I’ve been told that utilizing this functionality is terrible, bad practice, a mistake, contributes to climate change, etc. However, it fits into my workflow pretty well, and it might fit into yours as well. After all, it is implemented in at least two version control systems…so some people must find it useful, right?

I use both Mercurial and Git depending on the project, so I’ll briefly describe the usage for both, with references to more complete documentation at the end. While the implementation is different, in both cases there are essentially multiple working directories for a single repository.

I was unable to find much information about this issue so it’s either somewhat obscure or I’m terrible at searching for things. Probably both.

Background

I originally ran into this problem when trying to run Firefox in Firejail using the standard Firejail profile for Firefox. Firefox ran fine, except there was no audio. I found that this was a known issue documented here, but unfortunately none of the suggested fixes had any effect. The page states that newer versions of PulseAudio do not exhibit that issue, so that is not really surprising.

There are many solutions for accessing GUI applications as another user (in X Windows). Several are described in this excellent post on the Arch Linux Wiki.

However, I needed a different solution as I frequently “su” to different accounts in the terminal to perform different tasks – I normally don’t just start one application and then exit back to the original user.

While by no means an “essential” setting for many users, the internalBorder setting in rxvt-unicode can go a long way towards making the terminal more readable or simply looking more the way you want. It adds some padding between the edge of the terminal window and the start of the text, both at the top/bottom and the left/right of the window. This is especially useful if you use a tiling window manager and do not otherwise have spacing between windows.

The (arguably) venerable xterm terminal emulator has a similar property called BorderWidth.