VIEWGLOB
VIEWGLOB is a little GTK+ window that sits near your xterm, and listens to you tapping away on bash or zsh. When you “cd” to a new directory, it shows you the content listing of that directory. [...] As the author Stephen Bach says, “no longer will you compulsively ls after every cd”.
I made the exact same thing, for the exact same reason (the “ls compulsion”) back in 1997 at Pratt & Whitney. Mine was super low-tech: the auto-ls window was just a cmdtool that started up, wrote its PID to a file, and then went into an infinite loop waiting for a signal. Then I used an alias to override my cd command to do the cd, write the path of the new current dir to a file, read the PID file, and use that to send a signal to the auto-ls window. The auto-ls window would wake up, read the path, execute ls, and then wait again. Sure, this new-fangled VIEWGLOB has more features, but my solution was written in about one one thousandth of the number of lines of code of VIEWGLOB’s Makefile.
I also hacked my .XDefaults files and whatever those other files were called so that my windows didn’t have any borders or widgets around the edges. You could only move, resize, or close them if you knew the obscure key combinations. Yeah… I was just EVER SO COOL back then.
REPLY))
You were very good back then. You made a million cool litle utilities, with names like “joxtool”. That, by the way, was the best program ever written in my opinion. Back when things like yahoo messenger were just a glint in the milkman’s eye. Even today, all the stupid messenger buddies they have out there don’t have a “boss screen” as cool as joxtool’s.
Then you got lame. Nothing good came out of you for years. Ball universe was good, and I guess FoF is ok too, but those aren’t even in the same ballpark as joxtool. Is it all downhill from here? I’m depressed.