Disappointing MATE (a rant)

9 June 2020

I had a silly idea to create a .desktop file for bollux today, so I made a dumb little icon and a little .desktop entry. I was at work so I emailed them to myself so I could put them in when I got home. I do that all the time; in fact that's how a lot of bollux has been written while I've been working. It's been great.

=> a dumb little icon for bollux: a swan with a space helmet

When I got home today, though, it was different. First, the damn .desktop entry wouldn't run at all. I figured out that I needed to validate it. So I did, and I fixed it, and I tried it again. Now it said that less is forcing it to exit with an error. That was truly head-scratching. I looked around F OR E VE R for something online that might tell me what the problem is, before I realized I should try it in a different terminal.

So I installed xterm. Boom. It worked fine (I had to install dex too, since my MATE desktop wasn't seeing the dang .desktop file, even though it saw Castor's in literally the same folder (I can't figure out what you did differently, julienxx!!)). I installed st. Boom. No problem. For whatever reason MATE terminal was crashing when it was initiated with bollux.

I did a cursory look in mate-terminal's git repo, but I didn't really care, since mate-terminal has given me nothing but problems anyway -- I can't select URLs in it, for example! Something that urxvt has and gnome-terminal and a ton of other ones. Hell, even st has a patch that'll let you do it probably. So I decided I'd install st.

Of course, my custom built st is old. And it didn't merge cleanly with upstream. So I had to download upstream's, then run a for-loop to apply all the patches I wanted. That took about a half hour. Then I had to figure out that the Xresources patch doesn't work right -- I don't think it ever actually applies the colors it gets from the xrdb (of course, this is after I install xrdb and write a ~/.Xresources, since I'm running MATE and haven't had to use those yet). So I hard-coded the colors I liked. Okay.

NOW I had to figure out how to get st to run when I hit -, and when I had Terminal=yes in a .desktop file (which is the reason I went into all this to begin with!). I had to edit a dconf entry. Another search online. Another stumble. Another install (dconf-editor this time!). Finally I had st as my default terminal in MATE.

Until I tried opening my Weechat .desktop entry. It still opens in MATE terminal. WTF.

I'm regretting installing Void MATE. I wanted a desktop that I wouldn't have to fight over networking and shit with. But MATE is not very polished as far as that goes. Eventually I guess I'll just go back to DWM or whatever. Sigh.