Another usability thing with linux today are locales, especially character sets.

I use de_DE@euro.UTF-8, since i hope we can get rid of any other character set on the long run... This works great except for a couple of things.

First is *zsh*. I really like zsh, but it needs support for UTF-8, not having properly working Backspace or Left-Right-Keys (you need to press it twice for stepping over 2-byte-chars, and the display is broken then) really sucks.

The second problem is when working on machines with different character sets.

I often ssh to a machine - the one i read mail on when not on my notebook, the one this blog is on etc. - and the default locale there uses latin9.

Well, latin9 in fact is the obvious choice, since i usually ssh there from latin9 or latin1 boxes. But sometimes i ssh there from a UTF-8 account.

I don't know what is the proper solution: either ssh should forward the character set used on the client to the server (so my sh scripts on the server can set the locales appropriately, assuming that woody has enough UTF-8 support already), or maybe ssh should get the charset somehow from the server and convert (which is broken by design IMHO).

Usually i start a terminal emulator with the appropriate charset and use that to ssh. This brings me to another issue i really have to file a bug against: gnome-terminal. I like it because it can run multiple terminal windows and such.

But WHY is the charset not included in its profiles? Instead i have to enable the menu bar, choose the charset, disable it again.

Hi, i'm happy to finally be on Debian Planet.

Since all the dust around the X11 Licencing Chaos has now settled down, i'd like to point out a major usability problem with X11: *Input devices*.

In fact, Input Devices are what annoys me most with X11, i hope the people on freedesktop.org are already working on that.

Today, Input devices are a plug'n'play thing. Especially with notebooks, people want to plug in a mouse and just use it.

This only works due to a ugly hack: It's called /dev/input/mice.

Since any newly added Mouse also outputs to this device, new mice will just work when this device is used.

But there is a big drawback: you cannot configure these mice differently.

And with Kernel 2.6, you PS/2 Mouse is also included in this device (note: when you upgrade and are wondering why your PS/2 mouse is twice as fast as before, you probably should drop the old psaux device from your X11 config)

And this *really* sucks: my external mouse has three mouse buttons and a scroll wheel. My IBM Thinkpad Stick has three mouse buttons, and i'd like to use the middle button for scrolling with the stick in absence of a wheel.

I could do that if i use /dev/input/mouse0 and /dev/input/mouse1 - but ONLY if my USB mouse was plugged in when i started X11. This SUCKS.

Ok, enough rant for today.