💾 Archived View for gemini.circumlunar.space › ~acdw › 2020-06-09.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 17:22:07. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Disappointing MATE (a rant)

9 June 2020

I had a silly idea to create a .desktop file for bollux today, so I made a dumb little icon and a little .desktop entry. I was at work so I emailed them to myself so I could put them in when I got home. I do that all the time; in fact that's how a lot of bollux has been written while I've been working. It's been great.

a dumb little icon for bollux: a swan with a space helmet

When I got home today, though, it was different. First, the damn .desktop entry wouldn't run at all. I figured out that I needed to validate it. So I did, and I fixed it, and I tried it again. Now it said that `less` is forcing it to exit with an error. That was truly head-scratching. I looked around F OR E VE R for something online that might tell me what the problem is, before I realized I should try it in a different terminal.

So I installed xterm. Boom. It worked fine (I had to install `dex` too, since my MATE desktop wasn't seeing the dang .desktop file, even though it saw Castor's in literally the same folder (I can't figure out what you did differently, julienxx!!)). I installed st. Boom. No problem. For whatever reason MATE terminal was crashing when it was initiated with bollux.

I did a cursory look in mate-terminal's git repo, but I didn't really care, since mate-terminal has given me nothing but problems anyway -- I can't select URLs in it, for example! Something that urxvt has and gnome-terminal and a ton of other ones. Hell, even st has a patch that'll let you do it probably. So I decided I'd install st.

Of course, my custom built st is old. And it didn't merge cleanly with upstream. So I had to download upstream's, then run a for-loop to apply all the patches I wanted. That took about a half hour. Then I had to figure out that the Xresources patch doesn't work right -- I don't think it ever actually *applies* the colors it gets from the xrdb (of course, this is *after* I install xrdb and write a ~/.Xresources, since I'm running MATE and haven't had to use those yet). So I hard-coded the colors I liked. Okay.

NOW I had to figure out how to get `st` to run when I hit <SUPER>-<ENTER>, and when I had Terminal=yes in a .desktop file (which is the reason I went into all this to begin with!). I had to edit a dconf entry. Another search online. Another stumble. Another install (dconf-editor this time!). Finally I had st as my default terminal in MATE.

Until I tried opening my Weechat .desktop entry. It still opens in MATE terminal. WTF.

I'm regretting installing Void MATE. I wanted a desktop that I wouldn't have to fight over networking and shit with. But MATE is not very polished as far as that goes. Eventually I guess I'll just go back to DWM or whatever. Sigh.