Reform utilities on Pocket Reform

MNT Pocket Reform
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A few observations / notes on the Reform software in the reform-tools package (which is generally really great! these are nitpicks or suggestions)

  • reform-help lists reform-display-config as an option, however, running that command reports that it is not found; it is at /usr/sbin/reform-display-config, running that via sudo reports that it is only valid on MNT Reform 2. So, it might be nice not to show this in reform-help when running on a Pocket?
  • the Terminal option in reform-tray.py is hardcoded to run Foot, whereas I’ve installed Tilix (and I’ve modified wofi and sway to launch that as my preferred terminal option) - it might be nice if that was settable in a config file rather than always using Foot.

As a side note, are these the kinds of things we could contribute via the Gitlab instance, or is that for the Reform team only?

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Might be useful to use $TERMINAL, I’d have thought.

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yes, that’s my thinking, fallback to Foot as a (preinstalled) default.

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What is the $TERMINAL environment variable?

@selfawaresoup took care of the problem with reform-help output

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It’s the env variable conventionally used to identify which terminal emulator (as opposed to terminal type re $TERM) is in use, e.g. “kitty”, “xterm”, “foot”, etc. It’s also simlar to specifying $EDITOR as neovim or helix, etc.

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Do you have any documentation on that? I’m unable to find any. I see it being used by the xdg-terminal program in xdg-utils but xdg-terminal is commented out in the makefile scripts/Makefile.in · master · xdg / xdg-utils · GitLab so we cannot even offload this task to xdg-terminal as that utility is not available on Debian. I also do not see it being set anywhere. It is certainly not set in any terminal I tried. Who is responsible for setting it? If you think that $TERMINAL is the right way forward, could you provide a few more details on it? Best with links to documentation. Thanks!

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My apologies - it seems I may have misled you - I mostly use Arch, and always set $TERMINAL in the start up scripts and use it for configuration of window managers (e.g. awesomewm, i3, hyprland) and scripts (mostly ones I’ve written, using rofi or dmenu).

I do feel it’s a handy convention, and being able to set it as a preference in once place is nice… checking now, it doesn’t seem as well adopted in Debian for some reason.

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I think the right way forward would be to use the Debian alternatives system. So I think what should happen is for the reform-tools package to call the x-terminal-emulator program instead of foot and the reform-system-image script should set the /etc/alternatives/x-terminal-emulator to /usr/bin/foot. That way, the user can change their default terminal emulator by running:

sudo update-alternatives --config x-terminal-emulator
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Just noticed that when you run reform-handbook on a Pocket, it opens the handbook for the big Reform model which is probably not what most people need or expect.

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Thank you, good point. I’ll let @minute make the call on that one: Should the Pocket Reform Handbook be opened when people run the reform-handbook executable on the Pocket? And conversely: what should happen when the pocket-reform-handbook executable is opened on the classic Reform?

EDIT: Uh… plot twist: despite what I thought was the reality, the pocket-reform-handbook package does not install the corresponding pocket-reform-handbook executable. I guess this is good because its sister package reform-handbook does not install a reform-handbook executable either. The reform-handbook executable is shipped by reform-tools. But reform-tools also does not install a pocket-reform-handbook executable. Bug or feature?