Terminal; and IANAD Stuff

[Brian J. Tarricone]

Jud wrote:

>- Feature creep is the enemy.  Thus, though I love Terminal, my
>sentiment would be to either substitute it for xfterm4 or leave it
>separate (and perhaps xfterm4 as well).  Don't have more than one
>terminal emulator as part of the XFCE package - that way lies GNOME/KDE.
>  
>
Just FYI: xfterm4 isn't a terminal emulator; it's just a script that 
runs $TERMCMD, or, failing that, xterm.  So Xfce doesn't actually 
include a terminal in its core.  Not sure if that changes your 
opinion/recommendation as to whether or not to include Terminal, but I 
thought I'd point this out.

>What about some of the things that
>aren't intuitive from the UI, like setting default terminal emulator and
>browser/documentation browser?  Could these sorts of options be moved
>into the UI?)
>  
>
Yeah, this is one of the things that falls clearly into the "polish" 
category that I wish we already were doing properly.  Having to figure 
out in which startup script you should define the TERMCMD env var is a 
pain, and something like that should be in a settings panel somewhere.  
Same deal for browser selection.  I think having a minimalist core 
desktop is fine, but then we should be providing an easy way to select 
among the various options that exist for the stuff we *don't* provide.  
I believe Jasper hacked something together a while ago as a 
proof-of-concept, but it needs some work.

>- For people like me who do not mind editing text config files, I find
>the documentation of XFCE's config files a bit lacking still.  I'm still
>searching for whatever config file entry corresponds to the
>anti-aliasing and hinting checkboxes in the settings manager plugins UI.
> It would be nice if these aspects of XFCE configuration were made more
>transparent to users.  (Or perhaps they have been, and I haven't looked
>hard enough?)
>  
>
Yeah, we're missing a lot of geek-mode documentation.  We could really 
use some help here.  Perhaps it could start out as simple as someone 
taking it upon themselves to watch the mailing lists for questions like 
these, and when an answer comes up that involves a hidden pref, or 
something in a config file, document it and stick it on the web 
somewhere.  Eventually it would be nice to have a list of all config 
files and what each config entry does, but a FAQ-like document would be 
a nice start.

    -Brian