[RndTbl] Linux "write"

[Trevor Cordes]

Follow-up: I made a bz for it
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1466993
and was promptly informed it's an upstream WONTFIX.  See:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=747046

So the GNOME guys in all their wisdom decided utmp wasn't important and
proceeded to rip out all the relevant code:

"pty-helper removal is a nice win:  22 files changed, 22 insertions(+),
2944 deletions(-)"

Now I see what is wrong with "the kids these days", mainly the GNOME
and systemd clowns.  Their idea of a great "win" is to rip out 3000
lines of code that destroys agreed upon conventions?  I wonder how many
other things broke because of their destructive fervor.

So write to a pts is broken.  But it's also broken to just "write
trevor", unless you have at least one xterm open, then the xterm gets
the message but not the g-t's.

For fun I tried wall.  This is even worse.  With only g-t's open the
wall gives no error, appears to proceed, but produces no output on ANY
g-t!  WTF?  At least write tells you it ain't going to work.  So much
for admins telling their users a reboot is imminent with wall.

Fun MUUG exercise: can anyone think of other standard tools that would
be broken by this?  I'll test them out and add them to the bug.

Expert MUUG exercise: can anyone think of a workaround I can use to
write to a specific pts without using the "write" command?  I'd still
like to get this to work as a script I wrote depends on it.

Bonus exercise: can anyone recommend a terminal I should use instead of
g-t.  Seems every year I run into another g-t "XXX deletions, nice
win!" problem.  Absolute requirements: must be able to CTL-click (or
something-click) urls to open them in a browser; must have either sane
or user-configurable double-click-select characters; configurable long
scrollback buffer.  Gravy g-t has I can live without if I must: rewraps
long lines when window is resized.  Probably more things I can't
immediately think of but use every day :-)

Oh ya, and xterm is very weird (unforgiving) in where you have to click
to drag to select text, compared to g-t at least.  But that I could
live with, I guess.

Thanks!