[OT] unbelievable: #ifdef _OTHER_LIB_H

[Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 26 November 2014 at 21:02:20 UTC, H. S. Teoh via 
Digitalmars-d wrote:
> I have a high distrust of brand new *hardware*, because they 
> inevitably are gratuitously incompatible with my current 
> software and require new-fangled OSes bloated with features I 
> never use.

Yeah. My old computer started randomly freezing up though and I 
don't like that. Lasted only about 4 years. Though I might have 
solved the problem by disabling the second processor core in it, 
it went 10 days without trouble after doing that, whereas before 
it only went 7.

But I ordered the new hardware just in case it failed completely, 
and when it all got here yesterday, I figured might as well give 
it a try.

BTW this is my first computer without a floppy disk drive. I feel 
naked without one. Thankfully, it has an internal speaker though, 
I still have my beloved beeps.

> You're brave. :-P  Me, I've given up on xterm long ago, and use
> rxvt-unicode these days.

I never got into rxvt-unicode. I use xterm and plain rxvt 
together. I put rxvt on the right application menu key (next to 
right ctrl) to pop it up instantly and I dismiss it just as fast. 
I sometimes have ten rxvts open though who are only acting as 
controlling ttys for other applications. The megabyte of virtual 
space it saves over xterm seems important to me....

...though the new box has 16 GB of memory and I've never come 
close to using even 4 GB before.

> Speaking of which, whatever happened with your D-based terminal 
> app from a while back?

I think I'm going to be using it now. It is working fine on this 
box whereas xterm is failing on me. I'm sure it has unicode 
issues though... but if I'm replacing my beloved, reliable xterm 
with it, I'll be forced to fix those eventually!

I think I want to change the color scheme though. I like black 
xterms and my thing only does white. I think. Maybe I added an 
option and forgot what it is.

The unicode support right now btw looks like I can handle 
individual code points fine, but not combining characters and 
surely not more. Individual codepoints are probably good enough 
for me though.

The other part of my terminal emulator was also a gnu screen 
replacement. I got it to the point where it worked pretty well... 
but not well enough to break my inertia toward good old screen. 
Maybe I'll revisit that too though.


BTW this system update seems to have changed my mutt too. Tab is 
bringing it back to the old items (marked O) instead of beeping 
when I'm out of new items (marked N). I'm not a big fan.

> Yeah, that's the downside of maintaining your own fork of stuff.
> Upstream (presumably) would've taken care of updating these 
> ugly bits of
> code, but you don't get the benefit of that unless you 
> regularly pull
> from upstream and merge, which is a lot of work to begin with.

and it kinda defeats the point: merging from upstream means I'm 
stuck with their new "features" too, unless I carefully go 
through and am really selective about keeping the changes... at 
which point, I think it is useless. If a bug bothered *me*, I'd 
fix it myself, so I don't need every bug fix from upstream anyway,


> you start out and no matter how clean the initial design

well, xterm isn't clean anyway :P


> Not just D modules, but many other aspects of D tend to keep 
> your program away from sinking into the rathole of patches upon 
> hacks upon bandages over patches, that every C/C++ program
> inevitably gravitates towards.

indeed.

> Shouldn't you be able to just install the good ole fonts and 
> expunge the ugly new ones?

I tried that and then X wouldn't start. Part of what annoys me is 
there isn't an xorg.conf anymore. Perhaps I could add one, but by 
default there isn't one at all and it tries to auto configure 
everything. That's great when it works, but I'm not sure what to 
do when it doesn't.

> The GUI emperor has no clothes, and I'm calling BS on the whole 
> movement! </soapbox>

I like guis sometimes. Though much of it is just me wanting to 
watch a youtube while doing something else in another few windows.