I am sitting here looking at a blank terminal, thinking it's the end of the month, I should write at least one more post for this month, but I can't think of anything.
Due to aforementioned infelicities between SDL and the window manager I use I haven't played Doom much, so I have no new levels to write about, I still have no idea how to fix this short of switching window managers, which would be very annoying.
Oh, I know, this should fill up some pixels:
git diff, wads, and textconv
A cool trick you can do with newer versions of git. Suppose you edit a wad in a repository, then type git diff. You just get
Binary files a/blah.wad and b/blah.wad differ
Yes I know they differ, I just edited the thing. So do this
add
*.wad diff=wad
to .gitattributes or .git/info/attributes, this tells git to use a diff configuration named "wad" for files whose names end in .wadrun
git config diff.wad.textconv PROGRAM
to configure textconv for the 'wad' diff configuration. (PROGRAM is the name of a command that will dump a wad to a text file)
You end up with basically a diff of the two text dumps. Readable diffs for wads! I literally wept.
So far the only insurmountable issue I've had with running sid is with awesome. At least I think it's with awesome, anyway.
The problem is, it doesn't get out of the way properly when you run a program that uses SDL to change resolution and go fullscreen. This is hard to explain but basically instead of seeing what the SDL program is drawing, I get a black screen, with a white line across the top and down the left side, which looks remarkably like the top corner of a window.
Why is this a problem? Well, guess what is an SDL program that tries to go fullscreen and change resolution?
Basically I can't play Doom unless I run a second X server (startx -- :1)*, change resolution manually, (xrandr -s 640x480), and then run the game. This is really annoying! I have to stop myself just idly typing "doom2 blahblah.wad -warp 1" into a terminal like I've been doing all the time for years.
I think it's awesome's fault because I've tried various other minimal tiling window managers such as ratpoison, wmii etc. and they all do what I expect. But they have other issues and I don't really want to change window managers.
* Not strictly necessary, but using xrandr under awesome causes awesome to reset all of your tag layouts back to normal, which is just as annoying, so a second X server running it is.
