A major improvement in user interfaces is the ability to tune things into your own needs. When people says they are glad when things are uniform (Windows file selection dialogs, anyone), they typically forget how mad they were at MS the last time they faced an unwanted change in their application behaviour.
Right-click on the gnome bar to add/remove widgets or to drag the bar around is neat. global-set-key in emacs is neat. Do I have trouble remembering that F2 isn't for saving the current file ? I can just tell the application how I work rather than training myself to new commands. In that respect, I do love the ctrl+right-click of Enlightenment's terminal where I can tell "off with their scroll bars!" like the Wonderland's Queen of Hearts. I'd just have loved something more such as "tweak'n'tune" menu entry that would have dumped the current settings in /tmp/eterm-current.rc that would have had a comment saying "tweak at wish and save under $HOME/.etermrc to validate the current settings as defaults".
Let's face it, application designers: you cannot anticipate all the possible tuning needs of your users. A config file is 200 times worth any wizard you can come with. If you deliberately and definitely hide configuration away from users, you also remove them the opportunity to learn more and to repair things when they're broken (how long did i wasted investigating the output of strace -eopen in search for an undocumented resource/config file!)
All this because I couldn't close a tab in emacs by middle-clicking it (a firefox habbit) nor to adjust an Eterm background intensity with the scrolling wheel ...
actually, I'm getting closer to the solution of "adjust Eterm intensity with the scrolling wheel". You have to edit $(HOME)/.Eterm/themes/Eterm/user.cfg (which I locate'd from the Eterm manpage). There, you can see a section "begin actions" where you can register bindings to various mouse events. That's how e.g. CTRL+middle button show/hides the scroll bar:
ReplyDeletebind ctrl button2 to string '^[[?30t'
Obviously, Eterm developers extended ANSI escapes and similar terminal codes to their own needs. I was curious and located /usr/share/Eterm/themes/trans/menus.cfg, which contains all the actions you can achieve by CTRL+right-clicking a terminal in the "Eterm menu". There I could find codes that let me magnify/minify the fonts with the scrolling wheel those commands added in "actions" section previously mentionned:
bind ctrl button4 to string "\e]50;#+"
bind ctrl button5 to string "\e]50;#-"
That's why I love linux and will never turn back to Redmon: when you are dedicated to find a solution to a problem, you eventually discover that things are much more flexible than you initially thought.
So I still cannot increase/decrease brightness because there isn't support for '+' and '-' for brightness, only setting (afaik), but at least I can toggle between "normal translucence" and "darker translucence" through
bind ctrl button4 to string "\e]6;1;image;brightness;64\a"
bind ctrl button5 to string "\e]6;1;image;brightness;128\a"
If I really whish so, I could hack term.c in the sources so that '+' and '-' are also recognised. or write a script that keeps track of (or asks for) current brightness and issue the proper command to increase/decrease it.
note: .gnome2/accels seems worth investigation.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.eterm.org/docs/view.php?doc=ref has some info about those curious control strings...
ReplyDelete