Questions about windows support

[Nick Sabalausky]

"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote in message 
news:mailman.826.1329869015.20196.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
> On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 06:22:25PM -0500, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> [...]
>> That hadn't occurred to me. Thanks. Normally, the only time I use
>> fg/bg is if I try to cancel something with Ctrl-blah and it suspends
>> the process instead of stopping it. So then I "fg [whatever num]" and
>> either try a different key combo or let it finish.
>
> fg/bg is the best thing on earth since sliced bread. Well, to me. :)
>
> It lets me fire up my (text-based) mail client, read mail halfway, find
> someone mentioning an obscure library function, press ctrl-Z to suspend
> to mail client, `man obscure_function` to find out on earth they're
> talking about, then fg to continue reading mail.
>

Yea, see I think the reason I almost never use it is because I'm still not 
used to having it available. "When all you have is a hammer..." So I 
instinctually just fire up another window, another connection, or another 
whatever, whenever I need to multitask.

But now that you mention it, I can definitely think of times when I could 
really make use of it. For instance, when browsing through the man page 
describing all the args for a command I'm using.

Not sure if I'll actually end up kicking the habit of avoiding it though. 
I've spent years on systems (including Windows) with multiple desktops 
available in the taskbar, and I always ended up just using one of the 
desktops. I always liked the idea of multiple desktops, but using more than 
one just meant spending more mental effort on organization and "What the 
hell desktop did I leave that window on??". heh :)

>
> Yeah. And worse yet, I've actually encountered GUI Linux apps that
> expect input from stdin. I'm not kidding. As they say, fact is stranger
> than fiction.
>

Eww. That's just...wow.

>> The whole Unix philosophy is orthogonality, one tool to do one task
>> well, no duplicated functionality for slightly-different use cases.
>> The whole "sudo" vs "gtksudo/kdesudo" thing seems to be some sort of
>> big ugly hack.
>
> It's to prevent people from doing foolish things like logging in as root
> and doing everyday tasks as root, just because one or two commands
> *might* require root privileges. It's convenient, it's like Windows and
> DOS where you can do pretty much anything without this troublesome
> protection thing.

Oh, no, that's not what I meant. I understand the need for sudo, and I'm 
totally in favor of it. What bugs me is why we *also* have 
"gtksudo/kdesudo". Ie:

$sudo apt-get install foobar
versus:
$kdesudo kate /etc/some-system-config-file &

When you run a commandline tool with root privileges, you use "sudo". *But*, 
when you run a GUI app, you're supposed to use "kdesudo" or "gtksudo" (or is 
it "gsudo"?) instead. Apperently, launching a GUI app via "sudo" causes some 
ownership or permissions or something to be wrong even though it usually 
apears to work fine (I don't understand the details). That's what I mean: 
Shouldn't there just be *one* "sudo" that works properly for launching 
*both* GUI and commandline apps?

Shit, this whole thread is too damn addictive!