In praise of xlogo

[scbrg]

TIL: xrdb translations.

25 years of X usage, and that one has somehow managed to evade me. Such an awesome (and now that I learned about it - obvious) thing.

[teddyh]

These only work with programs written using (and linked to) Xt, the X Toolkit, or something which uses Xt internally, like the X Athena Widgets. More modern toolkit libraries like GTK or Qt are not using Xt, since Xt is ancient; modern toolkit libraries are written directly on top of Xlib or the even more modern XCB.

[pfranz]

I deal with OpenGL a lot so glxgears has been my standby. If it's just X I'm testing I've always used xclock.

[djsumdog]

I always used xeyes to test X connections in the past.

I wonder if we'll see a wleyes for Wayland, to test Wayland only and not the x11 comparability layer.

[jasonjayr]

As a totally uninformed guess -- no?

Part of wayland's security design decisions is that one program cannot receive events from another program.

An app like xeyes would need cooperation from the compositor otherwise.

[craftyguy]

I use xeyes on wayland to determine whether a given app is using Xwayland or not.

[chrisperkins]

> As a ruler. Want to know how big something on your screen is in pixels? Fire up an xlogo, line it up with one edge of the thing, resize until the opposite edge lines up too, and if your window manager puts up a tooltip during window resizing (which I think all the ones I've ever used do), then you know the size.

I don't see a tooltip that shows the window size. I am using Xfce.

[smhenderson]

Yeah, I wondered about that too. I remember older, traditional window managers like TWM, FVWM, OpenBOX, etc. show this but most newer "Desktop" environment's window managers like XFCE's and Gnome's do not.

Interestingly when sizing a terminal window these WM's show the size in columns and rows and when sizing a "real" window it shows the size in pixels.

Probably an option somewhere to turn it on in newer environments but it's been a while since I used anything but cwm[1] (which does show the window size on resize) so I can't be sure.

[1] calm window manager - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cwm_%28window_manager%29

[enriquto]

xlogo is one of my favourite programs. I have it as the exec line on my xinitrc, so that the only way to logout is by killing xlogo.

[comboy]

or ctrl+alt+backspace unless you disabled it

[kzrdude]

don't you close it by mistake sometimes? I'd close it to unclutter the screen

[jmclnx]

When a service kicks off, a small XLogo appears to let me know it is active, it goes away when it ends.

[wces]

Long time back (when xhost by default accepted all connections) in my college lab, I used to redirect DISPLAY to an unsuspecting user sitting on my favorite machine and and bombard them with `while true; do xlogo & done;`

[jmuhlich]

I once used a computer lab where the AIX workstations each had their local filesystems exported to the entire campus via AFS. Even /dev. Including /dev/audio. Which was world-writeable. And there was no apparent volume control for the chassis speaker.

[buzzert]

I prefer xeyes

[yellowapple]

> This [using xlogo as an alarm] is better than an audible alert because it's less antisocial in an open-plan office

And here I am with a loud clicky keyboard and my notifications very much not on mute in protest of my open office.