X sucks (was: Re: Ware Ware Wizardjin)

[Root Boy Jim]

In article <15785 at smoke.brl.mil> gwyn at smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn) writes:
>In article <128236 at uunet.UU.NET> rbj at uunet.UU.NET (Root Boy Jim) writes:
>>Another thing I hate about X is the protocol.
>
>To my mind the worst problem with X is that to get anything at all done,
>two processes must communicate back and forth through the protocol
>bottleneck.  

Yeah. I already complained that the device independence is in the
wrong place (in the client rather than in the server where it belongs).
I forgot to add that device control is in the wrong place as well.

With Blits and NeWS, you can download code to handle certain events
locally.

>This inherently limits the interactivity attainable using
>typical hardware (Sun workstations, for example) to levels below my
>personal standards for interactive graphics.  To give a specific
>example, when I borrow the use of somebody's Sun running an X window
>manager, I often fail to "hit" pop-up menu items when I select them.

But what's worse than sluggish response is the indeterminence
of type-ahead and mouse-ahead operations. There is no guarantee
that a client won't open a window right where you're typing
or mousing and steal your input. With local device control,
these operations can be synchronized.

>That's because I'm used to the responsiveness of the Blit family of
>terminals, where the interaction is entirely under control of a single
>process with direct access to the terminal handware.  What seems like
>a natural expectation for selection from menus becomes more difficult
>under X, where I have to give the protocols time to trickle back and
>forth while I'm making the menu seclection.


This was one of the motivations for Mark Weiser's pie menus. Even
if the windowing system is slow, you can click a button, move in
a certain direction (say, northwest) and release, even before the
menu is drawn.
-- 
		[rbj at uunet 1] stty sane
		unknown mode: sane