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Going back to bed.
Feb. 16th, 2009 03:32 amWoke up unable to breathe because I thought I was well enough not to take a decongestant before bed. That will teach me.
I've now been awake for a couple of hours as my sinuses drained and the decongestant took effect. I used that time to set the default font in Emacs. This, of course, was almost impossible. Considering you can choose a font for a single session by clicking in a drop-down menu, you would THINK it would be trivial to just say "Yes, that one. Always start with that one."
Of course, I've long known that just about everything having to do with fonts in Linux is broken, and this just reinforced it. Bad enough that Emacs provides no way to an option permanently that it lets you set per session; even worse is that it blames the X system for having a central depository of program configurations. THAT IS NOT AN EXCUSE!
FINE that xrdb holds global parameters for programs. If Emacs depends on these then let Emacs push new values that way! So what if none of the X resources were ever intended for anything but hand editing (like so, so much in Linux). Invent a new system that DOES allow a program to publish desired settings back to the central server.
I HAVE BEEN COMPLAINING ABOUT THIS FOR TWENTY YEARS, ISN'T IT ABOUT TIME SOMEONE DAMN WELL *FIXED* IT?
And the reason that *I* haven't fixed it, is that up until now Linux has been so terribly terribly broken that it wasn't worth even trying to start. It was better to live in the Microsoft world, that at least paid lip service to the concept of usability.
Now its just mostly broken; just usable enough that I get upset each time I come across another boneheadedness like this.
And now I go to bed (Oh, and you know what else? Every man page talks about setting .Xdefaults to configure things, but it isn't used any more in this distro. Its now .Xresources that you have to set -- and where was that documented? Nowhere. I had to google for other folks complaining that nothing worked to find a single reference to the fact that it was changed. Grumph!)
I've now been awake for a couple of hours as my sinuses drained and the decongestant took effect. I used that time to set the default font in Emacs. This, of course, was almost impossible. Considering you can choose a font for a single session by clicking in a drop-down menu, you would THINK it would be trivial to just say "Yes, that one. Always start with that one."
Of course, I've long known that just about everything having to do with fonts in Linux is broken, and this just reinforced it. Bad enough that Emacs provides no way to an option permanently that it lets you set per session; even worse is that it blames the X system for having a central depository of program configurations. THAT IS NOT AN EXCUSE!
FINE that xrdb holds global parameters for programs. If Emacs depends on these then let Emacs push new values that way! So what if none of the X resources were ever intended for anything but hand editing (like so, so much in Linux). Invent a new system that DOES allow a program to publish desired settings back to the central server.
I HAVE BEEN COMPLAINING ABOUT THIS FOR TWENTY YEARS, ISN'T IT ABOUT TIME SOMEONE DAMN WELL *FIXED* IT?
And the reason that *I* haven't fixed it, is that up until now Linux has been so terribly terribly broken that it wasn't worth even trying to start. It was better to live in the Microsoft world, that at least paid lip service to the concept of usability.
Now its just mostly broken; just usable enough that I get upset each time I come across another boneheadedness like this.
And now I go to bed (Oh, and you know what else? Every man page talks about setting .Xdefaults to configure things, but it isn't used any more in this distro. Its now .Xresources that you have to set -- and where was that documented? Nowhere. I had to google for other folks complaining that nothing worked to find a single reference to the fact that it was changed. Grumph!)
