Cool but obscure X11 tools

Boy does that bring back memories of the 1990s!<p>Some of these are not obscure at all, but absolutely standard. Xterm was <i>the</i> shell, I’m not sure there were even alternatives in early X. Xbiff+Xload+Xclock used to be on <i>everybody’s</i> desktop. XV was the main image viewer on X for a long time.<p>Anybody remember xvacuum? I guess it’s truly obscure since it didn’t make the list. One of my favorite tricks to play on other people in the lab, before X security was a thing, was to run xvacuum on other people’s displays ... it slowly sucks everything on the screen into the mouse cursor.<p>If the page maintainer is reading, Xsnow has a calculator in the screenshot covering the snow. This one is a bit obscure, but I loved xsnow, so I think it deserves a calculator-less view! :)

&gt;XLennart is a modification of the arcade game XBill.<p>&gt;An evil and unpopular computer hacker named “Lennart”[1] tries to install his malicious init system on various BSD and Linux systems.<p>&gt;Like in XBill, the player has to hit him and restore infected systems.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cyber.dabamos.de&#x2F;unix&#x2F;x11&#x2F;poettering.gif" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cyber.dabamos.de&#x2F;unix&#x2F;x11&#x2F;poettering.gif</a>

For those looking for obscure-but-useful, checkout xdotool. `sleep 2; xdotool type &quot;foo&quot;` is super handy for typing passwords into virtual machines which don&#x27;t support guest additions. I&#x27;d rather not elaborate on the filthy things I&#x27;ve made it do, but rest assured you can use it to do some quick and dirty automation tasks if you really need to :)

One BIG thing missing: xteddy! It was xteddy shown in parallel on multiple HP 9000 screens in the early 90ies, which sparked my love for UNIX.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;weber.itn.liu.se&#x2F;~stegu&#x2F;xteddy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;weber.itn.liu.se&#x2F;~stegu&#x2F;xteddy&#x2F;</a><p>see also<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xteddy.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xteddy.org&#x2F;</a><p>Also xon (very handy for non-ssh users), jwz&#x27;s xdaliclock and xkeycaps.

As well DDD the X11 front-end for GDB [1]. Helped me quite a lot around 2003.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;ddd&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;ddd&#x2F;</a>

My two favorites were xev, for finding out which key&#x2F;event codes I needed to put in config files, and xnest, for trying out new window managers or containing window-happy applications in a single top-level window before workspaces became a common thing.

Fun point of trivia about XBill: you might not guess from XBill&#x27;s (ahem) slick, beautiful user interface, but one of the two people who wrote XBill is Matias Duarte.<p>Yes, that Matias Duarte, the guy in charge of UI for Android and who came up with Material Design.

Oh my, that reminds me of my first year with Linux, discovering all those little utilities hidden on my Slackware install or available on Sunsite…

Tgif is one of my all-time favorite X11 programs. It&#x27;s used to create vector drawings, and I could whip out nice infrastructure diagrams etc. so fast using it.<p>See <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bourbon.usc.edu&#x2F;tgif&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bourbon.usc.edu&#x2F;tgif&#x2F;index.html</a>

xeyes isn&#x27;t obscure , how else do you test that ssh x forwarding works otherwise :)

I was expecting X11 tools such as xev, xdotool, wmctrl, etc. Not a list a more or less obscure graphical programs (some stuff are even using GTK in the list). Fun nonetheless.

Many of those types of programs like XRoach, XSnow, XNeko as well as every program rendering to the root window will never be possible with wayland (unless you built them into the display server).

The 1994 xv codebase still compiles and runs on modern Macs with XQuartz! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jmcd&#x2F;status&#x2F;1143629189817470977?s=20" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jmcd&#x2F;status&#x2F;1143629189817470977?s=20</a>

TIL there is a successor to xbill, called xlennart.

xclip : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;astrand&#x2F;xclip" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;astrand&#x2F;xclip</a><p><pre><code> (long pipeline that generates lots of output) | xclip </code></pre> Or even just<p><pre><code> xclip &lt; &#x2F;some&#x2F;file </code></pre> Now paste where necessary.

No x2x?<p>Control two separate networked computers with one keyboard and mouse. Cursor slides out of right on one side and enters in on the left of the other.<p>Wayland folks is there a similar thing? I don&#x27;t keep up with Linux desktop tech anymore.

XMosaic - I remember reading about that in &#x27;93 and thinking that it looked like a cool hypertext browser but why would anyone want to load documents over a network!

Shameless plug - you can add also my tiny transset rewrite and enrichment - set_opacity[1]. It allows making X windows translucent, without any interaction required. Wrote it more than a decade ago, but still should be usable. This is how you can use it:<p>set_opacity -o 0.5 -i `pgrep gkrellm`<p>There is also a patched[2] xcompmgr with the colored shadows support:<p>xcompmgr -fF -I-.002 -O-.003 -D6 -cC -t-5 -l-6 -r5 -R 1 -G 0.5333 -B 0<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;XVilka&#x2F;set_opacity&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;XVilka&#x2F;set_opacity&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;xvilka.narod.ru&#x2F;files&#x2F;xcompmgr-1.1.2.tar.bz2" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;xvilka.narod.ru&#x2F;files&#x2F;xcompmgr-1.1.2.tar.bz2</a>

Oh xfig is missing. I still use this awesome program for drawings. It&#x27;s primitive but in many ways faster to use than inkscape.

Ah Motif, XBill and Afterstep! My nostalgia bit just got set.<p>My first experiences of GUI programming on Unix (HPUX on a Motorola 68040 machine) was with Motif, which was a pretty good toolkit after you got used to the very long function names.

Xsnow for christmas time and coding fun projects with christmas music :).

Free42 is also available for iOS and Android. It&#x27;s very handy, especially when I can keep my real 42S safe in a drawer at home.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;free42&#x2F;id337692629" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;free42&#x2F;id337692629</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=com.thomasokken.free42&amp;hl=en_US" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=com.thomasokke...</a>

Not sure if it counts as obscure, but to add to the note on xclipboard: xclip, which lets you change and inspect the primary selection&#x2F;clipboard from the command line.

This reminded me of xjump, a very addictive falling tower game where you must continue to jump to the next highest platform as the lower platforms collapse beneath you.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linuxx.info&#x2F;xjump&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linuxx.info&#x2F;xjump&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hugomg&#x2F;xjump" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hugomg&#x2F;xjump</a>

Sometimes xterm is still used; I use xterm. It is still being maintained, too. I also sometimes use xfontsel. I do not think these are so obscure, isn&#x27;t it?<p>Some of them, although I do not use them, I would not think they are so obscure, such as xbiff, xload, xclock (I have the functions of all three programs in another program I wrote, to display on a status line).

The GTK screenshots all use then ThinIce theme[1] – still my favorite, but sadly not available for GTK 3 or 4. And I guess it wouldn&#x27;t fit with GNOME&#x27;s current design direction anyway.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thinice.sourceforge.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thinice.sourceforge.net&#x2F;</a>

xcostena. It was an X application written at SGI which took an order and faxed it to La Costena, a taqueria on Rengstorff (at the time). It might have been the first case of e-commerce on the internet and this was pre-web.

Let me add my own cool but obscure project KDocker. You can use kdocker to move any app to the system tray :) These days it&#x27;s maintained by john at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;user-none&#x2F;KDocker" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;user-none&#x2F;KDocker</a><p>Edit: oh wow, I actually tried it again now and it actually works! Crazy, this was a tool I wrote like 12-13 years ago. I also found the initial sourceforge page - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kdocker.sourceforge.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kdocker.sourceforge.net&#x2F;</a>

I still use xv to open images from the command line. Its like muscle memory.

It mentions Neko, which has its own Wikipedia page:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Neko_(software)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Neko_(software)</a>

That grey-and-pink color scheme from the screenshots gives me such a wave of nostalgia. It is fascinating how this color scheme is both terribly, terribly ugly and gorgeous at the same time. ;-)

Nice nostalgia. Unfortunately most of the ones that deal with text are from before the 8bit to utf-8 move, which makes them unusable nowadays (unless you restrict yourself to ASCII).

Takes me back so many years to grad school. I still find myself using a few of the tools though, even after all these years. xload for one is a favourite.

What? no xdaliclock??<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jwz.org&#x2F;xdaliclock&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jwz.org&#x2F;xdaliclock&#x2F;</a>

Strange coincidence this appears on the front page, as I have been having system instability with freezes, and my hunch is that it&#x27;s something with the QT library. So lately I&#x27;ve been running only X programs instead of KDE apps, and it hasn&#x27;t frozen in a while. This list will give me some additional apps to play with.

How come gvim is obscure?

Cloud computing is becoming a thing ... eg. apps that runs &quot;in the cloud&quot; or in your browser. But with Xserver you can just ssh -X into any machine, run an app, and the front-end GUI will be visible on your machine! You can even play games that way. Technology keeps going in circles ...

I miss xev.

I used XFontSel two days ago to find a font for my StumpWM mode line. Still works like a charm.<p>Also, I miss XFig on the list. Still growing strong! The last release is from May 2018. I use it occasionally to create diagrams for presentations.

Some more obscure games were there, for example Sun Microsystems once released a book about games available on Solaris, which included a flight simulator amongst many others. Though I am unable to recollect the name.

Obscure today, but many of these were merely how things were done back then.

I didn&#x27;t realize XArchiver was obscure. I use that pretty regularly.

I used xearth as my desktop for ages -- it doesn&#x27;t have to be run in a window.<p>Xeyes and xclock were my go-to tests to make sure x11 forwarding was working properly.

To read that &quot;editors&#x2F;vim&quot; is an obscure tool is nothing short of astonishing.

oclock shows a shaped window. `oclock -transparent` shows only the clocks hands and border.

xantfarm is another one I like, ant farm in your root window <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;acme.com&#x2F;software&#x2F;xantfarm&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;acme.com&#x2F;software&#x2F;xantfarm&#x2F;</a>

Where is Xrisk?<p>Networked version of the board game we used to play continuously at work.

With the exception of local editors (gvim) and administration software (xload), the need for these applications is easier to satisfy with online HTML5 apps.<p>These are historically exciting, but nowadays the web browser is your X11.

I would add xkill

Does anyone know what happened to xpool?

xphoon is missing<p>Also I seem to remember a multiuser 3d tank game, maybe xtank? I don&#x27;t really remember.

I have the catclock in my xinitrc.

Vim is VERY obscure.

how about xbattle?

xeyes!

I didn&#x27;t know there was an Xgalaga. Linux Emulators aren&#x27;t the best, inevitably. Hope it&#x27;s fluid on limited hardware