MinTTY "vs" rxvt (was Re: MinTTY 0.3.3)

[Charles Wilson <cygwin at cwilson dot fastmail dot fm>]

Christopher Faylor wrote:
> Just to contribute something useful: Chuck Wilson, if you are reading
> this, am I correct in assuming that you don't enjoy maintaining the
> Windows version of rxvt?

Well, it's my main terminal. I tried MinTTY and I'm not sure yet whether
it will supplant rxvt for my personal use, but it shows promise.

> If so, should we consider deprecating rxvt in
> favor of MinTTY when MinTTY becomes a real package?
> 
> If not, there is no harm in keeping two packages in the distribution.  I
> was just trying to lighten your load if you were interested.

I'd lean toward keeping both in the distro (mainly because I'd hate to
see a never-ending flood of "where'd rxvt go?" queries. That'd be more
of a pain than the relatively infrequent updates that rxvt gets).

I'd certainly be one of the first encouraging new (and old) cygwin users
to try MinTTY if they dislike the standard cmd console, don't want to
use X, and are aware of the pty issue.

> The other thing that I've always wanted was some way for the user to
> choose what they want to run without running cygwin.bat by hand.  I
> think that would mean setup.exe modification though.

You mean like another setup.exe pane (or option in an existing pane) to
select the terminal that should be started by the "default" Cygwin link
in the Start Menu?  That's an interesting idea...

Consolidated reply to Yaakov:
> Or just switch rxvt to the regular X11 version w/o all the libW11 hackery?

At one time, I toyed with the idea of creating two different rxvt
packages (rxvt-W and rxvt-X), where neither was "split personality" but
only operated in the specified windowing environment. Further, rxvt-W
would be relatively stripped down (to only what libW11 supports, as
currently), but rxvt-X would have all the bells and whistles turned on.
 The transparent "use X or Windows GDI" switching would be handled by
the checkX program.

Part of the reason for this 'diabolical plan':
http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-apps/2006-03/msg00119.html
"IMO the split personality is a bad idea: the worst of both worlds. rxvt
is configured to support only the least common denominator options,
those that BOTH modes can each support. So, no xft support ever.
InheritPixmap is, err, at-your-own-risk. Plus, the underlying [builtin]
W11 library is just as moribund as rxvt -- and the wrapper system means
ALL library calls in EITHER mode must be handled by dlsym()."


A wrinkle: the 'all singing all dancing' version of rxvt-X might
require/support certain .Xdefaults options that the -W version doesn't,
or a user might want them to be different. To support this, the -W
version (or the -X version) would need a different XAPPRES name. But
making this change would break existing setups.  I never figured out how
to handle this issue cleanly, which is part of why the idea died out.
(The other was the complete lack of interest I got regarding a
standalone, limited-functionality libW11).

http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-apps/2006-03/msg00122.html
http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-apps/2006-03/msg00121.html
http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-apps/2006-03/msg00120.html

One way to side step all of that is to partially implement it:

new package: rxvt-X, all singing, all dancing
rxvt becomes a wrapper package, using checkX. When X is detected, it
launches rxvt-X. However, if X is not detected, it launches MinTTY.

Later, if there is enough demand (complaints?) I can look at creating
rxvt-W (with an alternate XAPPRES name) that is windows-only (maybe with
the external libW11, maybe just like at present with the builtin libW11)
-- but no split-personality. Those poor sods that insist on using it can
  (1) change the rxvt (wrapper) configuration to launch rxvt-W in
windows mode instead of MinTTY
  (2) explicitly transfer their windows-compatible .Xdefault settings
from the existing Rxvt: XAPPRES to the new RxvtW: XAPPRES prefix.

However, in the meantime nothing actually *breaks* -- it just looks
different. We might get a flood of "I launched rxvt and got MinTTY
instead" which would be almost as bad as "where'd rxvt go?" but...

cgf: hmm...how's that for "lightening my load"? <g> Actually, this plan
^^^^^^ is a lot of work up front but would probably be extremely
low-maintianence after that.

--
Chuck


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