a list of two other dicts? Right?

It is quite hard for me to grasp the structure of YAML docs. šŸ˜¢

The big advantage of YAML (and JSON and TOML) is that itā€™s much easier to write code for those formats, than it is with XML. json.loads() and youā€™re done.

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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (35w ago)

Only figured this out yesterday:

pinentry, which is used to safely enter a password on Linux, has several frontends. Thereā€™s a GTK one, a Qt one, even an ncurses one, and so on.

GnuPG also uses pinentry. And you can configure your frontend of choice here in gpg-agent.conf.

But what happens when you donā€™t configure it? Whatā€™s the default?

Turns out, pinentry is a shellscript wrapper and itā€™s not even that long. Here it is in full:

#!/bin/bash

# Run user-defined and site-defined pre-exec hooks.
[[ -r "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}"/pinentry/preexec ]] && \
        . "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}"/pinentry/preexec
[[ -r /etc/pinentry/preexec ]] && . /etc/pinentry/preexec

# Guess preferred backend based on environment.
backends=(curses tty)
if [[ -n "$DISPLAY" || -n "$WAYLAND_DISPLAY" ]]; then
        case "$XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP" in
        KDE|LXQT|LXQt)
                backends=(qt qt5 gnome3 gtk curses tty)
                ;;
        *)
                backends=(gnome3 gtk qt qt5 curses tty)
                ;;
        esac
fi

for backend in "${backends[@]}"
do
        lddout=$(ldd "/usr/bin/pinentry-$backend" 2>/dev/null) || continue
        [[ "$lddout" == *'not found'* ]] && continue
        exec "/usr/bin/pinentry-$backend" "$@"
done

exit 1

Preexec, okay, then some auto-detection to use a toolkit matching your desktop environment ā€¦

ā€¦ and then it invokes ldd? To find out if all the required libraries are installed for the auto-detected frontend?

Oof. I was sitting here wondering why it would use pinentry-gtk on one machine and pinentry-gnome3 on another, when both machines had the exact same configs. Yeah, but different libraries were installed. One machine was missing gcr, which is needed for pinentry-gnome3, so that machine (and that one alone) spawned pinentry-gtk ā€¦

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lyse
lyse.isobeef.org
 (35w ago)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I fully agree with you on https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-07-22/0/POSTING-en.html!

Although, in the first screenshot, the window title background is much darker in the new version than the old one!1!1 :-P Kidding aside, the contrast in the old one is still better.

Also, note the missing underlines for the Alt hotkeys now. I just think that the underline in the old one is too thick.

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