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CDE – Common Desktop Environment

sourceforge.net

48 pointschungy49 comments

I dislike CDE. IMO, Motif was sabotaged by Microsoft's involvement. This is a very minor point, but I will never accept ALT+F4 as a sensible hotkey for exiting apps. I think macOS picked the best hotkey defaults.

Anyone interested in this should also check out OpenStep [0]. I've been researching this area heavily during the past year and I'm constantly amazed by all the revolutionary work that got done at NeXT and Sun. It's a damn shame they didn't win bigger mindshare.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep

Until you use a non English keyboard. Alt-F4 is perfectly acceptable OSX has its own share of stupid key bindings especially where the browser is concerned.

The main thing that irks me on Macs is the non-standard behavior of the Home and End keys. I expect them to go the beginning or end of the line I'm typing, and in every other system they do, whereas in MacOS they usually scroll to the top or bottom of the entire page.

Basic emacs keybindings work in most MacOS text boxes. CTRL-A goes to the beginning of the line, CTRL-E the end, CTRL-P prior line, CTRL-F forward, CTRL-B backwards, CTRL-N next line. I think this was originally a NEXTSTEP thing.

http://unix-kb.cat-v.org/

As that page notes, C-a and C-e are not just Emacs bindings; and are even in Vi. However, the other bindings mentioned are Emacs bindings; and macOS textareas do support Emacs keybindings (on ctrl, not cmd), and that includes C-a and C-e.

I believe the comment about NeXTSTEP was not that the keybindings originated there, but that NeXTSTEP implemented Emacs keybindings in textareas, and that macOS inherited that (I don't know about the accuracy of that though).

Oh, and the page said "Rob Pike answers in 9fans: “I believe ^H ^W ^U date back at least to TENEX.”"; it seems odd to me that he didn't mention that 'H' with the control bit flipped is literally the ASCII "backspace" control character.

Yeah, the thing that irks me is when C-a and C-e don’t work. (Most things support it these days, but I’m afraid it’ll be less prevalent in the coming years as fewer people are familiar with emacs.)

Indeed. I've spent the better part of probably 100 hours configuring KDE Neon + apps + Emacs w/ a bunch of custom keyboard shortcuts, kwin rules, etc. to do my level best to get my home and work Linux machines to have sane, memorable keyboard interfaces. After a ton of effort and some oddities (kwin rules on window-class don't seem to trigger for Firefox for some reason) it mostly works. Mostly.

One of the big benefits of the Mac-style shortcuts scheme is that there's no conflict between terminal commands and everything else... because things like Ctrl-C aren't overloaded, and I don't have to contextually remember to use Ctrl-Shift-C when in a terminal.

I've said it before, but I'd pay non-trivial amounts of money for a Linux distribution that went to significant length to configure, compile, or otherwise mimic Mac-like shortcuts in its desktop environment and packaged applications.

This is also one of the main reasons why I prefer mac over Linux even for serverside development and operations. MacOS Terminal is just exactly what I want from a terminal. It’s curious that no linux desktop seems to have achieved that yet.

The other main reason for me is PDF support, but that gets buggier on mac with every release sadly. It seems to have reached its peak around 10.4 where OSX finally got really good.

Funny, I feel the opposite – certain keystrokes just don't work in Mac OS terminal (ex. Page Up/Down, Control+arrow keys), breaking my editor of choice – and Preview is surprisingly slow, crashy, and difficult to navigate with (ex. page numbers don't line up).

Whereas on Linux, my terminal (urxvt) behaves perfectly w/r/t keystrokes (though I wish I could increase/decrease the font size with a keyboard shortcut), and Evince is the most perfect PDF reader I've ever used (fast, and gets page numbers correct).

What OS you prefer is highly dependent on what you emphasise. From your examples, I don't care about paging in Terminal, and word-jumps work throughout MacOS using alt-arrow-left/right. Preview is indeed crashy and slow but it's still the only one that gives me the editing features I want out-of-the box without installing Adobe Creator tools. More importantly, MacOS (and its predecessor NextStep) is AFAIK still the only system that can create lossless PDFs out of anything you see on screen. The fact that I can open a PDF, make a rectangular selection and copy&paste to native MacOS applications while keeping images, vector graphics and fonts at full quality (i.e. you can zoom in without aliasing forever!) is a big part of my workflow when documenting stuff.

I used CDE when Motif was still state-of-the-art in X, and it was by far the best unix desktop environment I had used up to that point.

Yes, as dated as it looks now, it was the first unix desktop that felt 'polished' to me up to that point. It's also the first desktop I had that was in colour though, so maybe that's part of it.

I just installed it on my OpenBSD laptop for when I actually need X (it's rare) and it's a joy to use.

I've used every other wm under the sun and I end up spending more time configuring my damn window manager more than getting work done. So much lost productivity vs just not using them to begin with.

CDE still does one thing that no other wm seems to be able to do: completely consistent behavior everywhere

I love reading about the end of the commercial UNIX wars. Definitely watch this documentary filmed during a NeXT company retreat, if you haven't: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNeXlJW70KQ

I think the most stunning thing is that NeXTStep basically won in the end, and has far more mindshare today than anyone would have ever imagined...

But yeah, it was way better than CDE and Motif in it's day, but still on the margins.

Cmd+Q is awful IMO. It's too easy to hit accidentally trying to do Cmd+Tab.

Or Cmd+W. The amount of times I've gone to close a tab and ended up quitting :-D

I do this at least once a week. So annoying.

Every time people tell me they like MacOS shortcuts I look at them with a bit of stink eye. They're about as anti-muscle memory and as "shortcuts that shouldn't be next to each other" as key combinations can get.

Great, they're very easy to learn, but not so great to retain and use. I'm going to be spending the rest of my career looking up on SO the bottom 75% of the shortcuts I need to use. Thanks guys. Thanks Steve.

I disagree that they're difficult to retain and use. I've learned how to use both sets of shortcuts, as I sometimes move between macOS, Linux (Ubuntu), and Windows. Regardless, macOS shortcuts are my favorite.

In my experience, shortcuts are more consistent on macOS than on Linux and Windows.

When I first tried macOS I thought its shortcuts were the worst thing ever. But after giving it a genuine try for a few weeks, I immediately fell in love with em.

You can find the macOS shortcuts on the Mac keyboard shortcuts [0] support page. If you're interested in more details, you can learn about the guiding principles by reading the Human Interface Guidelines Keyboard article [1].

Even if you disagree with some of their design decisions, I'd still highly recommend reading through their Human Interface Guidelines articles. It's an amazing resource.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236

[1] https://developer.apple.com/macos/human-interface-guidelines...

This isn't usually a problem for me. However, one way in which macOS combats this is by encouraging applications to preserve their state between sessions. That means even if you were to accidentally exit, you can just re-open it without problems. This also helps protect you in the case of a system crash (incredibly rare, in my experience) or accidental power loss.

ctrl-W to close windows is worse. I can't count the number of times I tried erase-word-backwards and closed the browser or other window instead.

The nostelgia is strong with this one.

Every 6ish or so months I see a link like this and spend a lazy Sunday trying to get CDE (or another equally retro package or system, my last hit was Desqview)

It usually ends up either me aborting because of some dependency hell trying to get all the old versions in sync, or I get the system up, take a pleasant trip down memory lane, then 10 minutes later get annoyed by the impracticalities of it, and go back to my current system with renewed appreciation

I don’t know where I’m going with this, I’m not complaining I love doing it, and I can’t imagine I’m the only one, anyone wanna share some stories?

http://jamesdeagle.blogspot.com/2017/12/openbsd-62-cde.html

> It usually ends up either me aborting because of some dependency hell trying to get all the old versions in sync, or I get the system up, take a pleasant trip down memory lane, then 10 minutes later get annoyed by the impracticalities of it, and go back to my current system with renewed appreciation

Hah. I go a bit overboard with windows managers/desktop environments from icewm to fluxbox to KDE to GNOME. I've settled on XFCE but I have a VM solely to muck around with desktop environments and get my fix.

The worst for me is VIm color schemes. Can't seem to choose one I can stick with.

> The worst for me is VIm color schemes. Can't seem to choose one I can stick with.

http://vimcolors.com/290/CandyPaper/dark

Been using for years at this point. Very pleased.

I do the exact same thing. Though I will admit that I gave up the last time I tried compiling CDE on Linux hah.

It looks like outdated shit, and that makes me happy. I worked on CDE HP systems for many years, and I liked it. The fact that it looks bad now is proof that we've come a long way and that great progress has been made, hence the happiness.

It wasn't until relatively recently that software engineers took the opinions of artists and designers seriously. Apple was probably the original and first to do so, with Jobs' own background in artistry. It's why Mac OS looked above and beyond better than anything else in 1984, an era still typified by command-line interfaces and overwhelming GUIs that simply vomited everything at you.

"It's why Mac OS looked above and beyond better than anything else in 1984, an era still typified by command-line interfaces and overwhelming GUIs that simply vomited everything at you."

I'm sorry, but it's not Steve's artistry, it's his ability to "steal like an artist". Look at the Xerox Star, it had everything the Mac had (and more) years earlier. The difference was in its price. At the time, nobody needed convincing that GUIs would be great to work with, they needed convincing that they were worth the price.

While I don't think it was his artistry per se, it was, to a good degree, his taste. And I don't think he was so much stealing as he was hiring the very people who produced the Xerox Star, so their work could see the light of day. And it improved pretty dramatically under his management as well.

It wasn't just the price of the software - video ram was still expensive, the idea of wasting a whole bit on each pixel was still something you had to decide you could afford, plus you needed to be able to afford hardware that was fast enough to make a GUI work fast enough to be usable

The hardware behind the Mac arrived at prices where this was doable (at $2400 1984 $$ still really high), the Lisa bombed largely because of its much higher price

> Look at the Xerox Star, it had everything the Mac had (and more) years earlier. The difference was in its price.

You might want to learn more about the history: the work at Xerox PARC was enormously influential but it wasn't happening in a vacuum:

https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html

“Finally, as several authors have pointed out, there were actually two visits by groups from Apple to Xerox PARC in 1979. Steve Jobs was on the second of the two. Jef Raskin, who helped arranged both visits, explained that he wanted Jobs to visit PARC to understand work that was already going on at Apple. The Macintosh project had escaped the chopping block several times, and Raskin had tried to explain to Jobs the significance of the technologies it was incorporating. By showing that other companies considered this kind of work exciting, Raskin hoped to boost the value of the Macintosh's work in Jobs' eyes. Unbeknownst to Raskin, Jobs had his own reasons for visiting PARC: Xerox's venture capital arm had recently made an investment in Apple, and had agreed to show Apple what was going on in its lab.”

In particular, pay attention to the details about how much work went into things which might have started somewhere like PARC but required significant work developing affordable and reliable designs, coming up with design metaphors and concepts to make the GUI consistent and appealing to use, etc.

Bruce Horn wrote a nice summary years back on all of the refinements which went into things we now take for granted:

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...

Similarly, look at something as basic as dragging which took time and better mouse hardware to mature:

http://www.nomodes.com/Larry_Tesler_Consulting/Retrospective...

Again, this is not to dismiss the work which the Xerox team did but simply remember how much was left between an amazing prototype and a mainstream product. Our field is very prone to not taking UI work seriously and it's resulted in a lot of allegedly superior products being passed by.

> At the time, nobody needed convincing that GUIs would be great to work with, they needed convincing that they were worth the price.

This is similarly incomplete: cost was a huge factor but you also forget how hard it can be to recognize the benefit of a big change like the GUI. That exact attitude was not uncommon dismissing things like bitmap graphics and sound as frills which distracted from important business. When I got started in the 90s you could still find people complaining about GUIs being slow, etc. and otherwise ignoring the difference in how many more people could use a GUI or how long it took to learn a new task.

CDE has the same features. Do you think they borrowed them?

The first version of OSX looked horrible. The horizontal lines over the menus made them almost impossible to read.

Over the next several major releases the lines became less and less pronounced until it wasn't terrible anymore around 10.5.

Also the unbearable sluggishness of the OSX interface during those days, mainly caused my Apple trying to do too much with too weak hardware, made the system objectively worse than CDE.

CDE may have been ugly but it was usable and faster.

Whoa, crazy, is CDE still alive? I remember back in the day I wanted to build a GUI application, and was utterly defeated by Motif as a toolkit. I wasn't a very sophisticated programmer (I think I was like 12 or 13), but I still remember how opaque it was. Qt was a breath of fresh air!

Oddly, I still really, really, really like the aesthetic of the CDE. I think if there were a modern, HiDPI version of it, I might even use it.

You could probably get very close with a well-configured twm or fvwm2

Yea.. click to type. Like.. why. This is why a bunch of us stuck to uwm -> twm -> tvtwm

I'm right there with you, until tvtwm. I went with ctwm. The reason why is lost in the mists of time. Probably because another grad student had already set it up, and had shared a nice .ctwmrc

I diverted to fvwm and regretted it and my Emacs friendly friends forced tvtwm down my throat? Improved my experience but I stuck with a modal editor!

If you do the right magic to bind 'jump sideways' in units of the virtual desk, it's like moving entire panes painlessly. I had to load 3rd party stuff into OSX to get the same experience.

This was my first exposure to Unix desktop I used CDE on irix in that late 90s with Softimage for 3d animation. CDE had no bells and whistles but it enabled you to devote all your processing power to the task at hand.

You may have been using CDE, but the default on IRIX in the 1990s was Indigo Magic Desktop (later called IRIX Interactive Desktop), with SGI’s own port of Motif. This used the 4Dwm window manager, which had window decorations like those of mwm, but with window title bar labels in bold, italic type.

Man OpenWindows was so much better looking and XView much nicer to program for.

And anyways by the time Motif didn't have ridiculous licensing and costs it was already too late. The world had moved on.

I remember Solaris 10 shipped with CDE as one of two available desktop environments. The other one that it came with was based on GNOME.

I feel like there should be a Ubuntu based CDE distro out there.

I spent so much time in front of CDE that I can't help but feel nostalgic for it.

I feel nostalgic for it too but only because I'm looking at if for a few seconds. I'm on Unity now, and I rather stare at Unity all day than CDE.

Yeah, but nope. Just get xfce, it has similar ideas and it is so much better.

I think the last time I used CDE was on a Solaris/Intel box. At least I think it was CDE .. looked like it ... took over 30 minutes to load (literally).

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