On 1/13/21 2:56 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
Hello, Grant.
Hi Alan,
Well, there's really not much that can't be done in a terminal
emulator. But it's the manner of the doing that's important.
Okay. I can appreciate and respect that response.
Doing text work in X is s l u g g i s h. Changing from one
application to another, which would be achieved by, say Alt-F4 on a
console takes more key sequences in X, and is less than instantaneous.
I don't know that I've ever experienced the sluggishness that you're
talking about. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I will admit
that Alt-Tabing through windows is an additional step vs Alt-F# in that
you have the intermediary list that you cycle through vs just jumping
directly to the desired window.
The X terminal emulator tends not to occupy the whole screen - it tends
to have title bars, menu items, tabs even, which just distract from
the task at hand. Maybe it can be set up to take the whole screen,
but that's work. And the fonts used tend to be less distinct and
helpful than the 16 x 8 bitmaps I have on the console.
Those seem more like preferences / settings to me. But preferences are
still sufficient to drive decisions.
And X windows steals useful key sequences, such as Alt-Tab.
True.
On an Emacs session, in three columns on a console, I can display
195 consecutive lines of a source file simultaneously.
I would expect that to be the same possibility in X and on the console.
Or quite close counterparts.
I could go on, but ...
That's not to say there aren't problems with the tty console - even
before the screen scrolling was removed altogether, it wasn't exactly
anything to write home about. And it would be nice to have more than
16 colours available. But, on balance, I'll stick with the console.
Fair enough. To each their own.
I think bringing up a new Gentoo system absolutely requires working
in the console, certainly up to the point where X11 and a Window
Manager have been installed and debugged.
True.
Thank you Alan, for enlightening me to your work flow and how the
console is better for you.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
