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kman42 · Jan 14, 2003, 11:30 AM

Okay, 25,000 people downloaded X11. What are some cool X apps that we can now try out that some of us newbies may not be aware of. I installed gimp and managed to find xclock and xeyes in the /usr/X11R6/bin folder. Any recommendations?

kman

MacGorilla · Jan 14, 2003, 11:55 AM

fink.sourceforge.net has plenty

As does http://www.opendarwin.org

personally, I like The Gimp (image editing), xchat (irc client) and xmms (mp3/ogg player).

thesearcher · Jan 14, 2003, 11:59 AM

http://www.openoffice.org/

moki · Jan 14, 2003, 12:00 PM

Originally posted by kman42:
Any recommendations?

Yeah... don't set your expectations too high... the vast majority of X11 apps are rather poor.

Misanthrope · Jan 14, 2003, 12:27 PM

Originally posted by moki:
Yeah... don't set your expectations too high... the vast majority of X11 apps are rather poor.

Amen to that.

Quantity over quality. But there is the occassional gem.

hudson1 · Jan 14, 2003, 12:30 PM

I thought X11 would be a boon to OpenOffice on OS X and I'll concur that the interface is much faster and more usable now. What's disappointing, however, is that large Excel spreadsheets simply choke OpenOffice to death. Opening and calculating any kind of a large or complex spreadsheet brings it to its knees. These same worksheets update almost instantly on Excel 98 running in Classic mode. Granted, this could be because these speadsheets were created in Excel and hence are optimized for it. On the other hand, I seriously doubt that that's the overriding reason which suggests that OpenOffice compiled for OS X needs some serious work.

Millennium · Jan 14, 2003, 12:33 PM

Originally posted by moki:
Yeah... don't set your expectations too high... the vast majority of X11 apps are rather poor.

Indeed they are, but the good ones do fill in some interesting niches that we have yet to see natively.

Perhaps the two best examples would be GIMP and XChat. GIMP is often described as a "poor man's Photoshop". And indeed, while it's not nearly as good as Photoshop if you're working with print media, for graphics intended solely for digital use (including most Photoshop contests) it's actually excellent. The UI is fairly horrid, but once you get around that it's good at what it does.

The GIMP derivative Film-GIMP also has its uses, if you're into video editing. It's a different niche from FCP and After Effects, and the ability to apply some of the GIMP's niftier abilities is very cool. It does, however, suffer from the GIMP's UI problems.

XChat is an IRC client. In this, it's better than any of the freeware clients currently native on OSX, and most if not all of the shareware ones as well. Not really much else to say about it.

NEdit is a text editor for programmers. It has, hands-down and bar-none, the best syntax highlighting I've ever seen anywhere, on any platform. The sheer number of languages and modes is almost so huge it's almost ridiculous. A niche market, to be sure, but very good in that niche.

Hmmm... other good X11 programs... Actually, that's about it as far as my experience goes. At least, that's it as far as concerns the way most people will use it (rootless, integrated with the rest of OSX); there are some very good window managers but I doubt they'll see much use. There may, however, be some other apps that I'm not aware of.

clarkgoble · Jan 14, 2003, 12:55 PM

I'm not too impressed with OpenOffice, truth be told. I've never figured out what all the hype is about. I *personally* think AbiWord and Gnumeric are better. However even they can't hold a candle to MS Office.

Most of the useful X11 apps are small administration tools or so forth. Further most of the real good tools, such as MPlayer, have already been ported to OSX. (Although I don't think the interfaces of most ported software is much better)

smeger · Jan 14, 2003, 01:21 PM

Octave, GNUPlot, and Grace are all pretty cool if you dig on the maths. Octave is a Matlab clone, GNUPlot is a powerful CLI-driven plotting package, and Grace is a graphing program sorta like Kaleidegraph or Deltagraph.

engaged · Jan 14, 2003, 01:21 PM

I envy those that have been able to get Gimp working okay; I'm one of those that have black images whatever I open.

Appears to be some kinda kernel problem, as yet unresolved for many of us.

JFischel · Jan 14, 2003, 02:28 PM

Got me beat...I downloaded Gimp and X11 from Apple. I can't even seem to get Gimp to run. I'm thinking I didn't get the whole version of Gimp, the download was only like 10MB.

Any thoughts?

THANKS!

Josh

Superchicken · Jan 14, 2003, 02:39 PM

I have heard a lot about the GIMP... I really wanna try it... not running jaguar though

Kristoff · Jan 14, 2003, 02:41 PM

Originally posted by moki:
Yeah... don't set your expectations too high... the vast majority of X11 apps are rather poor.

Originally posted by Misanthrope:
Amen to that.

Quantity over quality. But there is the occassional gem.

That's just a silly thing to say.

There are plenty of excellent X11 apps.

There are just as many crappy Carbon/Cocoa/MFC/insert framework here apps as there are crappy X11 apps.

Give Ethereal a try.

Run it as root to gain access to all the features (packet capture).

Gimp is very nice.

Oh, and don't forget the ColecoVision Emulator!!

TimmyDee51 · Jan 14, 2003, 03:26 PM

If you're into GIS, GRASS is a good open source alternative to ArcView. Plus, it's Mac compatible to boot, something ESRI ditched a long time ago with ArcView. I'm not sure if it runs under Apple's X11, but OpenOSX has a version precompiled for OS X and available on CD.

Anomalous · Jan 14, 2003, 03:47 PM

How do you get emacs to run in X11 mode?

neoTony · Jan 14, 2003, 05:02 PM

Quanta is a great HTML/CFML/*ML editor from the KDE Project. If you're into web development, it is well worth a look.

MacGorilla · Jan 14, 2003, 05:20 PM

Originally posted by Anomalous:
How do you get emacs to run in X11 mode?

you download xemacs.

AJ · Jan 14, 2003, 05:27 PM

Talking about GIS, TNTmips also works "right out of the download". Box. Whatever

http://www.microimages.com/tntlite/MacOS10.htm

if anyone can get GRASS to work, please give me a headsup via a private message. I would *love* to know how...

All the best
AJ

eggboons · Jan 14, 2003, 06:02 PM

Originally posted by MacGorilla:
you download xemacs.

or build gnu emacs with X11 support (via fink)

stew · Jan 14, 2003, 06:03 PM

Originally posted by JFischel:
Got me beat...I downloaded Gimp and X11 from Apple. I can't even seem to get Gimp to run. I'm thinking I didn't get the whole version of Gimp, the download was only like 10MB.

From where I downloaded the Gimp (opendarwin.org), it also required gtk. After that, the gimp can be started by running "gimp-1.2" from xterm. For some reason, "gimp" did not work.

undotwa · Jan 14, 2003, 06:06 PM

Wow... I used GIMP with Apple X11, it looks much better than any other WM.

Is there any way to get Aqua GTK resources?

Hopefully Apple will port GTK to Quartz (the real thing). That will be cool.

MasonMcD · Jan 14, 2003, 08:37 PM

How do you add gimp (and what's the path) to Apple's X11 app? I've downloaded opendarwin's easy installer of gimp, and I do a search for gimp, and I get a shitload of files. Which one is the goddamn program?