Newbe questions

From: Arie Kazachin (ariek_at_attglobal3.14159265358979323846.net)
Date: 12/06/04 

Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 23:55:04

Hello!

I recently started working at a new place on a LINUX RedHat workstation
after almost 10 years of working as a chip designer on Sun boxes under
SunOS+OpenWin and later Solaris+CDE. At home I still use OS/2 WARP3
on my 9 years old PC.

At work I got quite used to keeping 40-60 apps open with most of them
being iconized into a specific location on the desktop. About 2/3 of them
are simple textedit-clones of various files which stay open for months
and most of the rest are about 10 cmdtools in which the most frequently
used command is "!!<ENTER>". My perception is mostly graphical - I just
remember almost by heart icon at which location represents what. After all,
after seeing for years the perfmeter at the top right, the mailer next left,
browser next left, .cshrc bottom right, .alias above .cshrc, ... it's easy
to remember. As for the text edit, I mostly love the textedit clones
for the user-configurable menus (through .textextras-menu) allowing me
to activate Perl scripts on a selected text. I value this feature so much
I can do without text highlighting if I'm forced to choose between the
two.

But now I'm new to the RedHat LINIX on KDE and the default behaviour
of KDE is too much windows-like: when minimizing an app. it creates
an icon at the panel instead of on the desktop, thus changing from
two-dimentional app-selecting tool (CDE desktop) into one-dimentional
app-selecting tool (panel or apps-list). Sometimes there is a second
"dimention" on the panel when many instances of the same app are started but
that requires clicking on more than one place which wastes time.

What I would like to know is:

1) Is there a way to configure KDE so that a minimized app will
        turn into an icon on the desktop instead of on the panel?
        Is there a way to start an app with geometry args (like CDE)
        which'll result in an iconized app with icon at specific
        coordinates? That's important for returning all apps icons
        to their places (with a script) after some lame sysop tells me
        I have to reboot after merely few months of uptime.
        I noticed that placing a file (or a link to it) in the KDE
        desktop directory creates an icon and I can edit the coordinates
        but that's not an app - it's a file (object?) with which an app
        is associated (somewhat similar to WARP3) and the icon stays
        weather the app is open or not.

        If there isn't such a way, what other win-managers can do that?
        Now that I have many hopes to persuade our IT guys to install
        anything other than GNOME or KDE but who knows...

        I visited http://xwinman.org/kde.html and also kde.org
        but I can't judge from the screenshots weather the icon
        is from a file placed in desktop folder or from a minimized app.

2) Searching for a simple editor with user-configurable menus I
        currently selected "nedit". It has a user configurable menus
        (in some ways even better than textedit) but the "copy-paste"
        behaviour of nedit isn't 100% deterministic: not always a double
        click marks a string and tripple click marks a line, while in
        textedit it was rock solid. Also, attempting to create a menu
        with few hundreds of elements (approaching what I used to have
        with textedit) I caused a segmentation fault of the nedit and had
        to give up on menu items to make it shorter. Another drawback
        of nedit menus compared with textedit: nedit loads the menu
        once at a start time, which means: editing the menu file
        doesn'r affect already opened editors.

        Is there any other small and simple editor for LINUX that has
        user-defined menus similar to "extras" of textedit? It doesn't
        have to be complicated (surely not the monster like Xemacs).
        It also should work fast with HUGE files: today I opened a file
        merely 20MB with nedit and waited 2-3 seconds for it to open
        while textedit works very well with files up to 2GB and it doesn't
        looks like length of the file affects anything (except save or
        search or replace).

3) The terminal shell used in KDE seems to have a low limit on the
        scroll history: I don't remember the value but it's orders of
        magnitude lower than 200MB scroll-history buffer I used to open
        the "cmdtool" with. Are there other shells with HUGE history
        buffers?

THANKS IN ADVANCE FOR ANY HELP ! ! !
******************************************************************************
* Arie Kazachin, Israel, e-mail: ariek@attglobal3.14159265358979323846.net *
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