Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!csri.toronto.EDU!drg
From: drg@csri.toronto.EDU (Dave Galloway)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: various problems with X11r2
Message-ID: <8805021554.AA06237@blandings.csri.toronto.edu>
Date: 2 May 88 15:54:48 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 43

I've used X10.4 for a while.  We now have X11.2 up, so I decided to spend
a day switching over to it.  Many things work better, but I noticed a few
things that are still broken or have gotten worse.  This is all on a
SUN 3/50, using twm as the window manager:

1) Now that the window manager gets involved in every change of input focus,
the window manager has to be in memory.  If it gets swapped out (like 50% of
the time), then moving the curser from one window to the next doesn't do
anything for about 5 seconds.  This means that you can move your hand to the
mouse, move the curser, move your hand back to the keyboard and type an
entire command into the wrong window.  This is both annoying and dangerous.

I can't think of a way around it.  It would help if change of input focus
was more obvious.  One way to do this is to change xterm back to the X10
behaviour of changing the block cursor from filled to hollow when the
window loses input focus.  X11 xterm only does this when there is no title bar.
However, people look at the cursor when typing, not the title bar.

2) Xterm's smooth scrolling is useless (too slow).  Even the jump scrolling
seems slower than X10 to me.

3) Xsun's keyboard auto-repeat is far too jumpy.  Keys start to repeat after
only 200 ms.  This makes "more" really hard to use, as you often get several
spaces when you only wanted one.

Xsun needs to have a more reasonable default, and it needs to take
an argument to set the speed to whatever you like.

Xterm is also guilty here, since it doesn't let you turn autorepeat off
from .Xdefaults.  The only way to turn it off is to use the xterm menu in
each window, or to send a escape sequence to it.

4) Xterm's understanding of geometry specifications for icons broke between
X10 and X11.  You used to be able to say:

		xterm -i =+180+290 '#-3+200' &

to get an icon that was 3 pixels from the right edge of the screen.  Now
it puts the left edge of the icon 3 pixels from the right of the screen,
which is not useful.

5) Xterm still doesn't understand that visualBell and audibleBell are
orthogonal concepts.  The "correct" behaviour is to both beep and flash the
window that is beeping, and you can't get this in X11 xterm.