rc + Xwindows

rc + Xwindows

[Byron Rakitzis]

I should know a thing or two about rc with X, since I use it just about
1/2 of my waking hours (that's scary).

What do I do? I run rc -l in all my windows. Do I notice the slowdown?
No way! Let's see....

; time rc -l /dev/null
        0.5 real         0.1 user         0.3 sys  

That's not bad, but then again my .rcrc is not that extravagant in the
first place. I execute a single globally-available script which tells me
the machine type of my host, stty, and then I set variables and functions.
Oh, I also run "msgs" to see if there are any new system messages.

I could easily put in a 'tty' command, or set up $history to be something
involving $pid in this file, and it would work great with X.

Is there really a reason to have *another* "rc -l"-like mechanism?

Re: rc + Xwindows

[Chris Siebenmann]

 By contrast, rc -l for me produces 36 lines of output and takes
4.8 real, 1.2 user, and 2.7 sys. This is too many lines of output, but
it will always produce two or three -- I don't want any. One of the reasons
I switched to rc is so that I wouldn't have to run a fair chunk of my
initialization code over and over again for each window (I have a lot of
functions); I'd hate to have to throw that advantage away.

	- cks

Re: rc + Xwindows

[Boyd Roberts]

    Byron>

    What do I do? I run rc -l in all my windows. Do I notice the slowdown?
    No way! Let's see....

I have a 181 line system .rcrc (it's pretty hideous) and a 66 line personal
one and both get sourced in every xterm I invoke:

    prl313 ; sed 2q .rcrc
    . /proj/ultrix/lib/system.rcrc
    
    prl313 ; wc /proj/ultrix/lib/system.rcrc
         181     468    3674 /proj/ultrix/lib/system.rcrc
    prl313 ; wc .rcrc
          66     143    1051 .rcrc

I have about 40 windows open now, on about 6 machines, but most of them are
on my own machine.  Do I see a slowdown?

    prl313 ; time rc -l /dev/null
            0.9 real         0.0 user         0.4 sys

The bulk of the time I'm waiting is for X to _give me that window_!

On the question of a root prompt, it's just:

    if (test -w /)
    {
    	pc='#'
    } else {
    	pc=';'
    }
    
    prompt=($MACHINE' '^$pc' ' ' ')

End of story.  It's dead cheap.

So cheap, I reckon it's another argument for rcmain.