From: hpeyerl@novatel.cuc.ab.ca (Herb Peyerl)
Subject: Re: Need Some Advice..
Organization: "NovAtel Communications Ltd. Calgary, Alberta, Canada"
X-Newsreader: Tin 1.1 PL5
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1992 15:44:22 GMT

Duane Fowler (djf@bnr.ca) wrote:
: Other than that though there is little I miss.  I found the window manager
: really painful for reasons too numerous to mention, but most had to do
: with how little I was able to customize it.  There seemed to be too few
: ways to do neat things that X, MWM, et al can do using resources, xset, etc.
: 
: So what sorts of thing could DM do that X can't?

Not to participate in a religious war or anything. Heck, I've also 
switched to using X/twm on a fulltime basis but not because I like
it better... I've made the switch because the DM is eventually going
to disappear and we're eventually going to upgrade our Apollo's to something
that will require me to use X.... I figured I'd better learn how to
use X now before we upgrade so that when we upgrade, I'll be prepared to
educate our users...

The things that always disturbed me about X:

If I wanted a bunch of VT100's on my desk, I'd have put a bunch of VT100's
on my desk... 

Ever scroll backwards in an xterm looking for something only to get to 
the top of the scrollable region and realize it's lost forever? (I realize
I can set the scrollable region to be very large but.....)

Ever have the urge to say "I wanna save the entire scrollback region of
my xterm but don't feel like copying and pasting it screen by screen into
another window.  (see: "pn" dm/commands)

Have you ever wanted to copy more than a screenful of text from an xterm
into a file?  It takes many more key-strokes/button presses in X.

Ever want to type a whole bunch of commands and then later want to go
back and change some of them before they execute?  (ie: buffering commands
while waiting for one to finish).

Ever try editing a file that's LARGER than the amount of free disk space
you have left?

Ever accidentally run a program that generates a *LOT* of output and by
the time you get around to hitting ^S it's blitted it all off the screen?
  (ever played the hit-return and ctrl-s as fast as possible game?)

Ever wanted to see two different parts of the same source file and have
both get updated if one is changed?  (I know there are other editors that
can do this like Emacs but we all know what "emacs" stands for... "Eight
Megabytes And Constantly Swapping"...)

Ever edited a file that has lines that are wider than the width of your
xterm/entire-screen?  Kind of hard to follow code that way. How 'bout when
you do a "ps -agux"... Do you get output wider than 80 columns in an xterm
no matter how wide your xterm is?  When I do it in a DM pad, I get the
entire argument-list... I can scroll sideways to see the whole thing.

-----

Anyways, before I started using the DM, I thought X was great (X11R2 at
the time) but hadn't had much Xperience... Then I started working here
and thought the DM was awkward and painful... But after you get used to 
it and stop fighting it; it's actually quite a bit more comfortable. Now
I'm reasonably happy using X but even after a year or more of (almost)
exclusive use of X, it still feels like putting on an old pair of comfy
slippers whenever I have to use the DM. (Our users still use the DM.)

--
"I was early to finish | hpeyerl@novatel.cuc.ab.ca <Reply-To>   | I brew |
I was late to start, I | peyerlh@cuug.ab.ca                     | there- | 
might be an adult, but | #define JANITOR "Network Administrator"| fore I | 
I'm a minor at heart." |    JANITOR, NovAtel Communications Ltd.|   AM.  |