Can you use Unix without X11 forward?

Do you need X(wayland) with X forward?

  • yes

    Votes: 10 58.8%

  • No

    Votes: 7 41.2%
  • Total voters
    17
Spartrekus said:
This sentence is X percents against other choices. Eventually, one day, if you have some time, you may think what it may mean for someone.
(X = 100%)

You may just delete it...
Click to expand...
Obviously you did not completely read what I wrote. You probably stopped after the sentence that you quoted. I encourage you to read the rest, too, then you will understand.
 
olli@ said:
This survey doesn't make sense, because it mixes things up.
Click to expand...

I thought people were talking about running their browsers on a remote server because they don't have the computing power to do so at home or work. Hard to say really, what the intention is here.

kpedersen said:
I can honestly see terminal web browsing making a comeback.
Click to expand...

I run lynx often. Sometimes when I'm running DOS, as it's the only viable browser for that OS. But also when I want to browse the net from a remote location - typically for a quick check of some kind. That said, it seems pretty viable still. I just checked the Washington Post as an example of a contemporary site, and it worked fine as plain text. However, as web developers get less and less skilled at communication and put more emphases on pure game like entertainment, I'm not sure that it will be possible to extract actual text as readily usable information.
 
OJ said:
I just checked the Washington Post as an example of a contemporary site, and it worked fine as plain text. However, as web developers get less and less skilled at communication and put more emphases on pure game like entertainment, I'm not sure that it will be possible to extract actual text as readily usable information.
Click to expand...

They don't get much more painfully plain text than my sites. Maybe some dancing baloney... 🚷

I like www/lynx but don't have it installed ATM. I need to so I can look at Demonica's site. I prefer Mozilla based browsers and usually end up using them for browsing even if I do have lynx.

I just added a viewport metatag so people on a smartphone could resize the screen. I've never owned one so it may not even work like it should, but it makes google happy. It already scaled to size with a browser squeeze.

They were going to penalize me if I didn't add it, tyrants. Gave you HTTPS when I didn't need it to keep you happy now you need viewport. Reminds me of something...
 
Trihexagonal said:
They don't get much more painfully plain text than my sites. Maybe some dancing baloney...
Click to expand...
And I thank you for that! Yes, I realized that my original comment was perhaps a bit inflammatory, but regardless of the fact that people do need to make a living and it's hard to buck the trend, there is definitely a need to fight back. If for no reason other than general compatibility and security.
 
I think a lot of people are already annoyed enough by bloated sites. I wonder what would happen if a well known techie forums wrote a forum software explicitly for lynx and then checked in the User Agent variable for the presence of "Lynx" and rejected all other requests... would this be enough for people to install lynx? Or would they just use another forum? Would be an interesting experiment.

FreeBSD forums could be our Guinea pig ;)
 
I considered for while if to participate in the pool ... I concluded that I can’t vote. I feel no need to change X, for me it is just fine.

I guess I do not need W. ; and I like the forward stuff. I don’t use it frequently. But sometimes I found it more practical than VNC & cousins.

For example, suppose you are analyzing remote data with R, it is extremely useful to be able to see plots generated remotely in real time, on you screen. Cause the remote machine may be a big one. (a few years ago I did this a lot)

Another practical use I remember is this, I was getting scientific papers with ssh -X foo@mac1 firefox because computer mac1 was is the subnet allowed to retrieve articles. Getting the VPN to work was quite difficult. VNC server was not set up on mac1. ( a decade ago )

In the end ssh -X is so easy all user can do it and do it well. I want to keep it.

bye
n.
 
OJ said:
I run lynx often.
Click to expand...
I recommend having a look at links (port www/links) and w3m (port www/w3m). Both are text-mode web browsers like lynx, but generally work much better because they support more HTML features like tables, frames and menus. Note that links also has a port option to add X11 support (enabled by default), so it can display inline images if you want. Furthermore, there is a variant called elinks that includes support for JavaScript (it's somewhat limited, of course, but it's enough that you can navigate some sites that don't work at all with lynx).

Another piece of software worth mentioning is dillo (www/dillo2). Its is a graphical web browser, so it requires X11, but it is based on the lightweight FLTK toolkit. It does not support JavaScript, which means that some sites don't work with it. On the other hand, it is very fast (try it!), is more secure, it has a very small footprint, and it also works well with low-end hardware (slow CPU, small memory). A nice side-effect of missing javaScript support is that you don't need an ad-blocker, because most ads require JavaScript. ;)

Because of their technical shortcomings, none of the browsers mentioned above can replace a standard web browser (like Chrome or Firefox) completely. However, they can be used as an alternative or supplement for certain sites where they work better. For example, I use Dillo to read a certain news site, which is much fast than any standard browser (and removes the ads). Although the formatting of the pages is a little weird, you can still read the text and see the images without problems, which is why I read the news site after all.
 
olli@ said:
but generally work much better because they support more HTML features like tables, frames and menus
Click to expand...

No! The less HTML features, the better. Thats the whole point ;)

But yes, I agree, lynx is the most bare bones of them all making it infeasible for the "modern web". That said, I have been told that it gives the best experience for those with sight related disabilities. I wonder why? Is it because it basically lays everything out like a list rather than allowing things to be i.e right justified?

Offtopic: I am very tempted to write a tiny "lynx-only" forums just to see how user friendly I can make it.
 
kpedersen said:
No! The less HTML features, the better. Thats the whole point ;)
Click to expand...
In that case you should simply use telnet (for HTTP) or openssl s_client (for HTTPS).

But seriously … Many sites use tables for various purposes, so a client supporting tables is better than one that does not. And being able to render tables doesn't impose any disadvantages, as far as I can see. (Unlike e.g. supporting JavaScript, which has several disadvantages regarding security and efficiency.)

Offtopic: I am very tempted to write a tiny "lynx-only" forums just to see how user friendly I can make it.
Click to expand...
Indeed, that might be interesting. However, please don't needlessly exclude users of links or w3m from using it.
 
olli@ said:
I recommend having a look at links (port www/links) and w3m (port www/w3m). Both are text-mode web browsers like lynx, but generally work much better because they support more HTML features like tables, frames and menus. Note that links also has a port option to add X11 support (enabled by default), so it can display inline images if you want. Furthermore, there is a variant called elinks that includes support for JavaScript (it's somewhat limited, of course, but it's enough that you can navigate some sites that don't work at all with lynx).
Click to expand...

Excellent suggestions. I'm familiar with those, but don't find the extra features very compelling. Interestingly, I just installed both on a remote server in order to confirm my opinion of them, and Google blocked me with a message saying they've detected unusual activity. That's both funny and sad, and shows what we're up against here.

olli@ said:
Another piece of software worth mentioning is dillo (www/dillo2).
Click to expand...

That was my default browser for a while. "Default" meaning the one that pops up when I click on a link outside of my regular Firefox browser. It actually displays almost everything I want to see and the blazing speed is wonderful. That said, it is not good because it doesn't integrate with cut/paste, making it almost useless for most things that I encounter. I still need to open the link in something else anyway.
 
kpedersen said:
Offtopic: I am very tempted to write a tiny "lynx-only" forums just to see how user friendly I can make it.
Click to expand...

I vote for that! I'm sure there are many communities who would make use of that - one being the vintage computing people.
 
There is a funny project – browsh. A text-mode browser which uses headless Firefox for rendering.
Browsh requires a true-color terminal, e.g. x11/sterm. The download link for FreeBSD-amd64 is incorrect: the trailing .deb has to be removed.
May have some use cases, here is a screenshot:
6011
 
aragats said:
There is a funny project – browsh. A text-mode browser which uses headless Firefox for rendering.
Browsh requires a true-color terminal, e.g. x11/sterm. The download link for FreeBSD-amd64 is incorrect: the trailing .deb has to be removed.
May have some use cases, here is a screenshot:
View attachment 6011
Click to expand...
nice !
What says top (cpu/mem....) about it?

OJ
vintage terminal-based community could be relatively small, but still it is sufficiently large enough. What's future of terminal softwares (on termcap, ncurses,...)?
 
Spartrekus said:
OJ
vintage terminal-based community could be relatively small, but still it is sufficiently large enough. What's future of terminal softwares (on termcap, ncurses,...)?
Click to expand...

There are a lot of DOS users and people using Commodore and other1980s computers. We run IRC and text based stuff quite easily. There's a lot of functionality, but forums are a huge pain with a text based browser like Lynx, or even with the only decent DOS browser, which is Arachne. It would be great to run a forum that everybody could actually use on the vintage kit, and not have to discuss on a separate modern machine.
 
Regarding Dillo …
OJ said:
That was my default browser for a while. "Default" meaning the one that pops up when I click on a link outside of my regular Firefox browser. It actually displays almost everything I want to see and the blazing speed is wonderful. That said, it is not good because it doesn't integrate with cut/paste, making it almost useless for most things that I encounter. I still need to open the link in something else anyway.
Click to expand...
Have you tried autocutsel (deskutils/autocutsel)? It synchronizes the various clipboards and cut buffers supported under X11. It has solved all copy&paste-related problems for me.
 
aragats said:
There is a funny project – browsh. A text-mode browser which uses headless Firefox for rendering.
Click to expand...
Funny indeed. I think it's quite crazy (and tremendously inefficient) to let the text content of a web page be rendered into graphics, and then use OCR to convert that back to text. And it isn't very good at it; the screenshot you posted contained many obvious OCR errors.
 
olli@ said:
Funny indeed. I think it's quite crazy (and tremendously inefficient) to let the text content of a web page be rendered into graphics, and then use OCR to convert that back to text. And it isn't very good at it; the screenshot you posted contained many obvious OCR errors.
Click to expand...

I would be interested to know what does the CPU ...

By the way, if ssh -X does not exists, because of no X11 forward, how will work vim --servername foo ?

example:
Host:
start X and run:
vim --servername foo
(you can on :0)

Client:
ssh -X host
export DISPLAY=:0
vim --servername foo --remote-send "<Esc>oHello World<Esc>"


Without X11 forward, this option of vim makes no longer sense.

CCL:
Wayland will bring more issues than do something positive for BSD.
For Linux gamers, maybe fine, but not for Unix professionals.
 
SirDice said:
Why not simply run ssh me@somehost vim file_on_somehost?


Real professionals don't rely on a GUI.
Click to expand...

(1) VIM CLIENT/SERVER
servername is a client/server option..
It communicates over X, so it needs definitely X11 forward ;)
The communication between client and server goes through the X server. The
display of the Vim server must be specified. The usual protection of the X
server is used, you must be able to open a window on the X server for the
communication to work. It is possible to communicate between different
systems.
more reading: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/remote.html

(2) FORWARD FOR VNC
Another way (non cool) to export the display is as follows.
HOST:
ssh -R 5959:localhost:5900 192.168.1.20
x11vnc
It will create a reverse ssh on 192.168.1.20

DISTANT:
xtightvncviewer localhost:5959

it will export display.

3) Way using X11
ssh -C -X -R 5959:localhost:22 192.168.1.20
Then on localhost you can use a given app to view full display.
 
Spartrekus said:
The communication between client and server goes through the X server.
Click to expand...
I really don't understand any possible need of that. I always use screen/tmux on a remote server, so can (re)attach (broken) sessions with vim or whatever else.
What's a real life scenario you may need it in?
 
aragats said:
I really don't understand any possible need of that. I always use screen/tmux on a remote server, so can (re)attach (broken) sessions with vim or whatever else.
What's a real life scenario you may need it in?
Click to expand...

vim / client/server / +servername is for professionals that usually write books and articles using FreeBSD.

It shows that X11 can be used for desktop but as well for just terminal applications like vim.
 
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