[gentoo-user] Something eats my memory - please help

[Helmut Jarausch]

Hi,

since a few days my system eats up memory, uses SWAP space and gets
slow.
It might depend on xorg-server, but I don't know why.

On a nearly idle system (except xorg-server and some XTerms) I have
MEM | tot 7.5G | free 2.9G | cache 1.2G | buff 114.6M |
slab 498.0M | shmem 848.3M | vmbal 0.0M | hptot 0.0M

(My system has 8G memory installed)

Adding up all terms except 'tot' I get 5.6G where are the remaining 2G?
And why is shmem 0.85G - I have even seen a value of 4G for shmem
although all tempfs filesystems
were nearly empty.

When I stop the X-server I get

MEM | tot 7.5G | free 6.9G | cache 387.4M | buff 118.4M |
slab 72.0M | shmem 1.4M | vmbal 0.0M | hptot 0.0M |


I haven't seen this in the last 10 years!

I'm running kernel 4.11.0-rc5 but I doubt it has to do with the kernel
since the values without a running xorg-server are for the same
kernel.

Has anybody seen something similar?

Many thanks for a hint,
Helmut

[Alan McKinnon]

Hi,
since a few days my system eats up memory, uses SWAP space and gets slow.
It might depend on xorg-server, but I don't know why.
On a nearly idle system (except xorg-server and some XTerms) I have
MEM | tot 7.5G | free 2.9G | cache 1.2G | buff 114.6M |
slab 498.0M | shmem 848.3M | vmbal 0.0M | hptot 0.0M
(My system has 8G memory installed)
Adding up all terms except 'tot' I get 5.6G where are the remaining 2G?
And why is shmem 0.85G - I have even seen a value of 4G for shmem
although all tempfs filesystems
were nearly empty.

Lots of things use shared memory. All you know here is that something is
using lots of it

When I stop the X-server I get
MEM | tot 7.5G | free 6.9G | cache 387.4M | buff 118.4M |
slab 72.0M | shmem 1.4M | vmbal 0.0M | hptot 0.0M |

When you stop the X-server you also stop all the X-clients, so of course
all the memory the culprit is using gets released. This is expected

I haven't seen this in the last 10 years!

well, you are seeing it now <shrug>

I'm running kernel 4.11.0-rc5 but I doubt it has to do with the kernel
since the values without a running xorg-server are for the same kernel.
Has anybody seen something similar?

Yes. You have something allocating gobs and gobs of memory for itself.
Most likely, some recently updated package has a memory leak and it
grows and grows till it consumes all memory, then the system swaps, then
it falls over, then all your kitty cats died.

You haven't done much useful to track it down. Find the process that is
really using memory. A very quick easy first step is to run top and sort
on the memory columns (just take the left-most memory-related column
with a big bag of salt, it doesn't show what people usually think). Then
correlate that with packages you recently updated.

[Kai Krakow]

Am Sat, 8 Apr 2017 23:55:29 +0200

Post by Alan McKinnon

Post by Helmut Jarausch
Adding up all terms except 'tot' I get 5.6G where are the remaining
2G? And why is shmem 0.85G - I have even seen a value of 4G for
shmem although all tempfs filesystems
were nearly empty.

Lots of things use shared memory. All you know here is that something
is using lots of it

Shared memory is not tmpfs. If many processes load the same .so file,
that memory is accounted for as shared memory: it's only mapped once
into memory. Well, with PIC/PIE that is not necessarily true as the
dynamic linker is patching the files (better speaking: the mapped
memory pages) during load, so some parts become unshared, unless you are
using prelink which should eliminate that factor to a great degree.
Shared memory also includes what is allocated as shmem file descriptors
(which in turn goes into tmpfs files, hence you thinking tmpfs is
shmem).

I think something is creating memory mapped files on your filesystem -
it could explain why you're missing 2G of memory.

If you don't use prelinking, 0.85G shmem looks perfectly normal to me.
I have around half of it with a full-blown but fully prelinked system.

[Helmut Jarausch]

Post by Alan McKinnon

Post by Helmut Jarausch
Hi,
since a few days my system eats up memory, uses SWAP space and gets

slow.

Post by Helmut Jarausch
It might depend on xorg-server, but I don't know why.
On a nearly idle system (except xorg-server and some XTerms) I have
MEM | tot 7.5G | free 2.9G | cache 1.2G | buff 114.6M

|

Post by Helmut Jarausch
slab 498.0M | shmem 848.3M | vmbal 0.0M | hptot 0.0M
(My system has 8G memory installed)
Adding up all terms except 'tot' I get 5.6G where are the remaining

2G?

Post by Helmut Jarausch
And why is shmem 0.85G - I have even seen a value of 4G for shmem
although all tempfs filesystems
were nearly empty.

Lots of things use shared memory. All you know here is that something is
using lots of it
You haven't done much useful to track it down. Find the process that is
really using memory. A very quick easy first step is to run top and sort
on the memory columns (just take the left-most memory-related column
with a big bag of salt, it doesn't show what people usually think). Then
correlate that with packages you recently updated.

Thanks Alan.
I think my problem is a bit more complicated.
I did try to identify a process which eats my memory, but I couldn't
find one.

I have written a small Python program which does something similar to
htop / atop
which I've used before.

And here is what I get (I have summed up all 'visible' memory that top
would have shown)
And please, compare this to what I see as memory usage.


X memory usage: 548367360 swap 0
colord memory usage: 69735424 swap 0
python memory usage: 16473088 swap 0
python3 memory usage: 15261696 swap 0
nedit memory usage: 12661760 swap 0
atop memory usage: 10737664 swap 0
cupsd memory usage: 10657792 swap 0
icewm memory usage: 10000384 swap 0
nedit memory usage: 9300992 swap 0
gconfd-2 memory usage: 8031232 swap 0
xterm memory usage: 7298048 swap 0
xterm memory usage: 6979584 swap 0
xterm memory usage: 6731776 swap 0
polkitd memory usage: 5476352 swap 0
xterm memory usage: 4276224 swap 0
systemd-udevd memory usage: 3397632 swap 0
zsh memory usage: 3300352 swap 0
zsh memory usage: 3064832 swap 0
xterm memory usage: 2962432 swap 0
zsh memory usage: 2939904 swap 0
zsh memory usage: 2852864 swap 0
syslog-ng memory usage: 2841600 swap 0
xterm memory usage: 2834432 swap 0
zsh memory usage: 2819072 swap 0
zsh memory usage: 2812928 swap 0
zsh memory usage: 2799616 swap 0
zsh memory usage: 2798592 swap 0
icewmtray memory usage: 2284544 swap 0
icewmbg memory usage: 2159616 swap 0
upowerd memory usage: 1927168 swap 0
xless memory usage: 1859584 swap 0
at-spi2-registryd memory usage: 1820672 swap 0
xless memory usage: 1741824 swap 0
gvfsd-fuse memory usage: 1623040 swap 0
gvfsd memory usage: 1613824 swap 0
at-spi-bus-launcher memory usage: 1581056 swap 0
login memory usage: 1528832 swap 0
console-kit-daemon memory usage: 1523712 swap 0
dbus-daemon memory usage: 1434624 swap 0
su memory usage: 1292288 swap 0
su memory usage: 1292288 swap 0
dbus-launch memory usage: 1124352 swap 0
dconf-service memory usage: 1123328 swap 0
dbus-daemon memory usage: 1037312 swap 0
xfconfd memory usage: 1034240 swap 0
sshd memory usage: 998400 swap 0
dbus-daemon memory usage: 823296 swap 0
vsftpd memory usage: 717824 swap 0
startx memory usage: 651264 swap 0
sh memory usage: 650240 swap 0
xinit memory usage: 611328 swap 0
fcron memory usage: 599040 swap 0
syslog-ng memory usage: 589824 swap 0
pland memory usage: 538624 swap 0
atd memory usage: 462848 swap 0
agetty memory usage: 364544 swap 0
agetty memory usage: 362496 swap 0
agetty memory usage: 361472 swap 0
agetty memory usage: 356352 swap 0
agetty memory usage: 353280 swap 0
dpid memory usage: 327680 swap 0
init memory usage: 284672 swap 0

Total memory {Mb]: 776.73828125 i.e. ONLY 0.776 Gb

BUT the system is swapping :

MEM | tot 7.5G | free 59.2M | cache 3.8G | buff 170.1M |
slab 477.1M | shmem 3.7G | vmbal 0.0M | hptot 0.0M |
SWP | tot 4.0G | free 1.9G | |
| | | vmcom 6.5G | vmlim 7.8G |

just after starting X11 I have
free -m
total used free shared buff/cache
available
Mem: 7718 149 7252 0
316 7472
Swap: 4095 1 4094

[Kai Krakow]

Am Mon, 10 Apr 2017 18:17:36 +0200

Post by Helmut Jarausch
And here is what I get (I have summed up all 'visible' memory that
top would have shown)
And please, compare this to what I see as memory usage.

Did you put the 'virtual' column into your calculation?

If yes, don't do it, it doesn't show what you think it shows. It only
shows allocated memory (and thus is already a sum), it doesn't show
actually used memory. Applications tend to allocate more memory than
they actually use. Linux "uses" memory only when you write to those
allocated memory pages.

You really shouldn't sum up the columns per line. They are important
each on their own.

And you cannot simply create a run down sum to see your memory usage.
Virtual is allocated memory, resident size is what is unshared resident
memory (so the best indicator of memory usage you get), and shared is
memory that is (in parts) shared with other processes. There's no way
to devide shared memory into the multiple processes. That's memory
dedicated to resident shared libraries.

You won't help anyone here in helping you by trying to make the numbers
simpler for us.

[Walter Dnes]

Post by Helmut Jarausch
Hi,
since a few days my system eats up memory, uses SWAP space and gets
slow. It might depend on xorg-server, but I don't know why.
On a nearly idle system (except xorg-server and some XTerms) I have
MEM | tot 7.5G | free 2.9G | cache 1.2G | buff 114.6M |
slab 498.0M | shmem 848.3M | vmbal 0.0M | hptot 0.0M
(My system has 8G memory installed)

Run "top -c" from the commandline (xterm or true text console), and
take a look at the "%CPU" and "%MEM" columns. Is there anything that
looks bad? You may have to wait for a day or two for the guilty app to
chew up memory, to catch it.

Post by Helmut Jarausch
When I stop the X-server I get
MEM | tot 7.5G | free 6.9G | cache 387.4M | buff 118.4M |
slab 72.0M | shmem 1.4M | vmbal 0.0M | hptot 0.0M |

When you shut down X, you also shut down all gui applications,
including whatever is eating memory, so that's not going to help pin
down the culprit.

[Kai Krakow]

Am Sat, 08 Apr 2017 21:33:20 +0200

Post by Helmut Jarausch
Hi,
since a few days my system eats up memory, uses SWAP space and gets
slow.
It might depend on xorg-server, but I don't know why.
On a nearly idle system (except xorg-server and some XTerms) I have
MEM | tot 7.5G | free 2.9G | cache 1.2G | buff 114.6M
| slab 498.0M | shmem 848.3M | vmbal 0.0M | hptot 0.0M
(My system has 8G memory installed)
Adding up all terms except 'tot' I get 5.6G where are the remaining
2G? And why is shmem 0.85G - I have even seen a value of 4G for
shmem although all tempfs filesystems
were nearly empty.
When I stop the X-server I get
MEM | tot 7.5G | free 6.9G | cache 387.4M | buff 118.4M
| slab 72.0M | shmem 1.4M | vmbal 0.0M | hptot 0.0M |
I haven't seen this in the last 10 years!
I'm running kernel 4.11.0-rc5 but I doubt it has to do with the
kernel since the values without a running xorg-server are for the
same kernel.
Has anybody seen something similar?

It would be interesting to see the memory usage of the running
processes. Start top and press Shift+M (and maybe press "c" also to
see the complete command line) and watch the memory usage. When you
start experiencing slowdowns, have a look at top again.

For me, it was a runaway upower process some months ago. I'm using
systemd, so I fixed it easily with the following drop-in:

$ cat /etc/systemd/system/upower.service.d/99memory.conf
[Service]
MemoryLimit=512M

Upower now is limited to 512M of RAM (tho, it can still occupy swap
instead). That means, due to the resource limit RAM no longer filled up
but swap did. But that was meaningless performance-wise (I have 16G RAM
and 64G swap).

Maybe you can also "fix" it in a similar way by jailing misbehaving
processes into a limited amount of RAM with cgroups. Swap will still be
used but not for running/interactive processes so it won't become slow.

Strange enough: The moment I did this, the process stopped misbehaving.

Cgroups also support controlling swap usage but it comes at the cost of
additional memory usage (and probably also performance overhead), so I
only activated the RAM controller. And I started to add some safety
limits to other services, too. They now also dump their
never-needed-again junk straight into swap if any memory allocation
bugs would hit me.

[David Haller]

Hello,

Post by Kai Krakow
For me, it was a runaway upower process some months ago. I'm using

Tell us, why exactly would one need upower again, anyway?

-dnh

[Kai Krakow]

Am Sun, 9 Apr 2017 19:09:23 +0200

Post by David Haller

Post by Kai Krakow
For me, it was a runaway upower process some months ago. I'm using

Tell us, why exactly would one need upower again, anyway?

If you don't need it, don't use it. This was an example, not a call to
use it.

It reports battery status of peripherals for me.

[David Haller]

Hello,

Post by Kai Krakow
Am Sun, 9 Apr 2017 19:09:23 +0200

Post by David Haller

Post by Kai Krakow
For me, it was a runaway upower process some months ago. I'm using

Tell us, why exactly would one need upower again, anyway?

If you don't need it, don't use it. This was an example, not a call to
use it.
It reports battery status of peripherals for me.

Surely, there must be other apps to report this for you, besides a
mem-hogging behemoth, that (I guess) actually does not much more than
'cat /sys/...something'! .5 Gig or even more?? You're kidding me,
right? Riiigghhhhhtt????? That's just plain insane! Stuff like that
should run in a few KB. Or a few MB with a fancy GUI and DE integration.

You could probably do that with a few lines of perl/python/ruby plus
the toolkit of your choice (Tk, Gtk, Qt, Wx, Fltk, ...).

I e.g. wanted a minmal clock to have while playing movies fullscreen.
Result: ~21 lines of generously formatted perl using Tk and a
bold-white-on-black (easily changeable) digital clock with a mere
38x20 pixels in the right-top-corner (easily changeable).

Haven't implemented the "Keep on top" stuff right though yet, but ISTR
that should be possible too with perl/Tk. Or any of the above mentioned
lang/toolkit combos. And the "on-top" stuff also depends on your WM in
the details.

And anyway: 'eix batt' spits out e.g. x11-misc/xbatt, x11-misc/xbattbar,
x11-plugins/wmbatteries...

As I do just have a normal below-desk PC, I can't help with the
/sys/*batt*? stuff, but if it breaks down to basically displaying the
contents of some files under /sys/ then it's a piece of cake whupping
up an UI displaying that as e.g percent or whatever.)

Probably, I'd just have to change the "update" sub (1 line) of my
clock to read that /sys/-file instead of the time and whoopididoooda ;)

A fancy graphic bar would be a bit more coding.

Oh, and have a look at gkrellm and its plugins. It might have all you
want already and then some :)

Now, integration in the "big" DEs of KDE/Gnome3, you're screwed.
Royally. But that comes with those DEs anyway. Like Gnome3 requiring
systemd (WTF?)...

But, you can still display stuff without "integration".

Myself, I found WindowMaker in ~200[01] and am happy as a bunny since
then, I think I had to change just one option _ONCE_ since then in my
config. One "forced" change in ~1[67] years? I'll call that ok! Sure,
there was new, optional stuff, but documented and often times even
appearing as e.g. a new checkbox in the WPrefs app. Compare _that_ to
KDE ... I switched to WMaker, avoiding KDE2.0! Never looked back.

-dnh

PS: yes, Windowmaker was and is what I was looking for, but KDE 1.1
served ok until then. And I did look at KDE2-5 and Gnome1-3 in
various version, no, not for me. *bleargh*

[Kai Krakow]

Am Sun, 9 Apr 2017 23:40:15 +0200

Post by David Haller
Hello,

Post by Kai Krakow
Am Sun, 9 Apr 2017 19:09:23 +0200

[...]

Post by Kai Krakow

Post by David Haller
Tell us, why exactly would one need upower again, anyway?

If you don't need it, don't use it. This was an example, not a call
to use it.
It reports battery status of peripherals for me.

Surely, there must be other apps to report this for you, besides a
mem-hogging behemoth, that (I guess) actually does not much more than
'cat /sys/...something'! .5 Gig or even more?? You're kidding me,
right? Riiigghhhhhtt????? That's just plain insane! Stuff like that
should run in a few KB. Or a few MB with a fancy GUI and DE
integration.

It uses 1M of memory currently. The 512M limit I set is just a safety
boundary. I don't actually want to limit it, but when it goes havoc
it's as least limited.

Post by David Haller
You could probably do that with a few lines of perl/python/ruby plus
the toolkit of your choice (Tk, Gtk, Qt, Wx, Fltk, ...).

Yes, I could probably code everything myself in tiny little
scriptlets. But it's not worth the effort. This machine has 16G of
memory, it can run full-blown KDE, it uses 5G of memory after fully
booted (including two containers, mysql and elasticsearch, for devel
purposes), and that boots in 30s from a mixed bcache/btrfs file system.

Post by David Haller
I e.g. wanted a minmal clock to have while playing movies fullscreen.

That's what I have a smartphone for. I don't sit in front of my PC to
watch full-screen movies (tho, the TV is connected to the machine).

Post by David Haller
Result: ~21 lines of generously formatted perl using Tk and a
bold-white-on-black (easily changeable) digital clock with a mere
38x20 pixels in the right-top-corner (easily changeable).

That's a nice solution if you have enough time and want to stay
minimal on system pressure. I just want to stay minimal on
distractions, so I don't have CPU meters and whatever always visible
on screen. I also don't need all those fancy live graphics of memory,
disk usage, CPU, load, whatever on the X root window. I never
understand what's the purpose of that is anyways because I have
multiple windows in front of it. Hence, I even have no icons on the
desktop, just some different background images to easily distinguish
between energy profiles: I'm using activities to switch between
"listen to music", "watch videos/play games", "development", and
"browse internet and other desktop activities". And I hardly use menus
to start programs: I use the krunner search and a fullscreen launcher
for my favorite apps. I really hate those deeply nested menu launchers,
I want flat easy structures, searchable. During development I almost
only use keyboard shortcuts.

Post by David Haller
Haven't implemented the "Keep on top" stuff right though yet, but ISTR
that should be possible too with perl/Tk. Or any of the above
mentioned lang/toolkit combos. And the "on-top" stuff also depends on
your WM in the details.

That should be pretty much standardized by now, probably you could just
call "xprop -set" from your scripts.

Post by David Haller
And anyway: 'eix batt' spits out e.g. x11-misc/xbatt,
x11-misc/xbattbar, x11-plugins/wmbatteries...

Plain old X programs with Tk or xwidgets are exactly not what I am
looking for. I seek a visually streamlined desktop, so I mostly
exclusively use Qt or KDE programs excepts there's no suitable
alternative. So, e.g. I still use gitk a lot although I found git-cola
appealing. Still I'm doing lot of git stuff directly on the console. I
use git-cola only for fast and easy hunk committing and visual browsing
of current workspace status.

Post by David Haller
As I do just have a normal below-desk PC, I can't help with the
/sys/*batt*? stuff, but if it breaks down to basically displaying the
contents of some files under /sys/ then it's a piece of cake whupping
up an UI displaying that as e.g percent or whatever.)

I have a normal below-desk PC, too, hidden inside the desk, and 6 or 7
years old [1]. But I use a wireless mouse and keyboard for working - I
don't want cables and lots of stuff visible on or under my desk. And I
want some battery warning/status for these devices, integrating with
what I run: KDE Plasma.

Post by David Haller
Probably, I'd just have to change the "update" sub (1 line) of my
clock to read that /sys/-file instead of the time and
whoopididoooda ;)

You are free to put it on github or so, I'd even be curious looking at
it.

Post by David Haller
A fancy graphic bar would be a bit more coding.

It's always nice when new features integrate easy as I can tell from my
own projects, tho I do ruby mostly.

Post by David Haller
Oh, and have a look at gkrellm and its plugins. It might have all you
want already and then some :)

No, I hate that. See above. Too overwhelmin, too distracting, and
either it steals screen real estate or isn't visible anyways and thus
no need to run it altogether. As I said, I never understood why one
would need such fancy monitor stuff. If I feel the need of monitoring
some status, I usually do this in a console window using CLI tools.

Post by David Haller
Now, integration in the "big" DEs of KDE/Gnome3, you're screwed.
Royally. But that comes with those DEs anyway. Like Gnome3 requiring
systemd (WTF?)...

Systemd actually does a lot of things right for me, like bringing the
system up and down reliably which sysvinit/openrc often didn't. And it
does this fast.

Post by David Haller
But, you can still display stuff without "integration".

Actually, I want integration. And I wish that the Linux desktop would
gain a lot more progress here. I guess it's always a game of choice
vs. integration: With Linux, you have a lot of choice but also a lot of
competing solutions which do not integrate so well with each other.

Don't get me wrong: I prefer choice and configuration over vendor
locking, but I think that all those Linux components need to learn to
integrate better with each other, and systemd is one big player of
this. And by this I don't mean to lock down hard dependencies to
systemd. But systemd provides a long needed API definition that
everyone could implement. Depending on such an API would be okay for
me, hard depends on systemd, tho, is not what should be done, as that
would take away choice.

Post by David Haller
Myself, I found WindowMaker in ~200[01] and am happy as a bunny since
then, I think I had to change just one option _ONCE_ since then in my
config. One "forced" change in ~1[67] years? I'll call that ok! Sure,
there was new, optional stuff, but documented and often times even
appearing as e.g. a new checkbox in the WPrefs app. Compare _that_ to
KDE ... I switched to WMaker, avoiding KDE2.0! Never looked back.

I used CDE on Solaris late in the 90's and always hated it. I arranged
with using fluxbox by that time, I also tried WindowMaker for a while
on my privat machine. Then came KDE based on Qt and it did a lot of
things in a way I liked - and I stayed with it since then, with some
experiments using Ubuntu and it's Unity desktop (which I kinda liked
for some ideas but mostly hated for it's non-configurability).

Post by David Haller
PS: yes, Windowmaker was and is what I was looking for, but KDE 1.1
served ok until then. And I did look at KDE2-5 and Gnome1-3 in
various version, no, not for me. *bleargh*

Well, Plasma 5 is for me, but visually stripped down a lot, and
configured mostly for flat colors, no window borders, and with subtle
shadows and almost no colors (except important spots on the screen). It
looked a lot like Win8 or Win10 for me before those were distributed,
with some usability ideas "borrowed" from OS X (yes, plasma 5.9
luckily brought back the global menu bar so I could unclutter the
windows even more).

KDE 3 by that time started to become a cluttered mess, pumped full of
stuff you never need and visually becoming too distracting. That was
the time when I started to try other desktops. Then came KDE 4 which
had some nice ideas but was becoming a mess and migration nightmare, I
lived with that and stripped away what wasn't working correctly, or
replaced it with alternatives (mostly web-based). Now, since some
months, Plasma 5 has come into real good shape. And thanks to
Chrome/Chromium I can run many web-based apps like normal desktop apps
(with their own native looking windows instead of in browser tabs).

[1]: Storage, CPU coolor, and graphics card has been upgraded
since ;-)

[Alan McKinnon]

Post by Kai Krakow

Post by David Haller
Oh, and have a look at gkrellm and its plugins. It might have all you
want already and then some :)

No, I hate that. See above. Too overwhelmin, too distracting, and
either it steals screen real estate or isn't visible anyways and thus
no need to run it altogether. As I said, I never understood why one
would need such fancy monitor stuff. If I feel the need of monitoring
some status, I usually do this in a console window using CLI tools.

he :-)

I actually /like/ gkrellm, been using it for years. On KDE too. See
screenshot.

I keep it narrow (60 pixels) and with 1920x1080 I can afford that.
I use virtualbox extensively and when I fire up all 12 VMs I have
currently, I find gkrellm is the only thing that really shows me
activity the way I want it. Horses for courses I guess :-)

Never really groked CDE though. Lilac just ain't my hting

[Dale]

Post by Alan McKinnon

Post by Kai Krakow

Post by David Haller
Oh, and have a look at gkrellm and its plugins. It might have all you
want already and then some :)

No, I hate that. See above. Too overwhelmin, too distracting, and
either it steals screen real estate or isn't visible anyways and thus
no need to run it altogether. As I said, I never understood why one
would need such fancy monitor stuff. If I feel the need of monitoring
some status, I usually do this in a console window using CLI tools.

he :-)
I actually /like/ gkrellm, been using it for years. On KDE too. See
screenshot.
I keep it narrow (60 pixels) and with 1920x1080 I can afford that.
I use virtualbox extensively and when I fire up all 12 VMs I have
currently, I find gkrellm is the only thing that really shows me
activity the way I want it. Horses for courses I guess :-)
Never really groked CDE though. Lilac just ain't my hting

Same here. I have Gkrellm on my parking desktop. That's the desktop
I'm usually on when I'm not doing anything. At a glance, I can see what
the CPUs are doing, memory, disks, fans and a whole host of other
things. I can't see me going without Gkrellm. I'd be one sad puppy if
it stopped working or being developed. :-( I'd want it up and running
no matter what desktop I was using. As you showed, you can make it
really small if one wants too.

Dale

:-) :-)

[Peter Humphrey]

I have Gkrellm on my parking desktop. That's the desktop I'm usually on
when I'm not doing anything. At a glance, I can see what the CPUs are
doing, memory, disks, fans and a whole host of other things. I can't see
me going without Gkrellm. I'd be one sad puppy if it stopped working or
being developed. :-( I'd want it up and running no matter what desktop
I was using. As you showed, you can make it really small if one wants
too.

Here's another vote for gkrellm, which I have been using for more years than
I can easily remember. I have it permanently on display on all desktops: one
instance for this workstation and one each for two other boxes on the LAN. I
like to know what my systems are doing, all the time, BOINC and all. So on
my 27", 1920x1080 display I can afford a 100px display of each.

I also subscribe to the gkrellm mailing list to stay up to date and so that
I can report oddities, which do crop up from time to time. One of those at
the moment is that my NVMe disk shows up in between sda and sdb, which are
both external USB drives. Hey ho.

[Alan McKinnon]

Post by Peter Humphrey

I have Gkrellm on my parking desktop. That's the desktop I'm usually on
when I'm not doing anything. At a glance, I can see what the CPUs are
doing, memory, disks, fans and a whole host of other things. I can't see
me going without Gkrellm. I'd be one sad puppy if it stopped working or
being developed. :-( I'd want it up and running no matter what desktop
I was using. As you showed, you can make it really small if one wants
too.

Here's another vote for gkrellm, which I have been using for more years than
I can easily remember. I have it permanently on display on all desktops: one
instance for this workstation and one each for two other boxes on the LAN. I
like to know what my systems are doing, all the time, BOINC and all. So on
my 27", 1920x1080 display I can afford a 100px display of each.
I also subscribe to the gkrellm mailing list to stay up to date and so that
I can report oddities, which do crop up from time to time. One of those at
the moment is that my NVMe disk shows up in between sda and sdb, which are
both external USB drives. Hey ho.

I tried all sorts of other monitors over the years.
Anything and everything ever written to go into a kde or plasma panel
just does not cut it - they are way too big and tend to drift to the top
of top.
Gnome's monitors are smaller but just as resource sucky.
enlightenment has nice ones, but they are few and only work with
enlightenment (which I gave up on shortly into e0.18)
conky really only works if you minimize all windows and look at the
desktop. Not for me.

CLI tools are nice and I use them all the time when troubleshooting. But
not for regular use - nothing beats flicking my eye over to the left
edge and looking for biggish blobs of cyan and amber :-)

[Ian Zimmerman]

Post by Peter Humphrey
Here's another vote for gkrellm, which I have been using for more years than
I can easily remember. I have it permanently on display on all desktops

mee too

[Miroslav Rovis]

Post by Ian Zimmerman

Post by Peter Humphrey
Here's another vote for gkrellm, which I have been using for more years than
I can easily remember. I have it permanently on display on all desktops

mee too

And installs and runs just fine in a sans-dbus system.

Years ago that, to my best recollection, wasn't the case. I had to go
without it when I converted my system to sans-dbus.

Now I'm back to using it. The building and installing was very quick
too!

I found and set a smaller font size, and I'm only left with one,
non-urgent, thing to do. It's slightly larger than I would want it to
be. I think it was possible back a few years ago to get is to occupy
less space on a desktop. Horizontally is fine, but vertically on
1024x768 screen, it occupies almost two-thirds of the height. Possible?
Any tips?

Regards!

[Mick]

Post by Miroslav Rovis

Post by Ian Zimmerman

Post by Peter Humphrey
Here's another vote for gkrellm, which I have been using for more
years than I can easily remember. I have it permanently on display on
all desktops>

mee too

And installs and runs just fine in a sans-dbus system.
Years ago that, to my best recollection, wasn't the case. I had to go
without it when I converted my system to sans-dbus.
Now I'm back to using it. The building and installing was very quick
too!
I found and set a smaller font size, and I'm only left with one,
non-urgent, thing to do. It's slightly larger than I would want it to
be. I think it was possible back a few years ago to get is to occupy
less space on a desktop. Horizontally is fine, but vertically on
1024x768 screen, it occupies almost two-thirds of the height. Possible?
Any tips?
Regards!

Select a 'Composite CPU' gkrellm, rather than one per CPU. Ditto for Disk.

[Dale]

Post by Miroslav Rovis

Post by Ian Zimmerman

Post by Peter Humphrey
Here's another vote for gkrellm, which I have been using for more years than
I can easily remember. I have it permanently on display on all desktops

mee too

And installs and runs just fine in a sans-dbus system.
Years ago that, to my best recollection, wasn't the case. I had to go
without it when I converted my system to sans-dbus.
Now I'm back to using it. The building and installing was very quick
too!
I found and set a smaller font size, and I'm only left with one,
non-urgent, thing to do. It's slightly larger than I would want it to
be. I think it was possible back a few years ago to get is to occupy
less space on a desktop. Horizontally is fine, but vertically on
1024x768 screen, it occupies almost two-thirds of the height. Possible?
Any tips?
Regards!

The way I adjust the overall height on mine, I adjust the height of each
section. For example, I make the CPU chart(s) shorter, then then hard
drive(s), processes etc until I get a height I want. It takes some time
to tweak it and get it right but eventually, I find a sweet spot.

Another thing, at least this used to work, adjusting fonts and their
size. That generally affects the height some too.

I'm not aware of a way to do that as a whole with a single setting. If
someone knows of one, I'd be interested in it too.

Hope that helps.

Dale

:-) :-)

[Miroslav Rovis]

Two answers, both useful, to my query. I'll reply to both in this single email,
pasting in Dale's reply the few lines from Mick's reply.

Post by Mick

Post by Miroslav Rovis

Post by Ian Zimmerman

Post by Peter Humphrey
Here's another vote for gkrellm, which I have been using for more years than
I can easily remember. I have it permanently on display on all desktops

mee too

And installs and runs just fine in a sans-dbus system.

...

Post by Mick

Post by Miroslav Rovis
I found and set a smaller font size, and I'm only left with one,
non-urgent, thing to do. It's slightly larger than I would want it to
be. I think it was possible back a few years ago to get is to occupy
less space on a desktop. Horizontally is fine, but vertically on
1024x768 screen, it occupies almost two-thirds of the height. Possible?
Any tips?

...
PASTING
...

Post by Mick
Select a 'Composite CPU' gkrellm, rather than one per CPU. Ditto for Disk.
--
Regards,
Mick

I tested it, it works, but I have only 4 CPUs, and I like to see them
all four. I know some processes only use one, and some (such as FFmpeg)
use absolutely all available by default, and I like to see those in a
glance as said previously in the thread ;-)

Also I often plug SATA disks in and out
(
such as e.g. for my local mirror; I sometimes update daily; Portage
snapshots and emerge-webrsync are still the way to go; the
verifiability! of the installation is there... You don't get that in all
the distro!
)
, which would make for the need to toggle disks on and off in gkrellm,
so only /dev/sda is always shown... andcompositing there wouldn't make
sense either

PASTED

Post by Mick
The way I adjust the overall height on mine, I adjust the height of each
section. For example, I make the CPU chart(s) shorter, then then hard
drive(s), processes etc until I get a height I want. It takes some time
to tweak it and get it right but eventually, I find a sweet spot.
Another thing, at least this used to work, adjusting fonts and their
size. That generally affects the height some too.
I'm not aware of a way to do that as a whole with a single setting. If
someone knows of one, I'd be interested in it too.
Hope that helps.
Dale
:-) :-)

I decided for your approach. It works! Now gkrellm occupies maybe 40 to
45 % of the screen height on my 1024x768 display, and that is
just fine!

Thanks!

A sidenote (or change of topic? if it would make for more than an email
or two; repliers, pls. re-work the subject line if needed).

While configuring gkrellm I figured out what to do for any windows to
get placed properly on the desktop when I start my Openbox (I start it
simply with "startx").

I open many windows with configuration in ~/.config/openbox/autostart
where I have lines like:

sleep 6 && urxvt -g -0+125 -fn "-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso10646-1" &
sleep 6.5 && urxvt -g -0-0 -fn "-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso10646-1" &
...
sleep 8 && urxvt -g +0-0 -fn "-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--12-110-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1" &
...
sleep 10.5 && urxvt -g -125+10 -fn "-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--10-100-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1" &
sleep 11 && urxvt -g -230+0 -fn "-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--10-100-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1" &
sleep 12 && urxvt -g -0+80 -fn "-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--6-60-75-75-c-40-iso10646-1" &
sleep 13 && gkrellm -g +0+0 &

The -g [+/-]<some number>[+/-]<some number> is what I finally figured
out by reading the Help in gkrellm.

And I was wondering how to achieve two things (I know they're buried
somewhere in Xorg man pages, but which manpages?)...

First, get the windows to start with arbitrary sizes (gkrellm can't do
it, says in its help, but it neither should do it). What I mean, I'd
like to get, say this urxvt window:

sleep 10.5 && urxvt -g -125+10 -fn "-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--10-100-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1" &

to be not the default size, but the size 80x5 only. Et cetera...

And the second thing, on rxv-unicode terminals, I mostly don't need the
title on top of it (such as, as I'm writing this in mutt, and if I
Alt-Space and "d" to decorate it (I keep'em all undecorated most of the
time), I have the title reading:
mutt-g0n-1000-5313-742846618375958965 + (/tmp) - VIM
on it (just to be precise by virtue of example in case I'm not naming
things correctly), or the decoration, which gives it the edges of some
2-3 pixels in size (in bottom only), for moving the windows with the mouse.

I mostly don't need those, as in Openbox I just use Alt-Space to get the
menu of the window to open, and then I type "m" for move, or "z" for
resize, and use arrows to either move, or resize, respectively, and Esc
when the position/size is acceptable upon move/resize.

How can I get urxvt to start undecorated, i.e without any edges nor
window title?

Regards!

[wabe]

Miroslav Rovis <***@croatiafidelis.hr> wrote:

[...]

Post by Miroslav Rovis
I mostly don't need those, as in Openbox I just use Alt-Space to get
the menu of the window to open, and then I type "m" for move, or "z"
for resize, and use arrows to either move, or resize, respectively,
and Esc when the position/size is acceptable upon move/resize.
How can I get urxvt to start undecorated, i.e without any edges nor
window title?

I use devilspie for such things.

Btw.: There is also devilspie2, but I never tested it.

--
Regards
wabe

[Miroslav Rovis]

Post by wabe
[...]

Post by Miroslav Rovis
I mostly don't need those, as in Openbox I just use Alt-Space to get
MOVED TO THE BOTTOM
-- || --
How can I get urxvt to start undecorated, i.e without any edges nor
window title?

I use devilspie for such things.
Btw.: There is also devilspie2, but I never tested it.
--
Regards
wabe

# eix devispie

gave:

* x11-misc/devilspie
Available versions: 0.22 0.23
Homepage: http://www.burtonini.com/blog/tag/devilspie.html
Description: A Window Matching utility similar to Sawfish's Matched Windows feature

* x11-misc/devilspie2
Available versions: 0.36 0.42 {debug LINGUAS="fi fr it ja nl pt_BR ru sv"}
Homepage: https://gusnan.se/devilspie2
Description: Devilspie like window matching utility, using LUA for scripting

As far as devilspie2, I don't visit very gladly...

https://gusnan.se/devilspie2 :

PASTING:
This Connection is Untrusted
You have asked Pale Moon to connect securely to gusnan.se, but we can't
confirm that your connection is secure.
PASTE
[...I don't visit very gladly] urls with broken or even simply (probably
in this case) expired certs.

Probably it's just exired certificate in this case; but I could confirm
my assumption only if I find time to study the trace --I capture all the
time when I connect-- but for every millisecond it can be minutes to
understand the dance of the electrons to make a web page and around...

Looking up devilspie, I found, non-related to my pursuit, this page that
I liked a lot, and recommend it to readers:

So long Wordpress, thanks for all the exploits
http://www.burtonini.com/blog/2016/08/26/so-long-wordpress/

Great! They couldn't figure out his script was pure Python, but accused
him of, ATTENTION:

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
a spam bot running on [his] account...
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

After having seen the most humorous picture in ages, in my eyes:
Loading Image...
( https://parazyd.cf is a page by a Devuan developer (and Gentoo
contributor, but I haven't seen emails of his in gentoo-user), also the
main Heads developer; Heads is based on Tails, but unlike Tails, has no
NSA Linux in it, but rather it is hardened with grsecurity! Hey, do
readers understand what I just wrote, try it --still in testing, but
very promising--: https://heads.dyne.org )

And now this python script taken for a bot is also good!

But, as far as either of those two packages go, nope, nada, gar nichts,
ništa, nulla!

Because gtk+-3 depends on dbus, and I'm determined life is safer without
dbus in GNU/Linux:

# emerge -tuDN devilspie2

These are the packages that would be merged, in reverse order:

Calculating dependencies ... done!

!!! All ebuilds that could satisfy ">=x11-libs/gtk+-3.4.4:3" have been masked.
!!! One of the following masked packages is required to complete your request:
- x11-libs/gtk+-3.22.12::gentoo (masked by: package.mask)
- x11-libs/gtk+-3.22.11::mv (masked by: package.mask)
- x11-libs/gtk+-3.22.11::gentoo (masked by: package.mask)
- x11-libs/gtk+-3.20.9::gentoo (masked by: package.mask)

(dependency required by "x11-misc/devilspie2-0.42::gentoo" [ebuild])
(dependency required by "devilspie2" [argument])
For more information, see the MASKED PACKAGES section in the emerge
man page or refer to the Gentoo Handbook.

#

# emerge -tuDN devilspie

These are the packages that would be merged, in reverse order:

Calculating dependencies ......... done!

!!! All ebuilds that could satisfy "x11-libs/gtk+:3[X]" have been masked.
!!! One of the following masked packages is required to complete your request:
- x11-libs/gtk+-3.22.12::gentoo (masked by: package.mask)
- x11-libs/gtk+-3.22.11::mv (masked by: package.mask)
- x11-libs/gtk+-3.22.11::gentoo (masked by: package.mask)
- x11-libs/gtk+-3.20.9::gentoo (masked by: package.mask)

(dependency required by "x11-misc/devilspie-0.23::gentoo" [ebuild])
(dependency required by "devilspie" [argument])
For more information, see the MASKED PACKAGES section in the emerge
man page or refer to the Gentoo Handbook.

#

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

But, since the reply is about my itch with positioning windows in
Openbox, preferably at the start, if anybody would like, if they know,
to give us the Xorg manual where the necessary info can be found about
how to do the following (actually it's the preceding in this thread, but
I'll repeat the question in part. I have also changed the subject of the email
accordingly... I see both wabe and Peter renamed the subject to gkrellm;
thanks, but that part has been solved, and I'm content with gkrellm

Post by wabe

Post by Miroslav Rovis
I mostly don't need those, as in Openbox I just use Alt-Space to get
the menu of the window to open, and then I type "m" for move, or "z"
for resize, and use arrows to either move, or resize, respectively,
and Esc when the position/size is acceptable upon move/resize.
How can I get urxvt to start undecorated, i.e without any edges nor
window title?

That must be a simple switch, just like adding "-g +0+0" to the window
in ~/.config/openbox/autostart makes the window appear in top left
corner and similarly!

See more about the question in full, in the bottom part of my email, on
the web at:
https://lists.gt.net/gentoo/user/325296#325296

and in subscriber's mailboxen it is findable by:
Message-ID: <***@g0n.xdwgrp>

(IOW, in the mailboxes, and in the web, it's just two emails previous to
here... hmmmhh... some web archives put it away once the subject
changes... well that's why I gave the link...)

Regards!

[Miroslav Rovis]

On 170411-20:37+0200, Miroslav Rovis wrote:
...

Part of this quest is solved, pls. see:

gkrellm [Was: Something eats my memory - please help]
https://marc.info/?l=gentoo-user&m=149194283531062&w=2
( marc.info was faster this time than gossamerthreads.com (now
lists.gt.net )

It's the part that is not in the subject line, but which I clearly asked
about how to do it. The removing of the title and borders to a window...

But the sizing in the config remains to be done.

Post by Miroslav Rovis
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

...

Post by Miroslav Rovis

Post by Miroslav Rovis
How can I get urxvt to start undecorated, i.e without any edges nor
window title?

This above is solved!

Post by Miroslav Rovis
That must be a simple switch, just like adding "-g +0+0" to the window
in ~/.config/openbox/autostart makes the window appear in top left
corner and similarly!

If -g ... is the switch to get the geometry, i.e. the position of the
window, be it gkrellm or urxvt, when set into
~/.config/openbox/autostart (or started from the command line), then...

Then what is the switch to get the windows of be of a certain size. I
didn't find that in "man urxvt"... Could that be in Xorg manual or where
is that?

So, e.g. if I want to start a window of size 200x50 or 1000x500, how to
I do that?

Post by Miroslav Rovis
See more about the question in full, in the bottom part of my email, on
https://lists.gt.net/gentoo/user/325296#325296
(IOW, in the mailboxes, and in the web, it's just two emails previous to
here... hmmmhh... some web archives put it away once the subject
changes... well that's why I gave the link...)

Regards!

[Floyd Anderson]

On Di, 11 Apr 23:12:12 +0200

Post by Miroslav Rovis
...
gkrellm [Was: Something eats my memory - please help]
https://marc.info/?l=gentoo-user&m=149194283531062&w=2
( marc.info was faster this time than gossamerthreads.com (now
lists.gt.net )

To be honest, I read not the whole and little bit confusing thread. So I
have not realised there is a multi-part issue to solve. I saw only one
precise question in the quotation of wabe’s response out of the corner
of my eyes.

Post by Miroslav Rovis
If -g ... is the switch to get the geometry, i.e. the position of the
window, be it gkrellm or urxvt, when set into
~/.config/openbox/autostart (or started from the command line), then...

Geometry (implemented as structure or bitmask) is not restricted to hold
only the position. It can also be used to specify the size and other
window attributes.

Post by Miroslav Rovis
Then what is the switch to get the windows of be of a certain size. I
didn't find that in "man urxvt"... Could that be in Xorg manual or where
is that?

Do not guess; RTFM or at least, search it! ;-)

I always have this in my mind. And when you cannot find what you are
looking for, read the ‘SEE ALSO’ man page section to get ideas for the
next step. But you are right, man page urxvt(1) is not really verbose
about the -geometry (or -g) option but this does not have to be the end
of the journey. As `qlist rxvt-unicode` shows, urxvt comes with several
resources. One of them is a man page of category seven (Miscellaneous).

Looking at it `man 7 urxvt` and searching for ‘geom’ and “Eureka!”, the
third and last match:
IRC*geometry: 87x12+535+542
looks good. Let’s try it with your requirements...

Post by Miroslav Rovis
So, e.g. if I want to start a window of size 200x50 or 1000x500, how to
I do that?

...and (if installed) examine the attributes with `xwininfo` or `xprop`
or simply by <Alt+Space> + resize and looking at the centred size tip.
urxvt -bl -geometry 200x50+0+0;
urxvt -bl -geometry 1000x500+0+0;

This should be answer your second part — completely resolved with
offline resources. But I highly recommend not to stop the journey here
because of what if urxvt(7) has never been written?

Do you know the commands ‘whatis’, ‘apropos’ (symbolic link to ‘whatis’)
or their equivalent ‘man -k’?

Try it out: `man -k geometry` or `apropos geometry`. You see several
category three (Library calls) references. This kind of information may
be hard to understand sometimes but if you have time you only can win.

For instance XWMGeometry(3), you already know X -> Xorg and WM -> window
manager (BTW: MWM -> Motif Window Manager as Jonathan earlier pointed
out) and Geometry is what you are looking for.

Sounds that not interesting to have a look at it? If you think so, you
will see at the description section what the argument to the -geometry
parameter of urxvt probably expected. If you are still hungry, go online
and search for other examples and meanings like at [1] or find [2] which
seems to have some tips about ‘devilspie’, ‘GKrellM’ and others.

[1] <http://imagemagick.org/script/command-line-processing.php#geometry>
[2] <https://sites.google.com/site/tstyblo//wmctrl/>

P.S. I love short precise questions and qualified answers as well and
usually hate walls of text — but this was a need for me. Hope that helps
to help yourself.

[Miroslav Rovis]

Post by Floyd Anderson
On Di, 11 Apr 23:12:12 +0200

Post by Miroslav Rovis
...
gkrellm [Was: Something eats my memory - please help]
https://marc.info/?l=gentoo-user&m=149194283531062&w=2
( marc.info was faster this time than gossamerthreads.com (now
lists.gt.net )

To be honest, I read not the whole and little bit confusing thread. So I
have not realised there is a multi-part issue to solve. I saw only one
precise question in the quotation of wabe’s response out of the corner
of my eyes.

I see.

Post by Floyd Anderson

Post by Miroslav Rovis
If -g ... is the switch to get the geometry, i.e. the position of the
window, be it gkrellm or urxvt, when set into
~/.config/openbox/autostart (or started from the command line), then...

Geometry (implemented as structure or bitmask) is not restricted to hold
only the position. It can also be used to specify the size and other
window attributes.

Post by Miroslav Rovis
Then what is the switch to get the windows of be of a certain size. I
didn't find that in "man urxvt"... Could that be in Xorg manual or where
is that?

Do not guess; RTFM or at least, search it! ;-)

The thing is, I do, I spend all the time available to reading the FMs.
But the time is not in sufficient supply... A little more on this
further below.

Post by Floyd Anderson
I always have this in my mind. And when you cannot find what you are
looking for, read the ‘SEE ALSO’ man page section to get ideas for the
next step. But you are right, man page urxvt(1) is not really verbose
about the -geometry (or -g) option but this does not have to be the end
of the journey. As `qlist rxvt-unicode` shows, urxvt comes with several
resources. One of them is a man page of category seven (Miscellaneous).

I couldn't get it with qlist:

# `qlist rxvt-unicode`
bash: /usr/share/doc/rxvt-unicode-9.22-r1/rxvt-tabbed.bz2: Permission denied
#

LATER NOTE START: you typoed that part of your advice, or you are misusing the
backticks, IMO. Not `qlist rxvt-unicode`, but simply:

# qlist unicode

which gives the list as the equery, sure. However, I've already
previously written the immediately below...
LATER NOTE END

But I suppose it's the same what I get with:

# equery f rxvt-unicode

And there the huge time that would be needed, just imagine! Here part of
the output of

# equery f rxvt-unicode

Here:

/usr/share/doc/rxvt-unicode-9.22-r1
/usr/share/doc/rxvt-unicode-9.22-r1/Changes.bz2
/usr/share/doc/rxvt-unicode-9.22-r1/README.FAQ.bz2
/usr/share/doc/rxvt-unicode-9.22-r1/README.configure.bz2
/usr/share/doc/rxvt-unicode-9.22-r1/README.xvt.bz2
/usr/share/doc/rxvt-unicode-9.22-r1/changes.txt.bz2
/usr/share/doc/rxvt-unicode-9.22-r1/rxvt-tabbed.bz2
/usr/share/doc/rxvt-unicode-9.22-r1/rxvt-unicode.termcap.bz2
/usr/share/doc/rxvt-unicode-9.22-r1/rxvt-unicode.terminfo.bz2
/usr/share/man
/usr/share/man/man1
/usr/share/man/man1/urxvt-background.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/urxvt-bell-command.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/urxvt-block-graphics-to-ascii.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/urxvt-clipboard-osc.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/urxvt-confirm-paste.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/urxvt-digital-clock.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/urxvt-eval.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/urxvt-example-refresh-hooks.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/urxvt-extensions.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/urxvt-keysym-list.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/urxvt-kuake.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/urxvt-matcher.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/urxvt-option-popup.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/urxvt-overlay-osc.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/urxvt-readline.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/urxvt-remote-clipboard.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/urxvt-searchable-scrollback.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/urxvt-selection-autotransform.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/urxvt-selection-pastebin.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/urxvt-selection-popup.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/urxvt-selection-to-clipboard.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/urxvt-selection.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/urxvt-tabbed.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/urxvt-xim-onthespot.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/urxvt.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/urxvtc.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/urxvtd.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man3
/usr/share/man/man3/urxvtperl.3.bz2
/usr/share/man/man7
/usr/share/man/man7/urxvt.7.bz2

No such time, else I would need to be reading FMs and nothing but that
for a few days...

Why do you object to my question? Isn't it a good thing that I, and very
likely others who will read the list not just now, but also who knows
when, be able to figure it out more quickly than that?...

Post by Floyd Anderson
Looking at it `man 7 urxvt` and searching for ‘geom’ and “Eureka!”, the
IRC*geometry: 87x12+535+542
looks good. Let’s try it with your requirements...

The more complete excerpt (
gotten with:
$ man 7 urxvt | col -b | grep -E -B6 -A8 'IRC\*geo'
):

Please note that I used the "urxvt" instance name and not the "URxvt" class
name. That is because I use different configs for different purposes, for
example, my IRC window is started with "-name IRC", and uses these defaults:

IRC*title: IRC
IRC*geometry: 87x12+535+542
IRC*saveLines: 0
IRC*mapAlert: true
IRC*font: suxuseuro
IRC*boldFont: suxuseuro
IRC*colorBD: white
IRC*keysym.M-C-1: command:\033]710;suxuseuro\007\033]711;suxuseuro\007
IRC*keysym.M-C-2: command:\033]710;9x15bold\007\033]711;9x15bold\007

What's IRC (the instant messaging program? or...)? And there's other
things that are cryptic in those lines... Hmmmh... But the solution *is*
there! That I do understand!

Wow! That was a long search, and the solution finally there! And it is

Post by Floyd Anderson

Post by Miroslav Rovis
So, e.g. if I want to start a window of size 200x50 or 1000x500, how to
I do that?

...and (if installed) examine the attributes with `xwininfo` or `xprop`
or simply by <Alt+Space> + resize and looking at the centred size tip.
urxvt -bl -geometry 200x50+0+0;
urxvt -bl -geometry 1000x500+0+0;

Tried, and this does work. That's it! It is. Thanks!

Post by Floyd Anderson
This should be answer your second part — completely resolved with
offline resources. But I highly recommend not to stop the journey here
because of what if urxvt(7) has never been written?

And where do I find the time to do so? Now that I got the solutions (one
is actually, the decoration one, possibly lame, more about it below), I
got to do some of the things that I got my computers for... I hope you
can easily understand that.

I'm not lazy, but I'm definitely not one of the most gifted of the
people participating in this list... I guess you understand my drift
just fine.

Post by Floyd Anderson
Do you know the commands ‘whatis’, ‘apropos’ (symbolic link to ‘whatis’)
or their equivalent ‘man -k’?

Uh! This may be good... Let me see...

$ man -k printf
printf: nothing appropriate.
$

Because, and this is straight paste from /var/log/messages that is
constantly running with:

# tailf /var/log/messages

in a terminal of its own, in all of my desktops.

Apr 12 14:18:36 g0n kernel: [27021.812778] grsec: (miro:U:/usr/bin/man)
exec of /usr/bin/man (man -k printf ) by /usr/bin/man[bash:9722]
uid/euid:1000/1000 gid/egid:1000/1000, parent /bin/bash[bash:5055]
uid/euid:1000/1000 gid/egid:1000/1000

Apr 12 14:18:36 g0n kernel: [27021.818916] grsec: (miro:U:/) exec of
/usr/bin/whatis (apropos printf ) by /usr/bin/whatis[man:9723]
uid/euid:1000/1000 gid/egid:1000/1000, parent /usr/bin/man[man:9722]
uid/euid:1000/1000 gid/egid:1000/1000

Apr 12 14:18:36 g0n kernel: [27021.824459] grsec: (miro:U:/) denied
access to hidden file /var/cache/man/index.db by
/usr/bin/whatis[apropos:9723] uid/euid:1000/1000 gid/egid:1000/1000,
parent /usr/bin/man[man:9722] uid/euid:1000/1000 gid/egid:1000/1000

'man -k' will be solved only when more time is available. Not now. I don't
run my computers without grsec enabled, not when working anything online
Saved me a lot of troubles. A lot!... But to get my grsecurity-hardened
kernels to allow it, there's more work to do...

Similar or same output with 'apropos' and 'whatis'. Similarly later work
for those too...

Post by Floyd Anderson
Try it out: `man -k geometry` or `apropos geometry`. You see several
category three (Library calls) references. This kind of information may
be hard to understand sometimes but if you have time you only can win.

Yes, also tried geometry instead of printf above. Same output/problems...

Post by Floyd Anderson
For instance XWMGeometry(3), you already know X -> Xorg and WM -> window
manager (BTW: MWM -> Motif Window Manager as Jonathan earlier pointed
out) and Geometry is what you are looking for.

$ man 3 XWMGeometry

Looks like the man page that I will need. Will read it. Thanks!

Post by Floyd Anderson
Sounds that not interesting to have a look at it? If you think so, you
will see at the description section what the argument to the -geometry
parameter of urxvt probably expected. If you are still hungry, go online
and search for other examples and meanings like at [1] or find [2] which
seems to have some tips about ‘devilspie’, ‘GKrellM’ and others.
[1] <http://imagemagick.org/script/command-line-processing.php#geometry>
[2] <https://sites.google.com/site/tstyblo//wmctrl/>

I will look at these in case the man page you pointed to doesn't give me
the solutions needed.

Post by Floyd Anderson
P.S. I love short precise questions and qualified answers as well and
usually hate walls of text — but this was a need for me. Hope that helps
to help yourself.

No way is this a wall of text. No!, this reply that you wrote is a
competent reply that gave very good advice! I'm advanced enough to claim
that it is such, but not as advanced as you are to author such advice in
queries like this.

Post by Floyd Anderson
--
Regards,
floyd

Thanks!

The solutions appear to be closer now...

And let me explain the other part of my query, which I thought, and
wrote yesterday, that it was solved. The 'borderless' solution, with the
'-bl' switch. It doesn't work as I thought it would.

At first I thought it did (and it appeared to work correctly, in the
first tries the 1-pixel border remained (to my best recollection), I
don't know how...), but looking it up more closely, and upon successive
later tries, it gives really no borders whatsoever, and if you have,
say, many terminals, you don't know where one ends and another begins,
it's a total mess.

I really would only need terminals/other windows, without the GUI
borders and without the title. They do need to have the one pixel
foreground color, or whatever color that it is, but it certainly is a
contrasting color border, I just want to get rid of the relatively huge
(if you start a lot of windows, and don't like to use the mouse) title
track (maybe 15 pixel or so) and the thick (maybe 3 pixel or so) GUI
track in bottom...

I leave this other part of the query under this same subject line,
because it is related enough to stay here.

I need a little time to arrange the starting of my windows that will
probably finally be sizes and positioned to my needs... Finally!... I've
wished to position and size my windows for long, probably even years
(two years, I think), and finally I will, very probably, be able to do
it.

Can I tell you more? I'm badly unimaginative. I have actually used the
ImageMagick's own image manipulation convert, composite and such, and I
have used them a lot, in my:
https://github.com/miroR/Flowstamp
(
you can see it in action here:
Åœurba Ludog Cara i Izborna Čudesa (Nova 2015-11-08)
https://vimeo.com/145843953
the title means "The Hurry of the Mad Tzar and Election Miracles"; have
a look at the very very thin moving overlay, say starting from 0:02:15
with clear "Miroslav Rovis" seen passing over the screen, or for the
bottom line, "www.CroatiaFidelis.hr" watch from 0:03:15, that's done
with cutting the images with, of course chosing the positions to cut
from, and sizes to cut out, or similarly...
-- Have a look at those and try to steal that video from me, and try to
tell that you did it, and not me! -- than you are bound to notice the
that overlay in the whole duration of the video, just very thinly...
)

And, given the above... How come I couldn't figure out the syntax can
only be similar for positioning as it is for
cropping/compositing/resizing the images, I can not tell, other than
being myself terribly unimaginative...

Will be back. Regards!

[Floyd Anderson]

On Mi, 12 Apr 15:25:32 +0200

Post by Miroslav Rovis

Post by Floyd Anderson
On Di, 11 Apr 23:12:12 +0200

# `qlist rxvt-unicode`
bash: /usr/share/doc/rxvt-unicode-9.22-r1/rxvt-tabbed.bz2: Permission denied
#
LATER NOTE START: you typoed that part of your advice, or you are misusing the
# qlist unicode
which gives the list as the equery, sure. However, I've already
previously written the immediately below...
LATER NOTE END

Yes, for sure. I used the backticks to make clear it is a command and to
separate it from the ordinary text around to be a little bit friendlier
to the eyes.

Post by Miroslav Rovis

Post by Floyd Anderson

Post by Miroslav Rovis
Then what is the switch to get the windows of be of a certain size. I
didn't find that in "man urxvt"... Could that be in Xorg manual or where
is that?

Do not guess; RTFM or at least, search it! ;-)

The thing is, I do, I spend all the time available to reading the FMs.
But the time is not in sufficient supply... A little more on this
further below.

Do you notice the smiley? I am far away to run someone down. I tried
just to say: “You have an idea, why not following it?”. If you have said
that you read/searched the Xorg manual and found nothing, that was an
other thing for me.

Post by Miroslav Rovis
[…]
No such time, else I would need to be reading FMs and nothing but that
for a few days...
Why do you object to my question? Isn't it a good thing that I, and very
likely others who will read the list not just now, but also who knows
when, be able to figure it out more quickly than that?...

Yes and no, I think. In my opinion it is not objectionable to grab
something from the community to solve an issue. That is the basic idea
of e.g. a mailing list. But on the other side I disbelieve that peoples
that only e.g. copy ’n paste ready-to-use solutions to their machines
can accumulate much knowledge. Therefore they might not be able to
contribute anything back to the community in the future.

It makes a difference if someone acquire and understand something by
him/herself or only use the output from others. I cannot resist the
feeling that nowadays more and more people just consume what others
provide them while their own capabilities disappears more and more.

Post by Miroslav Rovis

Post by Floyd Anderson
Looking at it `man 7 urxvt` and searching for ‘geom’ and “Eureka!”, the
IRC*geometry: 87x12+535+542
looks good. Let’s try it with your requirements...

The more complete excerpt (
$ man 7 urxvt | col -b | grep -E -B6 -A8 'IRC\*geo'

When I said search (the man page) I assumed you use something like
‘less’ as your pager for manuals and invoke ‘/ geom’ in there to find
the relevant parts. Your expression above will probably match but only
if there is a case sensitive ‘IRC’ in it — which you cannot know for a
first time search. And that might make searching more frustrating.

And also you have to repeat those piping for every new search instead of
simply hitting ‘G’ and scroll a little bit upwards to the ‘SEE ALSO’
section for example.

Post by Miroslav Rovis
Wow! That was a long search, and the solution finally there! And it is

Post by Floyd Anderson

Post by Miroslav Rovis
So, e.g. if I want to start a window of size 200x50 or 1000x500, how to
I do that?

...and (if installed) examine the attributes with `xwininfo` or `xprop`
or simply by <Alt+Space> + resize and looking at the centred size tip.
urxvt -bl -geometry 200x50+0+0;
urxvt -bl -geometry 1000x500+0+0;

Tried, and this does work. That's it! It is. Thanks!

Do not mention it, you have done it!

BTW, as you have certainly seen, the size is treated as columns and rows
(or lines) by urxvt. This depends on your used terminal font which makes
it sometimes difficult switching to another font with fine tuned window
positioning. Therefore it may be good to use such things like devilspie.
Some years ago and due to Lua, I have installed it but never used (shame
on me).

To be pixel precise you can use x11-misc/wmctrl:
wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -e 0,0,0,600,1000
to reset the current terminal or:
( urxvt -T test -e sh -c 'wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -e 0,0,0,600,1000 && top' )
to start a new one with a long running ‘top’.

For short living commands use ‘-hold’ to prevent a terminal closing:
( urxvt -hold -T test \
-e sh -c 'wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -e 0,0,0,150,50 && \
echo "hello world!"' )
or the same without third party tools using terminal escape sequences:
( urxvt -hold -T test \
-e sh -c 'echo -ne "\033[4;50;150t\033[3;0;0thello world!\n"' )

The ‘-e’ option has the disadvantage that you cannot work in the terminal.

Post by Miroslav Rovis

Post by Floyd Anderson
This should be answer your second part — completely resolved with
offline resources. But I highly recommend not to stop the journey
here because of what if urxvt(7) has never been written?

And where do I find the time to do so? Now that I got the solutions (one
is actually, the decoration one, possibly lame, more about it below), I
got to do some of the things that I got my computers for... I hope you
can easily understand that.
I'm not lazy, but I'm definitely not one of the most gifted of the
people participating in this list... I guess you understand my drift
just fine.

Yep it is all fine. Time may be a problem but keep in mind, doing things
step by step is sometimes faster as jumping directly to the finish while
understanding nothing. The journey is the reward.

Post by Miroslav Rovis

Post by Floyd Anderson
Do you know the commands ‘whatis’, ‘apropos’ (symbolic link to ‘whatis’)
or their equivalent ‘man -k’?

Uh! This may be good... Let me see...
$ man -k printf
printf: nothing appropriate.
$
Because, and this is straight paste from /var/log/messages that is
# tailf /var/log/messages

Manual — once more ;-) — say:
“tailf is deprecated. It may have unfixed bugs and will be removed
from util-linux in March 2017. Nowadays it's safe to use tail -f
(from coreutils), […]”

or `less +F /var/log/messages` to have a search ability after
interrupting the file read.

Post by Miroslav Rovis

Post by Floyd Anderson
P.S. I love short precise questions and qualified answers as well and
usually hate walls of text — but this was a need for me. Hope that helps
to help yourself.

No way is this a wall of text. No!, this reply that you wrote is a
competent reply that gave very good advice! I'm advanced enough to claim
that it is such, […]

Thanks, that was my hope.

Post by Miroslav Rovis
The solutions appear to be closer now...
And let me explain the other part of my query, which I thought, and
wrote yesterday, that it was solved. The 'borderless' solution, with the
'-bl' switch. It doesn't work as I thought it would.
At first I thought it did (and it appeared to work correctly, in the
first tries the 1-pixel border remained (to my best recollection), I
don't know how...), but looking it up more closely, and upon successive
later tries, it gives really no borders whatsoever, and if you have,
say, many terminals, you don't know where one ends and another begins,
it's a total mess.
I really would only need terminals/other windows, without the GUI
borders and without the title. They do need to have the one pixel
foreground color, or whatever color that it is, but it certainly is a
contrasting color border, I just want to get rid of the relatively huge
(if you start a lot of windows, and don't like to use the mouse) title
track (maybe 15 pixel or so) and the thick (maybe 3 pixel or so) GUI
track in bottom...

Not sure what it is. Maybe I cannot see it due to:
URxvt.externalBorder: 0
URxvt.internalBorder: 0
in my ‘${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/X11/xresources.d/rxvt-unicode’ Xresources
file. Try `urxvt -bl -b 0 -w 0 -g 100x100+0+0`. What does ‘xwininfo’ say
about the ‘Absolute upper-left {X,Y}’, ‘Relative upper-left {X,Y}’ and
‘Border width’ for that kind of window creation?

Post by Miroslav Rovis
I need a little time to arrange the starting of my windows that will
probably finally be sizes and positioned to my needs... Finally!... I've
wished to position and size my windows for long, probably even years
(two years, I think), and finally I will, very probably, be able to do
it.

Another hint, what about i3 [1] or terminal multiplexer for window/pane
arrangements? I personally have learned to love Tmux (that may the
reason I never used devilspie). But you are warned, that can be another
time consuming process. In the end it is all the same: The one that I
want, the other that I have to pay for with time, money, health, life or
what else.

Post by Miroslav Rovis
Can I tell you more? I'm badly unimaginative. I have actually used the
ImageMagick's own image manipulation convert, composite and such, and I
https://github.com/miroR/Flowstamp
(
Žurba Ludog Cara i Izborna Čudesa (Nova 2015-11-08)
https://vimeo.com/145843953
the title means "The Hurry of the Mad Tzar and Election Miracles"; have
a look at the very very thin moving overlay, say starting from 0:02:15
with clear "Miroslav Rovis" seen passing over the screen, or for the
bottom line, "www.CroatiaFidelis.hr" watch from 0:03:15, that's done
with cutting the images with, of course chosing the positions to cut
from, and sizes to cut out, or similarly...
-- Have a look at those and try to steal that video from me, and try to
tell that you did it, and not me! -- than you are bound to notice the
that overlay in the whole duration of the video, just very thinly...
)
And, given the above... How come I couldn't figure out the syntax can
only be similar for positioning as it is for
cropping/compositing/resizing the images, I can not tell, other than
being myself terribly unimaginative...

This is the point I mentioned above somewhere. If you acquire your
experience by yourself, you mostly can see parallelism to other things
you have learned in the past. Copy here and copy there, consume this and
consume that (without thinking, just for a quick success), doesn’t make
those things happen.


[1] <https://i3wm.org/screenshots/>

[Miroslav Rovis]

I have solved the starting of urxvt windows (and other windows) in
Openbox, with startx (can probably be applied to other DE, the solution
was in Xorg, by its utilities).

Post by Floyd Anderson
On Mi, 12 Apr 15:25:32 +0200

Post by Miroslav Rovis

Post by Floyd Anderson
On Di, 11 Apr 23:12:12 +0200

...

Post by Floyd Anderson
wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -e 0,0,0,600,1000
( urxvt -T test -e sh -c 'wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -e 0,0,0,600,1000 && top' )
to start a new one with a long running ‘top’.

...remains for me to try and play with it, but some other time... I've
spent many hours of these two days dedicatedly on this issue, and I have
to move to other matters in live and computing...

Post by Floyd Anderson
( urxvt -hold -T test \
-e sh -c 'wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -e 0,0,0,150,50 && \
echo "hello world!"' )
( urxvt -hold -T test \
-e sh -c 'echo -ne "\033[4;50;150t\033[3;0;0thello world!\n"' )
The ‘-e’ option has the disadvantage that you cannot work in the terminal.

( Pls. see the attachment autostart_2017-04-13_miroR_borderless.txt,
more about it furthe below. )
Since we're at the '-e' option, I'm courious how come I could put:
-e "top"
into the urxvt command in ~/.config/openbox/autostart, and also I could
put:
-e "mutt"
into another urxvt line, but I couldn't put:
-e "tail -f some-file"
nor:
-e "sudo -s"
...

Post by Floyd Anderson

Post by Miroslav Rovis
# tailf /var/log/messages

“tailf is deprecated. It may have unfixed bugs and will be removed
from util-linux in March 2017. Nowadays it's safe to use tail -f
(from coreutils), [
]”

Taken notice of.

Post by Floyd Anderson
or `less +F /var/log/messages` to have a search ability after
interrupting the file read.

As well.

...
Yes! In here lied the solution!

Post by Floyd Anderson
URxvt.externalBorder: 0
URxvt.internalBorder: 0
in my ‘${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/X11/xresources.d/rxvt-unicode’ Xresources
file. Try `urxvt -bl -b 0 -w 0 -g 100x100+0+0`. What does ‘xwininfo’ say
about the ‘Absolute upper-left {X,Y}’, ‘Relative upper-left {X,Y}’ and
‘Border width’ for that kind of window creation?

Well, it was different that that, but your suggestions pushed me to
investigate! Pls. see these attachments:

_Xresources_no_fonts_borderless.txt

autostart_2017-04-13_miroR_borderless.txt

Because as I said, the solution was actually to be found on Xorg
premises. I may even not have very correctly named the file with the
crucial lines which I now added, i.e. with the starting underscore, but
that gives me no headaches at all, and then with the right entries in
the /home/miro/.config/openbox/autostart (the
autostart_2017-04-13_miroR_borderless.txt needs to be modified as needed
and placed in /home/<you>/.config/openbox/autostart ; I haven't used
much of any other desktops, but I'm sure any other desktop flavor
readers might use will have their ways to accomodate for these
configurations). And it now all works as I long wished it would.
...

Post by Floyd Anderson
Another hint, what about i3 [1] or terminal multiplexer for window/pane
arrangements? I personally have learned to love Tmux (that may the

I looked up both:
x11-wm/i3
and:
app-misc/tmux
and I think I would like better tmux, but...
But only if I didn't have to leave these issues and work on other
matters in my life and in computing.
The ~/.config/openbox/autostart, with this line, calls:

xrdb ~miro/_Xresources_no_fonts_borderless.txt
(I'll actually name it without the '.txt' extension, which is there so
the attachment may be better accessible from the web.)

But the autostart openbox's configuration file calls, with this line,

xrdb ~miro/.Xresources ( = the _Xresources_no_fonts_borderless.txt
renamed )
with that line, autostart calls the:

~miro/.Xresources

I already explained in this morning email that I sent to this
gentoo-users' list:

How to set size to windows in Openbox in local config
https://lists.gt.net/gentoo/user/325333#325333

what other entries are in (now I hope the reader who wishes to configure
windows in openbox or other DE, has renamed it to:) .Xresources, and
what they do.

And these are the new entries in .Xresources that give the long
not-known-how-to-do-it 1-pixel border, black border (color #000000 is
black, just like #FFFFFF is white, and there are lots of colors in btwn)
on all the windows:

URxvt.internalBorder: 1
URxvt.borderColor: #000000

And now I can use the '-bl', because the windows will have a border!
NOTE: in case your background is black use the opposite, use #FFFFFF.

And that's it... If Floyd didn't provid advice, I may not have done it.
I think I probably wouldn't have done it. His advice and the information
he provided was crucial to the solutions presented in this topic.

I believe I can stick [SOLVED] in the subject line.

Only ERRATA may follow in the topic, as far as I am concerned.

Regards!

[Miroslav Rovis]

ERRATA: I wrote...

On 170413-21:19+0200, Miroslav Rovis wrote:
...

Post by Miroslav Rovis
Only ERRATA may follow in the topic, as far as I am concerned.

But I forgot floyd has got a "patch to keep the window position while
resizing the font" and offered it:

https://marc.info/?l=gentoo-user&m=149205691530349&w=2

And I, in my reply, accepted to try and apply it.

So, it depends on him if this topic is over or not.

It's very related, so probably best not to do any new subject for it.

[Floyd Anderson]

On Do, 13 Apr 21:55:29 +0200

Post by Miroslav Rovis
ERRATA: I wrote...
...

Post by Miroslav Rovis
Only ERRATA may follow in the topic, as far as I am concerned.

But I forgot floyd has got a "patch to keep the window position while
https://marc.info/?l=gentoo-user&m=149205691530349&w=2
And I, in my reply, accepted to try and apply it.
So, it depends on him if this topic is over or not.
It's very related, so probably best not to do any new subject for it.

Hi Miroslav,

back from some computer-free holidays, I haven’t forgotten that I owe
you a patch. Study my attached approach and if you like, apply the patch
at your own risk (it should be clean applicable to the currently latest
upstream commit [1]).

If you have any questions or ideas, get back to me. But keep in mind,
I’m neither a developer nor a GUI programmer guru.

It has some limits and/or doesn’t resolve certain issues:
- the patch assumes ‘NorthWest’ as the reference point for the window
gravity.
- if terminal background is colourised via escape sequences (as Andrew
mentioned in [2]), you may notice that a borderless window colourise
only full cells (of rows/columns), not the gap between a terminal
cell end and the window edge. Framed windows seems not to be
affected by this behaviour.
- window edges flutters/flickers while resizing fonts (independently
from step-size and also when using escape sequences for resizing)
- toggling a window between normal -> fullscreen/maximised state ->
and back, you may notice that the window size has changed. I don’t
know the reason for this issue (which occurs independently from the
urxvt-font-size extension and my patch).
- different window manager (WM) probably produces different
behaviours. Think about a WM that try to imitate a tiling window
manager by automatic resizing/positioning within a snapping area
near the desktop edges.
- patch is tested to my moderate needs but not fully with all kinds of
fonts, WMs, multi monitor environment, etc.
- ...

The patch is too unimportant to solve some/all of the above issues
and/or bloating up the urxvt extension script. And additionally,
rxvt-unicode won’t and doesn’t expose all Xlib functions (such as
XGetWindowAttributes) in urxvtperl, the embedded perl interpreter. So it
will be tricky sometimes, to solve a specific behaviour.

My used and tested urxvt-font-size related Xresource settings:
URxvt.font-size.keepwin: true
URxvt.font-size.step: 4
URxvt.keysym.C-0xffad: font-size:decrease
URxvt.keysym.C-0xffab: font-size:increase
URxvt.keysym.C-0xffb0: font-size:reset

Since I use the default keysyms for font-size:{decrease,increase,reset}
in Vim, I changed those defaults to C-KP_Substract (C-0xffad), C-KP_Add
(C-0xffab), C-KP_0 (C-0xffb0) like in Firefox and others.


References:
[1] <https://github.com/majutsushi/urxvt-font-size/commit/0cc2624489fb60fcebf85d5c4dd62f425196c5b0>
[2] <https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-user/message/a4d58e993934aa4a273998eda030d115>

[Miroslav Rovis]

Post by Floyd Anderson
On Do, 13 Apr 21:55:29 +0200

...

Post by Floyd Anderson

Post by Miroslav Rovis
But I forgot floyd has got a "patch to keep the window position while
https://marc.info/?l=gentoo-user&m=149205691530349&w=2

...

Post by Floyd Anderson
Hi Miroslav,
back from some computer-free holidays,

I hope you had good and restful time!

Post by Floyd Anderson
I haven’t forgotten that I owe
you a patch. Study my attached approach and if you like, apply the patch
at your own risk (it should be clean applicable to the currently latest
upstream commit [1]).

which I just git clone'd, for that purpose.

Post by Floyd Anderson
If you have any questions or ideas, get back to me.

Don't worry, I will! With my usual excuse for my slowness and relative
inaptitude...

Post by Floyd Anderson
But keep in mind,
I’m neither a developer nor a GUI programmer guru.
- the patch assumes ‘NorthWest’ as the reference point for the window
gravity.

NW is just fine, I would expect that, it's the usual default.

Post by Floyd Anderson
- if terminal background is colourised via escape sequences (as Andrew
mentioned in [2]),

Yeah, I had marked important that email previously already, but only now
found some time to study the links (and only *some* time)...

And some of these notes of yours below I'll only more fully understand
when I, hopefully, try and apply the patch (more about my plan on that

Post by Floyd Anderson
you may notice that a borderless window colourise
only full cells (of rows/columns), not the gap between a terminal
cell end and the window edge. Framed windows seems not to be
affected by this behaviour.
- window edges flutters/flickers while resizing fonts (independently
from step-size and also when using escape sequences for resizing)
- toggling a window between normal -> fullscreen/maximised state ->
and back, you may notice that the window size has changed. I don’t
know the reason for this issue (which occurs independently from the
urxvt-font-size extension and my patch).
- different window manager (WM) probably produces different
behaviours. Think about a WM that try to imitate a tiling window
manager by automatic resizing/positioning within a snapping area
near the desktop edges.
- patch is tested to my moderate needs but not fully with all kinds of
fonts, WMs, multi monitor environment, etc.
- ...
The patch is too unimportant to solve some/all of the above issues
and/or bloating up the urxvt extension script. And additionally,
rxvt-unicode won’t and doesn’t expose all Xlib functions (such as
XGetWindowAttributes) in urxvtperl, the embedded perl interpreter. So it

$ man urxvtperl # but how cryptic!, how long study that will be... I don't
have all those hours right now...
I hope I'll find a solution with less time to invest,
else...

Post by Floyd Anderson
will be tricky sometimes, to solve a specific behaviour.
URxvt.font-size.keepwin: true
URxvt.font-size.step: 4
URxvt.keysym.C-0xffad: font-size:decrease
URxvt.keysym.C-0xffab: font-size:increase
URxvt.keysym.C-0xffb0: font-size:reset
Since I use the default keysyms for font-size:{decrease,increase,reset}
in Vim, I changed those defaults to C-KP_Substract (C-0xffad), C-KP_Add
(C-0xffab), C-KP_0 (C-0xffb0) like in Firefox and others.

I don't get what these are. Not at this time. And this is my second
reading of your email...

NOTE (at proofreading): Is that 'C-KP_Substract' should read
'C-KP_Subtract'?, the "-" on the keypad? So 'C-KP_Subtract' means
Ctrl-<minus>?, and C-KP_0 means Ctrl-0?

I also compared what I have currently installed:

# eix urxvt-font-size
[I] x11-misc/urxvt-font-size
Available versions: 1.1 **9999
Installed versions: 1.1(13:07:28 22/02/15)
Homepage: https://github.com/majutsushi/urxvt-font-size/
Description: Perl extension for rxvt-unicode to change the font size on the fly

#

# qlist urxvt-font-size
/usr/lib64/urxvt/perl/font-size
/usr/share/doc/urxvt-font-size-1.1/README.markdown.bz2
#

[I compared what I have currently installed] with the 9999 version, which
is the version that, IIUC, I plan to hopefully try and patch with your
patch...

Post by Floyd Anderson
[1] <https://github.com/majutsushi/urxvt-font-size/commit/0cc2624489fb60fcebf85d5c4dd62f425196c5b0>

That's the the two colons that Jan Larres, the current maintainer left
out, and you reminded him they were missing. Nice of you! (IIUC)

Post by Floyd Anderson
[2] <https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-user/message/a4d58e993934aa4a273998eda030d115>

The link that Savchenko gave in that email is puzzling me:
http://rcr.io/words/dynamic-xterm-colors.html
I want to try and figure out that bash script there... It's very
educational.

I need more time to study this. But I do have a question:

I read, somewhere, spender (the author of grsecurity) wrote it, but I
don't recall the entire context, and so I can only vaguely paraphrase
what I remember he wrote, that... Aaargh, can't remember well at all...
I think it wasn't about perl only, or perl wasn't even mentioned
explicity, but it was spender saying how running scripts by using stuff
like:

#!/usr/bin/env [perl|python|...]
(
in the new script it's
#!/usr/bin/env perl
)


instead of the more simple, traditional shebang line:

#!/usr/bin/<interpreter> # perl or python or bash

(
in the old script it's
#!/usr/bin/perl
)

that the former (...env <interpreter>) is not as safe as the latter
(...bin/<interpreter>).

Why was it necessary to introduce that change? I'm referring to Jan's
change, of course.

It can't be it does not bring a tiny bit more into the attack surface,
can it?

I need to try and understand some more of the above, but not
immediately. A couple of hours of work on this today still got me
too inconclusive in my understanding... And I do have other stuff on my
hands that require my efforts and time...

And my plan is... Probably bump the ebuild into my custom overlay, as I
don't install online from git (until it becomes possible to verifiably
install packages while online, I mean: for non-experts like me; it is
possible to verifiably install packages with the old webrsync, also
while online...; OTOH app-crypt/gkeys that Savchenko recommended to me
in an email a month or two ago to try and test, those do bring in
more verifiability when installing from git, but I haven't found time to
study gkeys yet...)

[And my plan is... Probably bump the ebuild into my custom overlay,]
modify it to get the git source served from my local Apache cgit repo
[1] (and urxvt-font-size package is not even PGP-signed, neither tags
nor commits, which is always an important feature missing with the code,
for me...)

[modify it to get the git source from my local Apache cgit repo], put
your patch in /etc/portage/patches/x11-misc/urxvt-font-size/ check that
my /etc/portage/bashrc is ready to apply user patches (I recently
updated it as per the wiki page, gave the link in another email a couple
of days ago, to this list, yeah, it was in the non-replied-to message to
Ian Zimmermann in a 2 emails --so far-- thread split from this one...
which was about window positions as well!... [2]), and...

...And emerge it:

# emerge urxvt-font-size

Courious to read what your opinion is on usage of /env vs plain /bin
scripts security-wise, as I put it further above! And why that change...

Regards!
---
[1] I have actually learned when installing gnunet from
youbroketheinternet-overlay just two days ago that I probably can
use local overlay even without seving it with cgit and Apache,
simply from local filesystem!

[2] openbox window positions
https://lists.gt.net/gentoo/user/325342
(and my reply to it contains digressions, but also simple
questions...)

[Floyd Anderson]

On Fr, 21 Apr 00:12:28 +0200

Post by Miroslav Rovis

Post by Floyd Anderson
On Do, 13 Apr 21:55:29 +0200

...

Post by Floyd Anderson

Post by Miroslav Rovis
But I forgot floyd has got a "patch to keep the window position while
https://marc.info/?l=gentoo-user&m=149205691530349&w=2

...

Post by Floyd Anderson
Hi Miroslav,
back from some computer-free holidays,

I hope you had good and restful time!

Yes, thanks, it was like that and I had better stay there because after
an update yesterday, xorg-server kills my last nerve while I am fighting
with a "Segmentation fault at address 0x0" server error. :-(

Post by Miroslav Rovis

Post by Floyd Anderson
The patch is too unimportant to solve some/all of the above issues
and/or bloating up the urxvt extension script. And additionally,
rxvt-unicode won’t and doesn’t expose all Xlib functions (such as
XGetWindowAttributes) in urxvtperl, the embedded perl interpreter. So it

$ man urxvtperl # but how cryptic!, how long study that will be... I don't
have all those hours right now...
I hope I'll find a solution with less time to invest,
else...

Yes it needs investigation. That was the reason why I does not realise
firstly, that the changes to my local font-size extension script were
made by me (as I mentioned in an earlier reply). I could not believe
that I spend my time to those cryptic stuff (have not used Git for this
in the past, which had simply shown myself as the author).

Post by Miroslav Rovis

Post by Floyd Anderson
URxvt.font-size.keepwin: true
URxvt.font-size.step: 4
URxvt.keysym.C-0xffad: font-size:decrease
URxvt.keysym.C-0xffab: font-size:increase
URxvt.keysym.C-0xffb0: font-size:reset
Since I use the default keysyms for font-size:{decrease,increase,reset}
in Vim, I changed those defaults to C-KP_Substract (C-0xffad), C-KP_Add
(C-0xffab), C-KP_0 (C-0xffb0) like in Firefox and others.

I don't get what these are. Not at this time. And this is my second
reading of your email...
NOTE (at proofreading): Is that 'C-KP_Substract' should read
'C-KP_Subtract'?, the "-" on the keypad? So 'C-KP_Subtract' means
Ctrl-<minus>?, and C-KP_0 means Ctrl-0?

Sorry, I was not quite verbose about this. Yes your are right, the "C"
means control key and "KP" stands for keypad. Normally you can use those
identifier directly in the keysym definitions but those for keypad keys
does not work for me, so I used their hexadecimal keycode equivalents.
You can find the keycodes with the command `xev` or by looking in the
header file "/usr/include/X11/keysymdef.h" near line 202.

Post by Miroslav Rovis
# eix urxvt-font-size
[I] x11-misc/urxvt-font-size
Available versions: 1.1 **9999
Installed versions: 1.1(13:07:28 22/02/15)
Homepage: https://github.com/majutsushi/urxvt-font-size/
Description: Perl extension for rxvt-unicode to change the font size on the fly
#
# qlist urxvt-font-size
/usr/lib64/urxvt/perl/font-size
/usr/share/doc/urxvt-font-size-1.1/README.markdown.bz2
#
[I compared what I have currently installed] with the 9999 version, which
is the version that, IIUC, I plan to hopefully try and patch with your
patch...

Cannot figure out what IIUC is but anyway. Patching will fail with the
v1.1-tag commit (two years, four month old).

I would recommend not to hassle portage with those tiny installs (at
least on a single user machine). Simply tell rxvt-unicode where it can
find your additionally extension script(s) by using for instance:
URxvt.perl-lib: $HOME/.config/urxvt/ext

in your Xresource file for rxvt-unicode. Have a look at urxvt(1) manual
for more alternatives. I see only one disadvantage, you have to apply
the patch manually but only once if you are using a local Git repo (as
you do and mentioned in your reply).

Post by Miroslav Rovis

Post by Floyd Anderson
[2] <https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-user/message/a4d58e993934aa4a273998eda030d115>

http://rcr.io/words/dynamic-xterm-colors.html
I want to try and figure out that bash script there... It's very
educational.
I need more time to study this. […]

Not necessary if you rarely use it (in my opinion) but always good to
known that it is there when you need it. Becomes probably very handy
e.g. for terminal prompt designs, window titling or:
- quickly change/test fonts, where <type> is one of {710..713} which
stands for regular, bold, italic, bold-italic and <font> something
like 9x15, fixed or xft:termminus-12 and so on.
$ printf '\e]%s;%s\007' "<type>" "<font>"
- query RGB colour values, where <colournumber> is one of {0..255}
$ echo -ne "\033]4;<colournumber>;?\007"
- window sizing/positioning (e.g. 1144x954+0+0 bound to Ctrl+F11) in
urxvt. Did you remember the syntax? :-)
URxvt.keysym.C-F11: command:\033[4;1144;954t\033[3;0;0t
- ...

Post by Miroslav Rovis
I read, somewhere, spender (the author of grsecurity) wrote it, but I
don't recall the entire context, and so I can only vaguely paraphrase
what I remember he wrote, that... Aaargh, can't remember well at all...
I think it wasn't about perl only, or perl wasn't even mentioned
explicity, but it was spender saying how running scripts by using stuff
#!/usr/bin/env [perl|python|...]
(
in the new script it's
#!/usr/bin/env perl
)

Yes, with commit 83da253a7946c85d65fbf9c3a983bd6ef51420aa the explicit
path declaration for perl was removed.

Post by Miroslav Rovis
#!/usr/bin/<interpreter> # perl or python or bash
(
in the old script it's
#!/usr/bin/perl
)
that the former (...env <interpreter>) is not as safe as the latter
(...bin/<interpreter>).
Why was it necessary to introduce that change? I'm referring to Jan's
change, of course.
It can't be it does not bring a tiny bit more into the attack surface,
can it?

I do not think so. It is probably rather a portability related decision.
Have a look at a blog post by Michał Górny [1] for some light on this.

Post by Miroslav Rovis
And my plan is... Probably bump the ebuild into my custom overlay, as I
don't install online from git (until it becomes possible to verifiably
install packages while online, I mean: for non-experts like me; it is
possible to verifiably install packages with the old webrsync, also
while online...; OTOH app-crypt/gkeys that Savchenko recommended to me
in an email a month or two ago to try and test, those do bring in
more verifiability when installing from git, but I haven't found time to
study gkeys yet...)

Same here. I does not knew app-crypt/gkeys previously and it sounds very
interesting. It is totally overdue nowadays to have something like that
for the rsync protocol.

Post by Miroslav Rovis
[And my plan is... Probably bump the ebuild into my custom overlay,]
modify it to get the git source served from my local Apache cgit repo
[1] (and urxvt-font-size package is not even PGP-signed, neither tags
nor commits, which is always an important feature missing with the code,
for me...)

Maybe a kindly request upstream for signed tags may change this.

Post by Miroslav Rovis
[modify it to get the git source from my local Apache cgit repo], put
your patch in /etc/portage/patches/x11-misc/urxvt-font-size/ check that
my /etc/portage/bashrc is ready to apply user patches (I recently
updated it as per the wiki page, gave the link in another email a couple
of days ago, to this list, yeah, it was in the non-replied-to message to
Ian Zimmermann in a 2 emails --so far-- thread split from this one...
which was about window positions as well!... [2]), and...
# emerge urxvt-font-size
Courious to read what your opinion is on usage of /env vs plain /bin
scripts security-wise, as I put it further above! And why that change...
Regards!
---
[1] I have actually learned when installing gnunet from
youbroketheinternet-overlay just two days ago that I probably can
use local overlay even without seving it with cgit and Apache,
simply from local filesystem!
[2] openbox window positions
https://lists.gt.net/gentoo/user/325342
(and my reply to it contains digressions, but also simple
questions...)

Your plan with the Apache cgit repo seems to be a nice challenge to
learn something but as I noted above, creating and maintaining an
overlay for so tiny things is a little bit overkill in my opinion.
Fetching the related Git repository from time to time and you are done
while an overlay needs probably more significant work.

As an example, I am currently just imagine I have to create overlays for
my favourite Vim plugins instead of using well known manager like
Vundle, NeoBundle, Dein or what else. That were a lot of work for the
overlay solution or did I miss the point?


References:
[1] <https://blogs.gentoo.org/mgorny/2016/02/08/a-quick-note-on-portable-shebangs/>

[Miroslav Rovis]

Hi Floyd!

This is just an interim notice-reply. I need a few days to find a couple
of hours time to study the links you gave. I only wish to express my
appreciation, as the links look interesting and to the point, as well as
the rest of your reply.

Post by Floyd Anderson
On Fr, 21 Apr 00:12:28 +0200

Post by Miroslav Rovis

Post by Floyd Anderson
On Do, 13 Apr 21:55:29 +0200

...

Post by Floyd Anderson

Post by Miroslav Rovis

Post by Floyd Anderson
back from some computer-free holidays,

I hope you had good and restful time!

...

Post by Floyd Anderson

Post by Miroslav Rovis
[2] openbox window positions
https://lists.gt.net/gentoo/user/325342
(and my reply to it contains digressions, but also simple
questions...)

Your plan with the Apache cgit repo seems to be a nice challenge to
learn something but as I noted above, creating and maintaining an
overlay for so tiny things is a little bit overkill in my opinion.
Fetching the related Git repository from time to time and you are done
while an overlay needs probably more significant work.
As an example, I am currently just imagine I have to create overlays for
my favourite Vim plugins instead of using well known manager like
Vundle, NeoBundle, Dein or what else. That were a lot of work for the
overlay solution or did I miss the point?
[1] <https://blogs.gentoo.org/mgorny/2016/02/08/a-quick-note-on-portable-shebangs/>
--
Regards,
floyd

[Miroslav Rovis]

Post by Miroslav Rovis
Hi Floyd!
This is just an interim notice-reply. I need a few days to find a couple
of hours time to study the links you gave. I only wish to express my
appreciation, as the links look interesting and to the point, as well as
the rest of your reply.

I always try to keep my word, but I am not likely to be able to. My
Gentoo system is currently somewhat (probably mildly) broken, as can be
figured out from:

Strange script planted with Bash
https://www.croatiafidelis.hr/foss/cap/cap-170504-strange-bash/
and
Same Issue with Editcap
https://www.croatiafidelis.hr/foss/cap/cap-170313-git-devuan-mail/git-devuan-mail-4.php

and nice and useful, but cosmetic, issues fade away in importance
confronted with security issues.

(only my sig at end, no more new text)

Post by Miroslav Rovis

Post by Floyd Anderson
On Fr, 21 Apr 00:12:28 +0200

Post by Miroslav Rovis

Post by Floyd Anderson
On Do, 13 Apr 21:55:29 +0200

...

Post by Floyd Anderson

Post by Miroslav Rovis

Post by Floyd Anderson
back from some computer-free holidays,

I hope you had good and restful time!

...

Post by Floyd Anderson

Post by Miroslav Rovis
[2] openbox window positions
https://lists.gt.net/gentoo/user/325342
(and my reply to it contains digressions, but also simple
questions...)

Your plan with the Apache cgit repo seems to be a nice challenge to
learn something but as I noted above, creating and maintaining an
overlay for so tiny things is a little bit overkill in my opinion.
Fetching the related Git repository from time to time and you are done
while an overlay needs probably more significant work.
As an example, I am currently just imagine I have to create overlays for
my favourite Vim plugins instead of using well known manager like
Vundle, NeoBundle, Dein or what else. That were a lot of work for the
overlay solution or did I miss the point?
[1] <https://blogs.gentoo.org/mgorny/2016/02/08/a-quick-note-on-portable-shebangs/>
--
Regards,
floyd

[Floyd Anderson]

After rereading my previous reply to your response, two things catching
my eyes. Firstly I have forgotten to mentioned a neatly urxvt extension
[1] (for an on the fly font size changing) in the terminal font related
paragraph of my prior post.

I have made a little patch to keep the window position while resizing
the font. I you are interested in, let me know.

Post by Floyd Anderson

Can I tell you more? […]
And, given the above... How come I couldn't figure out the syntax can
only be similar for positioning as it is for
cropping/compositing/resizing the images, I can not tell, other than
being myself terribly unimaginative...

This is the point I mentioned above somewhere. If you acquire your
experience by yourself, you mostly can see parallelism to other things
you have learned in the past. Copy here and copy there, consume this and
consume that (without thinking, just for a quick success), doesn’t make
those things happen.

has some potential to get me wrong. Please, do not refer it to yourself
as my assumption why you have not figure out the syntax of the geometry
switch. Naturally this happens all the time — to me too. And as you say,
often someone cannot say why nor what is going on behind the scene.

For a recent example, as I looked for the above mentioned extension, I
realised that the local script has some changes against the origin one
but I was unable to remember who has made this. At the end I must say
nobody else than me might have done this but I really do not recall it.

To finish this second topic, my intention was only to pointing out what
can happen not *what* happened and had been better placed at my prior
community related statement.


[1] <https://github.com/majutsushi/urxvt-font-size>

[Miroslav Rovis]

Post by Floyd Anderson
After rereading my previous reply to your response, two things catching
my eyes. Firstly I have forgotten to mentioned a neatly urxvt extension
[1] (for an on the fly font size changing) in the terminal font related
paragraph of my prior post.

I do have the package:

x11-misc/urxvt-font-size

installed, and enabled. It is enabled via the line further below, and
it is the case since more than one year ago (I did it, at the latest,
around the time these files were last modified, so to recall all of
this, and to write this message took me some time :-) ):

$ ls -ABRgo ~miro/_Xresources_*fonts
-rw-r--r-- 1 641 2016-03-07 23:04 /home/miro/_Xresources_fonts
-rw-r--r-- 1 238 2016-03-12 14:34 /home/miro/_Xresources_no_fonts
$

But I'll attach my commented current ~/.config/openbox/autostart to give
an example of a simple config to even casual readers who will be finding
this via search engines. Pls. find attached:

autostart_2017-04-13_miroR.txt

( floyd, the explanation is for potential readers who are less advanced
than even me, just skim through it; or if you prefer, do correct it if
there's anything wrong, or where it, or my explanation here, is
incomplete )

This line, in the attached file autostart_2017-04-13_miroR.txt, arranges
for font resizing:

xrdb ~miro/_Xresources_no_fonts

xrdb just loads resources, from its manual page:
xrdb - X server resource database utility

And this is what gets the fonts resized on the fly:

$ cat ~miro/_Xresources_no_fonts
URxvt.perl-ext-common: font-size
URxvt.keysym.C-Up: perl:font-size:increase
URxvt.keysym.C-Down: perl:font-size:decrease
URxvt.keysym.C-S-Up: perl:font-size:incglobal
URxvt.keysym.C-S-Down: perl:font-size:decglobal

( C is the Ctrl key, Up and Down are the arrow keys, don't know what S
stands for, I've actually been using only the C-Up and C-Down. But the
x11-misc/urxvt-font-size package is just two files, the 300+ lines perl
script and the README, read there once you install the package... )

I attached autostart_2017-04-13_miroR.txt because finally the
positioning and sizing of urxvt (and other windows) I am able to do,
from my spartan-austere-simple, no-frills-whatsoever Openbox desktop,
and I like to offer the solutions that worked for me to other potential
readers!

It could even get improved soon, if, from the other message of floyd's
(more time I need to digest and to reply to that other message, which is
actually previous to this one of his that I am replying to) I figure out
how to get the urxvt windows to start with just just 1 pixel borders and
no GUI title and bottom bars...

It could even get improved. Could. But it it won't, this is already a
huge improvement with respect to what I was living with for... years. At
every starting of desktop, manually arranging the positioning and sizes
of windows...

That's why I'm sharing it, to help other users of lean and mean desktops
without bloat. Remember I'm on a non-dbus system, so I am somewhat of a
DIYer in a way (although more and more people prefer no-bloat, so also
no-dbus and no-poetterware installs, and it is now much easier for users
than when I converted my system to such).

What now follows is the explanation of the current state of my urxvt
terminal windows with respect to their positions being or not lost while
resizing them. Which is another issue to resolve, with, hopefully,
floyd's patch.

So, while the positioning of windows usually remains the same for very
simple resizing; simply C-Up to increase the font, and later C-Down to
decrease it back to the previous size returns the window to the exact
same position as previously in all respects, that is no longer the case
when more than one or two steps, such as two consecutive C-Up are
performed, and later two consecutive C-Down: the window does not return
to where it originally was, but moves away, usually upwards.

Previously, up until several months ago (just 2-3? or maybe 8-9?, I
don't recollect well at all), the window would move away even after one
single C-Up followed by one single C-Down. And as I described above,
that undesired move-away no longer happens, but it no longer happens
only for one step C-Up and one step C-Down. Which means somebody has
already tried, and with limited success, to fix the restoring of the
positions of windows upon these increases and decreases :-) .

Post by Floyd Anderson
I have made a little patch to keep the window position while resizing
the font. I you are interested in, let me know.

I am interested about your patch! I hope it won't be complex, the
patching...

Post by Floyd Anderson

Post by Floyd Anderson

Can I tell you more? [
]
And, given the above... How come I couldn't figure out the syntax can
only be similar for positioning as it is for
cropping/compositing/resizing the images, I can not tell, other than
being myself terribly unimaginative...

This is the point I mentioned above somewhere. If you acquire your
experience by yourself, you mostly can see parallelism to other things
you have learned in the past. Copy here and copy there, consume this and
consume that (without thinking, just for a quick success), doesn’t make
those things happen.

has some potential to get me wrong. Please, do not refer it to yourself
as my assumption why you have not figure out the syntax of the geometry
switch. Naturally this happens all the time — to me too. And as you say,
often someone cannot say why nor what is going on behind the scene.

No, c'mon. I won't get you wrong. I may be sensitive, but not that much
;-)

Post by Floyd Anderson
For a recent example, as I looked for the above mentioned extension, I
realised that the local script has some changes against the origin one
but I was unable to remember who has made this. At the end I must say
nobody else than me might have done this but I really do not recall it.

I'm not sure I get what you mean by 'local script'? Does 'local' mean:
gentoo repo?

Post by Floyd Anderson
To finish this second topic, my intention was only to pointing out what
can happen not *what* happened and had been better placed at my prior
community related statement.

All is fine.

This is where the two-files, very useful x11-misc/urxvt-font-size

Post by Floyd Anderson
[1] <https://github.com/majutsushi/urxvt-font-size>
--
Regards,
floyd

I need more time to digest you previous email.

Regards!

[Floyd Anderson]

On Di, 11 Apr 13:44:52 +0200

Post by Miroslav Rovis
How can I get urxvt to start undecorated, i.e without any edges nor
window title?

The manual page urxvt(1) mentioned the command line option ‘-bl’ and the
configuration resource ‘borderless’. Check your compiled-in support for
this with ‘urxvt -help’ for the former or with ‘urxvt --help’ for the
latter.

It’s up to the window manager to honour those settings. A short test
with the command line option on ‘xfce-base/xfwm4-4.12.3-r1::gentoo’
works here.

[Miroslav Rovis]

Post by Floyd Anderson
On Di, 11 Apr 13:44:52 +0200

Post by Miroslav Rovis
How can I get urxvt to start undecorated, i.e without any edges nor
window title?

The manual page urxvt(1) mentioned the command line option ‘-bl’ and the
configuration resource ‘borderless’. Check your compiled-in support for
this with ‘urxvt -help’ for the former or with ‘urxvt --help’ for the
latter.
It’s up to the window manager to honour those settings. A short test
with the command line option on ‘xfce-base/xfwm4-4.12.3-r1::gentoo’
works here.
--
Regards,
floyd

Yes it does! It works! And that's what the mailing lists are for! Perfect!

You know what the only other option of mine I thought was? To rummage
through Xorg manuals! And no, I wouldn't have found it, or would I...

I don't think so... And that would take hours, maybe long hours... And
would have been useless exercize, in part (there are always good things
to learn in FOSS programs manuals, so only: in part)...

But I wouldn't have found it! Because it was in the

$ man urxvt
...
-bl Compile frills: Set MWM hints to request a borderless window,
i.e. if honoured by the WM, the rxvt-unicode window will not
have window decorations; resource borderLess. If the window
manager does not support MWM hints (e.g. kwin), enables
override-redirect mode.
...
(not that I understand what MWM exactly mean..., WM of course means
Window Manager, doesn't it?)

And, but I have to post that in the other thread with the title:
How to set size to windows in Openbox in local config WAS: Something eats my memory
https://lists.gt.net/gentoo/user/325306
( in mailboxes: Message-ID: <***@g0n.xdwgrp> )

Pls. see my reply to my own query there, updated with this solution
(sending it right after this email), for which solution I thank you! :-)

Regards!

[Jonathan Callen]

Post by Miroslav Rovis

Post by Floyd Anderson
On Di, 11 Apr 13:44:52 +0200

Post by Miroslav Rovis
How can I get urxvt to start undecorated, i.e without any edges nor
window title?

The manual page urxvt(1) mentioned the command line option ‘-bl’ and the
configuration resource ‘borderless’. Check your compiled-in support for
this with ‘urxvt -help’ for the former or with ‘urxvt --help’ for the
latter.
It’s up to the window manager to honour those settings. A short test
with the command line option on ‘xfce-base/xfwm4-4.12.3-r1::gentoo’
works here.
--
Regards,
floyd

Yes it does! It works! And that's what the mailing lists are for! Perfect!
You know what the only other option of mine I thought was? To rummage
through Xorg manuals! And no, I wouldn't have found it, or would I...
I don't think so... And that would take hours, maybe long hours... And
would have been useless exercize, in part (there are always good things
to learn in FOSS programs manuals, so only: in part)...
But I wouldn't have found it! Because it was in the
$ man urxvt
...
-bl Compile frills: Set MWM hints to request a borderless window,
i.e. if honoured by the WM, the rxvt-unicode window will not
have window decorations; resource borderLess. If the window
manager does not support MWM hints (e.g. kwin), enables
override-redirect mode.
...
(not that I understand what MWM exactly mean..., WM of course means
Window Manager, doesn't it?)
How to set size to windows in Openbox in local config WAS: Something eats my memory
https://lists.gt.net/gentoo/user/325306
Pls. see my reply to my own query there, updated with this solution
(sending it right after this email), for which solution I thank you! :-)
Regards!

MWM is the Motif Window Manager, an ancient relic that is installed with
x11-libs/motif. Many window managers still support the window manager
hints that motif used to determine how to draw windows.

[Miroslav Rovis]

Post by Jonathan Callen

Post by Floyd Anderson
On Di, 11 Apr 13:44:52 +0200

Post by Miroslav Rovis
How can I get urxvt to start undecorated, i.e without any edges nor
window title?

...

Post by Jonathan Callen
MWM is the Motif Window Manager, an ancient relic that is installed with
x11-libs/motif. Many window managers still support the window manager
hints that motif used to determine how to draw windows.
--
Jonathan Callen

Thanks!

[Ian Zimmerman]

Post by Miroslav Rovis
sleep 6 && urxvt -g -0+125 -fn "-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso10646-1" &
sleep 6.5 && urxvt -g -0-0 -fn "-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso10646-1" &
sleep 8 && urxvt -g +0-0 -fn "-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--12-110-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1" &
sleep 10.5 && urxvt -g -125+10 -fn "-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--10-100-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1" &
sleep 11 && urxvt -g -230+0 -fn "-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--10-100-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1" &
sleep 12 && urxvt -g -0+80 -fn "-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--6-60-75-75-c-40-iso10646-1" &
sleep 13 && gkrellm -g +0+0 &

openbox has its own configuration mechanism for window geometry.

Look at ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml, there should be an <applications>
section near the end, with enough comments to get you started, IIRC.

In some cases it doesn't work due to the complexity of the protocols
involved. This includes any apps using the Tk toolkit, unfortunately.
Then you can try wmctrl or similar tools which were already mentioned here.
There's also my patch:

https://icculus.org/pipermail/openbox/2015-December/009014.html

[Miroslav Rovis]

Hi, Ian! very glad to read from you!

Post by Ian Zimmerman

Post by Miroslav Rovis
sleep 6 && urxvt -g -0+125 -fn "-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso10646-1" &
sleep 6.5 && urxvt -g -0-0 -fn "-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso10646-1" &
sleep 8 && urxvt -g +0-0 -fn "-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--12-110-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1" &
sleep 10.5 && urxvt -g -125+10 -fn "-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--10-100-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1" &
sleep 11 && urxvt -g -230+0 -fn "-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--10-100-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1" &
sleep 12 && urxvt -g -0+80 -fn "-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--6-60-75-75-c-40-iso10646-1" &
sleep 13 && gkrellm -g +0+0 &

openbox has its own configuration mechanism for window geometry.

I see.

Post by Ian Zimmerman
Look at ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml, there should be an <applications>
section near the end, with enough comments to get you started, IIRC.

I've attached that part of that file, from <application ... to
</application>, in attachment:

rc.xml_application.txt

And I read there:

<decor>yes</decor>
# enable or disable window decorations

I'm already pretty happy with what I've got, as per:

How to set size to windows in Openbox in local config
https://lists.gt.net/gentoo/user/325306

but I have to test this now...

Nope. (I'll cosider your patch later, but first the stock Openbox
config...), and no, my changing of that line to:

<decor>no</decor>

then placing of:
autostart_2017-04-13_miroR.txt
https://lists.gt.net/engine?do=post_attachment;postatt_id=51502;list=gentoo
( attachment to, or from, the message:
https://lists.gt.net/gentoo/user/325333#325333 )

into ~/.config/openbox/autostart

and issuing from no-GUI terminal:

$ startx

didn't get me a desktop without title bars and bottom borders on
windows.

Now your patch.

Post by Ian Zimmerman
https://icculus.org/pipermail/openbox/2015-December/009014.html

( remains also cited further below )
icculus.org in my Palemoon only offered me to save it as
attachment.patch, but I see you named it:

openbox-log-winid.patch

I am attaching that patch, renamed:

openbox-log-winid_patch.txt

so it can be opened more easily in the web archives, if my understanding
is correct about browsers kind of trusting the '.txt' extensions a lot
generally.

Also, on icculus.org, it doesn't appear you PGP-MIME signed your email.
But if you check what I post to this list and which will be PGP-signed
with my signature, I'm more confident your patch is correct if you
verify it as it is delivered with this PGP-MIME signed email of mine.

DIGRESSION START (read if interested in basic crypto, skip to DIGRESSION END if not)
We've had a email-verification thread on Mutt ML:

how to verify emails from web
https://marc.info/?t=147464061400001&r=1&w=2

but it's easier to get raw emails of that thread on:

how to verify emails from web
https://www.croatiafidelis.hr/foss/mutt/lurker/thread/20160923.133234.89c6e275.en.html

and check the verifying technique.

Actually it's impossible to me to get raw emails from marc.info at this
time...

BTW: anybody recalls marc.info archives webmaster having posted here in
gentoo-user mailing list about downloading raw emails for
PGP-verification from marc-info archives. Anybody remembers so well to
find where his instructions that he posted on this gentoo-user ML are,
the HTTPS address on the web or the Message-ID? ... I'll post it if I
find it sooner, in some future message...)
DIGRESSION END

Post by Ian Zimmerman
In some cases it doesn't work due to the complexity of the protocols
involved. This includes any apps using the Tk toolkit, unfortunately.
Then you can try wmctrl or similar tools which were already mentioned here.
https://icculus.org/pipermail/openbox/2015-December/009014.html

To try your patch, since Openbox (x11-wm/openbox) is EAPI="5" and not
"6", what I'd need to do, is something similar to what I suggested (
DIGRESSION START
[what I suggested] to the gynormous number of readers who are interested
in it, since everybody wants to know how the big players snoop into
their machines and into their lives... Aaarghh!! I'm being ironic...
It's the opposite! The schmoogs of the world and other nefarious players
can do most anything in people's machines and by that means do a lot in
people's very lives because it so hard to read the network, so much
learning that your head swells from pain sometimes... And my patch, see
below the bugs.gentoo.org link, hasn't turned into an use flag yet...
DIGRESSION END
)
[To try your patch, since Openbox (x11-wm/openbox) is EAPI="5", what I'd

Post by Ian Zimmerman
=dev-libs/nss-3.24 - Add USE flag to enable SSL key logging

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=587116

I.e. I'd need to put your patch in:

/etc/portage/patches/x11-wm/openbox/

or even in:

/etc/portage/patches/x11-wm/openbox-3.6.1/

and it should patch these files:

$ grep diff openbox-log-winid_patch.txt
diff --git a/data/rc.xsd b/data/rc.xsd
diff --git a/openbox/client.c b/openbox/client.c
diff --git a/openbox/config.c b/openbox/config.c
diff --git a/openbox/config.h b/openbox/config.h
$

given that I have the:
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki//etc/portage/patches#Enabling_.2Fetc.2Fportage.2Fpatches_for_all_ebuilds
( it's linked from:
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=587116#c2 , the second comment of
the page already given above
)
[given that I have that]:

/etc/portage/bashrc

already installed. Wow, looking at it, it has changed a lot since July
2016 when I read it last time! The patch is heftier and, again, not much
translated in English. Pure Bash language which everybody speaks
anyways... BIA. [B]eing [i]ronic [a]gain. I'm engrossed over my head in
connecting the bits and pieces to reply here; where do I find the
several-hours time to figure out what that patch means in English by
reading 'man bash' (which is a manual page of just a few lines; BIA)...
It's just like Ian Zimmermann translates it all into English. So he
said, over here, see for yourself how he would make everybody understand
it easily:

Relative ranges and goodies in oldie absolute ranges #283
https://github.com/neomutt/neomutt/pull/283

Find: "Ok, I will restrain myself from translating the C into English."
;-) Oh, I got he wrong, he meant the opposite...

Ian, I'm joking with good heart, out of mild frustration (and
impatience, read on)... I remembered and I tried to understand your
patches to Mutt, when you posted about them:

Repeat command or macro?
https://marc.info/?l=mutt-users&m=148191549713316&w=2
and

Repeat command or macro?
https://marc.info/?l=mutt-users&m=148495501820703&w=2

and I spent at least one or two hours this morning (that's the main
reason I'm replying a little late) reading:

( this link already given above )
Relative ranges and goodies in oldie absolute ranges #283
https://github.com/neomutt/neomutt/pull/283

but I wasn't able to understand much... And lots of people I'm sure,
looked at it, but C is not such a widely spoken language ;-) ... Will go
and learn C, give it another try again from some primer ... one of these
day, sooner, or later. I hope I will...

Anyway, I'd need to place your patch (renamed back to
openbox-log-winid.patch) into:

/etc/portage/patches/x11-wm/openbox-3.6.1/

check that I have the /etc/portage/bashrc updated, and simply reinstall:

# emerge -1 openbox

Right?

NOTE: I'm breaking a little from exhaustion, and also from a few multitasking
merry-go-round headaches ( such as also I have issues with gkrellm
spamming my syslog for some perms that it can't get in my
grsecurity-hardened kernel, but I'll go for that to either grsecurity
forums or to gentoo-hardened ). Regardless I'll try sooner than later,
if I get more of your opinion/advice on it...

ERRATA may follow.

[Peter Humphrey]

Post by Dale
Another thing, at least this used to work, adjusting fonts and their
size. That generally affects the height some too.
I'm not aware of a way to do that as a whole with a single setting. If
someone knows of one, I'd be interested in it too.

Note this in the rc file of the theme I use:

$ grep _font /usr/share/gkrellm2/themes/invisible/gkrellmrc
large_font = "-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal-*-*-100-*-*-p-*-*-*"
normal_font = "-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal-*-*-100-*-*-p-*-*-*"
small_font = "-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal-*-*-80-*-*-p-*-*-*"
StyleChart *.font = normal_font
StyleChart *.alt_font = small_font
StylePanel *.font = normal_font
StylePanel *.alt_font = normal_font
StyleMeter *.font = normal_font
StyleMeter *.alt_font = small_font
StyleMeter cal.font = med_font
StyleMeter cal.alt_font = large_font
StyleMeter clock.font = large_font
StyleMeter fs.alt_font = normal_font

I once tried playing about with the fonts specified in there, but I didn't
manage to make any worthwhile improvement so I put it back as before.

[Miroslav Rovis]

Post by Peter Humphrey

Post by Dale
Another thing, at least this used to work, adjusting fonts and their
size. That generally affects the height some too.
I'm not aware of a way to do that as a whole with a single setting. If
someone knows of one, I'd be interested in it too.

$ grep _font /usr/share/gkrellm2/themes/invisible/gkrellmrc
large_font = "-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal-*-*-100-*-*-p-*-*-*"
normal_font = "-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal-*-*-100-*-*-p-*-*-*"
small_font = "-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal-*-*-80-*-*-p-*-*-*"
StyleChart *.font = normal_font
StyleChart *.alt_font = small_font
StylePanel *.font = normal_font
StylePanel *.alt_font = normal_font
StyleMeter *.font = normal_font
StyleMeter *.alt_font = small_font
StyleMeter cal.font = med_font
StyleMeter cal.alt_font = large_font
StyleMeter clock.font = large_font
StyleMeter fs.alt_font = normal_font
I once tried playing about with the fonts specified in there, but I didn't
manage to make any worthwhile improvement so I put it back as before.
--
Regards
Peter

Not sure I understand. I don't have anything in
/usr/share/gkrellm2/
let alone a file by the name
/usr/share/gkrellm2/themes/invisible/gkrellmrc

Have a look at what:
# equery f gkrellm
told me, pls. open attachment:
equery_f_gkrellm.txt

Regards

[Neil Bothwick]

Post by Miroslav Rovis
Not sure I understand. I don't have anything in
/usr/share/gkrellm2/
let alone a file by the name
/usr/share/gkrellm2/themes/invisible/gkrellmrc

% qfile /usr/share/gkrellm2/themes/invisible/gkrellmrc
x11-themes/gkrellm-themes (/usr/share/gkrellm2/themes/invisible/gkrellmrc)

It's part of gkrellm-themes.

[Miroslav Rovis]

Post by Neil Bothwick

Post by Miroslav Rovis
Not sure I understand. I don't have anything in
/usr/share/gkrellm2/
let alone a file by the name
/usr/share/gkrellm2/themes/invisible/gkrellmrc

% qfile /usr/share/gkrellm2/themes/invisible/gkrellmrc
x11-themes/gkrellm-themes (/usr/share/gkrellm2/themes/invisible/gkrellmrc)
It's part of gkrellm-themes.

Ah!...

But... Spartan austerity here. Default themes are just fine for me.

[Peter Humphrey]

Post by Neil Bothwick

Post by Miroslav Rovis
Not sure I understand. I don't have anything in
/usr/share/gkrellm2/
let alone a file by the name
/usr/share/gkrellm2/themes/invisible/gkrellmrc

% qfile /usr/share/gkrellm2/themes/invisible/gkrellmrc
x11-themes/gkrellm-themes (/usr/share/gkrellm2/themes/invisible/gkrellmrc)
It's part of gkrellm-themes.

Yes, I should have mentioned that. Perhaps I assumed that everyone who uses
gkrellm also uses its themes. Mea culpa.

[Alan McKinnon]

Post by Peter Humphrey

Post by Neil Bothwick

Post by Miroslav Rovis
Not sure I understand. I don't have anything in
/usr/share/gkrellm2/
let alone a file by the name
/usr/share/gkrellm2/themes/invisible/gkrellmrc

% qfile /usr/share/gkrellm2/themes/invisible/gkrellmrc
x11-themes/gkrellm-themes (/usr/share/gkrellm2/themes/invisible/gkrellmrc)
It's part of gkrellm-themes.

Yes, I should have mentioned that. Perhaps I assumed that everyone who uses
gkrellm also uses its themes. Mea culpa.

heh. I have all the themes installed and never used them :-)
I try various ones out from time to time and always go back to the
default...

[Peter Humphrey]

Post by Alan McKinnon
I have all the themes installed and never used them :-)
I try various ones out from time to time and always go back to the
default...

Ah, but having some themes available to tweak has allowed me to set up a
colour to show the CPU nice total separately from the user total.

I suppose I could just keep my version and ditch the rest of the themes.
They do take up quite a lot of space, and time to install.