palordrolap

Is it any more maintainable with four levels of abstraction?

Be aware that a lot of distros will be switching from X11 to Wayland at some point in the not-too-distant future and these ancient tools will not work there.

People have tried to write equivalents (ydotool is one I’m aware of), but Wayland has intentionally been written to make doing such things difficult, for “security” reasons.

I will be grumpy until I can make my scripts work again, but that’s for future me to deal with.

They allow the user to script changes to, and pull information from, windows in the window manager. Like read, if not also set, a window’s title, change a window’s dimensions, move it around, send it to a different desktop, send keypresses, bring a window to the foreground, etc. etc.

Basically, anything the user can do with the mouse, keyboard or window manager via the GUI, and a little more besides, can be automated.

The two commands work slightly differently to each other and one can often do something the other can’t.

As an example, I have a script that resizes the active window to a 4:3 ratio at full vertical height on my 16:9 monitor. I’ve then bound that script to a keypress in the window manager. It’s a lot like having something halfway between window mode and maximised mode.

Couldn’t I do that with the mouse? Sure. But with the script I don’t have to gauge by eye and spend multiple mouse clicks and movements trying to get it just right.

You know how slackers tend to make more of an effort to at least look like they’re doing what they should be when the boss walks by?

This is the same relationship between the computers and the IT department.

And the real truth may be somewhere in between. The user may suddenly regulate their behaviour and take extra care, or at least act sufficiently differently, when the IT person is watching over their shoulder.

They don’t do the thing that makes the computer complain. Everything looks normal. IT person goes away. User reverts to original habits. Computer complains.

Or else the IT person uses the computer themselves, but does not emulate the user sufficiently well, so the computer behaves.

I know it’s not always this but it goes a long way to explaining how tech aura became a thing.

I’m going to miss xdotool (and wmctrl) when my distro eventually ditches X11.

I don’t use them often, but I do use them, and their functionality is nice to have.

There are partial replacements out there, but last I checked, they were very weak approximations.

Unmentioned by other comments: The LLM is trying to follow the rule of three because sentences with an “A, B and/or C” structure tend to sound more punchy, knowledgeable and authoritative.

Yes, I did do that on purpose.