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21. Linuxing with X11

21.1 The X11 desktop is a foreign langauge ?

It starts out with point and grunt. Different apps make diferent sense out of the same guesture. You have to learn them all, and gravitate to a way of working that makes sense to you.

21.2 Window focus, follows mouse.

I used to prefer the top window to stay active, now I prefer focusing with the mouse and not having to click. To change it in openwindows:

21.3 POINT-F5 raises window to front

This allows you to bring a window forward without having to find a safe place to click.

21.4 F1, F2, F3, F4, are strange

Undo the default openwin configuration, by editing  /.Xmodmap. Comment it all out.


! *** Installed by xview3L5 ***
! F1=Help  (move pointer on panel, press F1 to show help on the item)
! F2=Find  (after having selected some text, press F2 to do a search)
! F3=Cut   (select text, press F3 to move text into clipboard)
! F4=Copy  (select text, press F4 to copy text into clipboard)
! F5=Paste (insert text from clipboard at caret position)

! comment the following out
| use selection (maybe with SHIFT in xterm)
| paste is Middle Button
! use xedit as clipboard

!keysym F1 = Help
!keysym F2 = F19
!keysym F3 = F20
!keysym F4 = F16
!keysym F5 = F18

21.5 Paste into vi within xterm

New-vi / elvis understands mouse clicks within xterm, so to hightlight or paste, also use the SHIFT key. This disables the mouse press from going through xterm, except as HIGHLIGHT or PASTE (ie it also works with MC).

21.6 Text is too small to be readable

21.7 ALT-F1 ALT-F4

ALT-F3 selects the third window. These are also visible in the openwindows mini-panel in the top left.

ALT-ARROW moves selected window (look in the condensed worktop map TLC).

21.8 openwin - or - fvtwm ?

These share  /.xinitrc, which finished with either exec fvtwm or exec olvwm.

If you don't create  /.xinitrc, it's decided by the original command, either startx or openwin.

21.9 X-clipboard

As well as shift for xterm, you can use the clipboard, to collect New clippings, and scan through the list using Next and Prev. Run 'clipboard'. It is sinply a place to cut and paste text, but it can collect several different strings, and recall them. Nifty!

You still have to highlight the selection from the clipboard, but that's simple enough.

21.10 /usr/openwin/lib/*menu*

I added raven.tcl to the desktop menu /usr/openwin/lib/*menu*, you can add any program you like, but the error messages will go the text console where you started 'openwin' from (if you dont run xdm).


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