If you thought Uzbl was a minimal WebKit browser, you should see surf (http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux-and-open-source/if-you-thought-uzbl-was-a-minimal-webkit-browser-you-should-see-surf/)
surf is a simple web browser based on WebKit/GTK+. It is able to display websites and follow links. It supports the XEmbed protocol which makes it possible to embed it in another application. Furthermore, one can point surf to another URI by setting its XProperties.
It does not do much else.
no auto-update
no built-in search engine access
no cookie management
no configuration file
no extension system
no password management
no standard bookmark system
no tabbing
no toolbars
. . . and no bloat.
On my machine I have currently the minimalist Webkit browser Luakit. In Luakit only the interface is minimal. Otherwise there's
- Tabs
- Bookmarks (!!)
- Search engines
- Cookie management
- Completely configurable keyboard controls
- Extensible whichever way by means of lua scripting language
- Flash plugin
Looks like I like under-the-hood tweakability :)
But this thread is for all likeable minimalist apps, not just browsers.
I have no idea about what you're talking.
Is it about those inadmissible apps at my tablet that wants me constantly to give it permission for knowing where I am, what I'm doing and who am I talking with? and more a half dozen things?
I've blocked them all what turned my tablet into a beautiful machine to play Solitaire...
By apps I mean programs, computer applications. For example this is Uzbl browser:
(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.uzbl.org%2Fwiki%2F_media%2Fuzbl_tabbed1.png&hash=7029795cb908459bff3b4cf0cd2a3d85" rel="cached" data-hash="7029795cb908459bff3b4cf0cd2a3d85" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://www.uzbl.org/wiki/_media/uzbl_tabbed1.png)
It's "minimal app" because it has only the tab bar and combined address/status bar on the graphical interface. Otherwise it's keyboard-driven.
Another minimal app is Ranger, a console-based file manager for Linux:
(https://assets.digitalocean.com/articles/Ranger_Ubuntu/img1.png)
Isn't it totally awesome how it unfolds the folder system and peeks into files? :)
When you install Ranger, then do
ranger --copy-config=all
Then you can tweak the options under .config/ranger to no end :) Fantastic!
But let's get serious. I doubt you would like these programs, even if they can be installed on your tablet or XP. It could be possible to install them, but too difficult to bother, and just a waste of time to try when you won't use them anyway.
What kind of computer programs do you like besides Solitaire? Not the apps of minimal kind I suppose...
What kind of computer programs do you like besides Solitaire? Not the apps of minimal kind I suppose...
I don't like solitaire, don't play with real cards even less with a computer. To play it means that you're doing nothing with your computer just waiting time to pass by.
I like programs/apps that empowers the user and not those that treats users as idiots.
Examples: I prefer older versions of programs than the web 2.0 kind of thing. I like programs that do what I want instead of programs that pretends to know what I want and give me no option. I like programs with an "austere" interface and I don't like programs that seems you to have a kindergarten on screen.
Basically I use a browser, text editor, spreadsheet, antivirus, pc maintenance, encryption and an image editor. I'm forced to use file managers and the such in order to work with the computer.
Professionaly I had to work with many more specific kind of programs as CRM for example.. Also did, as Client Project Manager, software development and integration.
It could be possible to install them, but too difficult to bother, and just a waste of time to try when you won't use them anyway.
Is Uzbl your main browser? Is it your secondary browser?
Is Uzbl your main browser? Is it your secondary browser?
Neither :) I only had it installed for a little while. I prefer Luakit, because its configuration was easier for me to figure out.
Luakit is about the fifth-most important browser I have behind Opera (11.62), Seamonkey, Otter and Elinks. Had I been able to figure out Uzbl first, I would have had Uzbl in the same function instead.
As I use so many browsers, there are more functions to them than only "main" and "secondary". For example Opera is primarily for e-mailing. It's an internet suite, not a mere browser. Luakit is my primary replacement for Chrome/Chromium.
The latest release of Luakit is from 2012, so I have been searching for a similar browser that properly replaces it. I found it in dwb browser (http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/). It has the same minimalistic toolbars, but the settings and configuration are nicely graphically displayed, so even total noobs can tweak it. Bookmarks can be imported as a list of urls in a plain text file. In dwb I got cookie and adblock settings immediately to work the way I want, different from Luakit where I couldn't get whitelists to work. All in all, dwb looks like a nice improvement over Luakit.
(I didn't mean this thread to become about browsers. Must make more effort to talk about other apps too.)
I'm slightly confused. The screenshots make it look like a console browser?
dwb browser looks like a console browser? That's confused, yes. It's actually a webkit engine with minimal (=buttonless) toolbars around it, meant to be driven with keyboard. Just like Luakit. The default home page in dwb takes you to keyboard settings and configuration options at first launch.
I realize it's probably not, but have you seen this screenshot (http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/resources/completion.jpg)? That looks like Links 2 with better graphics. Incidentally, you can run Netsurf in the framebuffer (http://soosck.wordpress.com/2010/11/16/netsurf-graphical-web-browser-command-line-css/). So it's not unheard of.
Do you mean how the lines look at the bottom? That's what they call the popup. It contains stuff to select from so as to complete the line bottom-most. Works this way in Luakit too.
As to running graphics in console, I have managed to make mplayer display a video in a highly pixelized manner in the shell. It was in Ubuntu. It worked just that once.
But if it were up to me, anything that runs in console would not be called graphical. Things that run in console are console programs, not graphical. As to Netsurf, cool that it has a console mode. I have found Netsurf unfortunately unusable. It doesn't open up the railway timetables site that I need all the time.
Do you mean how the lines look at the bottom? That's what they call the popup. It contains stuff to select from so as to complete the line bottom-most. Works this way in Luakit too.
Well no, I mean everything except the actual website display. I suppose part of it might be xmonad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xmonad#mediaviewer/File:Xmonad-screen-triplehead-dons.png) or some such?
But if it were up to me, anything that runs in console would not be called graphical. Things that run in console are console programs, not graphical.
Whatever e.g. fbi is, it displays pictures just as well as any "graphical" picture viewer. :)
As to Netsurf, cool that it has a console mode. I have found Netsurf unfortunately unusable. It doesn't open up the railway timetables site that I need all the time.
It doesn't support the frame buffer the way it's precompiled in Debian/Ubuntu afaik. Btw, the Debian Netsurf package was recently updated from 2.9 to 3.2. It supposedly fixes quite a few bugs. That being said, on an increasingly Javascript-heavy web it's ultimately not that different than Links 2 or Elinks. (Netsurf 3.x claims to support some JS, but it doesn't seem to work for me.)
Whatever e.g. fbi is, it displays pictures just as well as any "graphical" picture viewer. :)
I take your word for it. It would be a nice addition in this thread, but I just tried it and all it does is complain about some fonts, so it's subminimal. What has displaying of images to do with fonts?
Imagemagick does many things in command line, but it still needs another window to display images.
Is it compaining about fonts or the fact that you're not running it in a real TTY? (Or a terminal emulator with framebuffer; I believe Terminology has it.)
In xfce4-terminal:
$ fbi screenshot-xfwm-compositing-settings-20140908-fs8.png
using "DejaVu Sans Mono-16", pixelsize=16.67 file=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSansMono.ttf
ioctl VT_GETSTATE: Inappropriate ioctl for device (not a linux console?)
In tty1:
$ fbi screenshot-xfwm-compositing-settings-20140908-fs8.png
using "DejaVu Sans Mono-16", pixelsize=16.67 file=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSansMono.ttf
map: vt01 => fb0
(You can only see that after you close the program.)
Edit: I just noticed the Netsurf framebuffer version is available in the package
netsurf-fb. I'll give it a try sometime.
Yes, that's the error message. I also tried 'fim', a derivative of fbi available in AUR. Fim also complains about fonts, but with a different error message. Makes no difference what terminal I pick or shell (tty), the same error messages.
Sorry, I was probably unclear. The font thing is not an error message: it's just a message. Only the line underneath, "Inappropriate ioctl for device", is an error message.
I'd show you a screenshot of what it looks like on tty (Ctrl+Alt+F1-7), but I don't know how to take screenshots there.
I'd show you a screenshot of what it looks like on tty (Ctrl+Alt+F1-7), but I don't know how to take screenshots there.
With your mobile phone of course :)
Fair enough. Oddly, the automatic Dropbox picture upload function just says "waiting to upload". Waiting for what, one wonders.
Wyrd is a command-line frontend for Remind. It's a nice little app for reminders, if your system is minimal enough so that you have no other app for reminders.
After you install Wyrd, do
cp /etc/wyrdrc .wyrdrc
and you'll have a nice config file to tweak. In that file (.wyrdrc), for example set
week_starts_monday to "true" and see the weekdays laid out as they are supposed to.
(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Frepo.openpandora.org%2Ffiles%2Fpnd%2Fwyrd%2Fpreview1.png&hash=e64d2e81e211149e931ca0ca446f3173" rel="cached" data-hash="e64d2e81e211149e931ca0ca446f3173" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://repo.openpandora.org/files/pnd/wyrd/preview1.png)
But reminders may be terribly advanced for most users. If you only need to see a current month display and your setup is so minimal that there's no other calendar app, type
cal in terminal and see what you get.
Rawdog is a console-based RSS feed reader. It's so basic that it can be considered outright clumsy. After installation it doesn't show up anywhere. It works by typing
rawdog in terminal, but there's some configuration to be done before it does anything useful.
First, copy the config and styles file into the home directory. In terminal:
cd # to make sure you are in home directory
mkdir .rawdog # create profile directory for rawdog
cp /usr/share/rawdog/config .rawdog/config # copies the default config file into the home directory
cp /usr/share/rawdog/styles.css .rawdog/styles.css # copies the styles file into the home directory
The styles file will put CSS styles on output.html about which more soon.
Then add an RSS feed to sync:
rawdog -a https://dndsanctuary.eu/index.php?type=rss;action=.xml
Rawdog will report if adding the feed was successful. You can add many feeds of course. The added feeds will appear at the very bottom of the config file.
To sync the feeds:
rawdog -Wuw
The -W argument is supposed to check something about the state and state.lock files in the profile directory. The -u argument updates the feeds. The -w argument writes the output.
The output is output.html, a static HTML file. To view the feed, open up output.html in a browser. The style for output.html is in styles.css. Some other configurable parameters, such as the feed update frequency (
rawdog -u doesn't really update more frequently than the period specified for the feed in the config file), date formats, etc. can be found in the self-explanatory config file.
To see the latest posts at DND (and some other feed providers), I have made a command-line alias
dnd that stands for
rawdog -Wuw && elinks ~/.rawdog/output.html. Awesome when it works.
Just a warning, looking up "rawdog" in a search engine has some… odd… results. Here (http://offog.org/code/rawdog/)'s the website.
Right, Frenzie. I didn't think of that...
And here's an outdated and probably incomplete list of command-line RSS thingies http://tinyapps.org/blog/nix/200708170700_command_line_feed_readers.html I haven't tried them all because some of them don't even seem to exist any more.
Looks like DWB is also all but abandoned, maybe considered feature-complete or perfect already, and beyond need of maintenance.
A similar browser in active development is Qutebrowser. However, I dislike Qutebrowser's unnecessarily oversized popup:
(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fc.1tw.org%2Fimages%2F2014%2Fqutebrowser.png&hash=e54b8066890db9164fbf7192b4588336" rel="cached" data-hash="e54b8066890db9164fbf7192b4588336" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://c.1tw.org/images/2014/qutebrowser.png)
In DWB and Luakit, the popup is only as big as there are rows to show (note the bottom portion of the image):
(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fportix.bitbucket.org%2Fdwb%2Fresources%2Fcompletion.jpg&hash=facdd093c0051084a2e718fe5ef33cf4" rel="cached" data-hash="facdd093c0051084a2e718fe5ef33cf4" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/resources/completion.jpg)
EDIT: And Qutebrowser adds a bunch of python dependencies. DWB is lighter to this extent.
However, I dislike Qutebrowser's unnecessarily oversized popup:
I found a setting that makes Qutebrowser's popup normal. The setting is called "shrink" in
qute:settings.
But I found another sad thing in Qutebrowser. The option for external textarea editors is there, but doesn't work, default or customised, nothing.
Looks like
calcurse is a somewhat better console calendar-reminder-todo thingie than
wyrd. Wyrd is a
remind front-end, i.e. its reminders go into the file called
.reminders in
remind's format and are viewable with
remind. For example, once some events have been marked up with Wyrd, the list of appointments can be generated with Remind by
remind -n ~/.reminders
And in tabulated calendar format.
remind -c ~/.reminders
This is called agenda. It's as close to a todo list as one can get with Wyrd and Remind. (These agenda formats can be viewed inside Wyrd also, with Shift+r and Shift+c respectively.)
Calcurse is independent from Remind. Calcurse does todo lists that are actually called todo lists. This in addition to ordinary calendar appointments. It has a more modern look than Wyrd.
A nifty feature in Calcurse is the ability to attach notes to appointments and todo lists (notes are not available in Wyrd). However, when the appointment item is moved or modified, it may get corrupted when a note is attached to it, e.g. the appointment's clocktimes may vanish. So it's nifty, but buggy.
Even though Calcurse seems easier to navigate and is conveniently configurable inside the program interface, it does not seem to have more settings and preferences than Wyrd.
- Calcurse seems unable to show week numbers in the calendar. Wyrd can show them.
- Appointments view is painfully unconfigurable in Calcurse. It's just an unalterable day view. No way to navigate the hours. No agenda (list of future appointments).
Agenda list seems inaccessible inside Calcurse interface, but it's accessible in the so-called non-interactive mode, i.e. by running the relevant options with it. A combined agenda and todo list, complete with their attached notes would be available this way:
calcurse -a -t --format-todo=%p\>\ %m\ %N --format-apt=%S\-%E\ %m%N
The downside is that when the item has no note, Calcurse prints out "No note file found", completely unnecessarily.
In conclusion, neither Calcurse or Wyrd attracts me to migrate my calendar from mobile phone to computer command line. Calcurse seems more attractive, but its
move function is not as reliable as Wyrd's. Both have shortcomings that still make me type
cal -w3 or
date -d 'next fri'.
Rofi (https://davedavenport.github.io/rofi/) is a cool window switcher, if your window manager is so minimalistic that it doesn't have a window switcher of its own (i.e. the equivalent of Alt+Tab). For example, Openbox has a window switcher, but i3wm doesn't. Rofi has more capabilities, but that's the only thing I use it for.
Lately, the colour scheme of Rofi is to be configured in .Xresources and my earlier command line yields an ugly result now. Instead of bothering to reconfigure, I downgraded to an older version that still has the daemon mode (replaced with the possibility of a symlink from dmenu in newer versions).
Rofi has several extensions. One of them makes Rofi cooperate with Surfraw https://github.com/carnager/rofi-scripts/tree/master/rofi-surfraw
I included a mention of Rofi in the window switcher I wrote myself, nimbler (https://github.com/Frenzie/nimbler), see here (https://github.com/Frenzie/nimbler/blob/master/docs/docs.md#similar-software).
Amazing. But you use Xfce which has its own Alt+Tab thingie. Why did you write another one? What's the default one missing?
I think I was still using GNOME 2 when I wrote it, at least on my desktop, although in any case Alt+Tab wasn't very usable in Xfce until 4.12 (the current release, from 2015).
As far as I'm concerned, a display of large icons as has been standard since at least Windows 3, is virtually useless. "Oh look, I've opened five text documents, ten PDFs and five file manager windows. I totally know which is which…" Mini thumbnails don't help either. "Oh look, all of my text documents have text in them. I can totally tell them apart now." When you find yourself using the much more awkward taskbar instead of Alt+Tab, you know Alt+Tab is broken.
A usable window list is structured like a text-based list consisting of icon + window title. That's the bare minimum. Xfce has that option nowadays, so it's alright. Unfortunately it's mildly hampered by some stupid transparency that can't (easily) be disabled. But like I said, that's just the bare minimum.
The brilliance of SmartTab.org over the traditional window switcher (which of course I shamelessly copied), besides the list-based approach, is to assign a quick way to access each window. So in nimbler, I activate the window switcher (my nimbler shortcut is Super + `), I identify what I want to switch to, and then I press, e.g., c. Another thing is that you can use the arrow keys or the mouse to activate a window as opposed to having to perform Alt-Tab contortionism.
Something I copied from superswitcher is to show all windows on all workspaces, organized by workspace, so I don't have to switch to workspace 3 first in order to go Alt-Tabbing around workspace 3. You can also quickly switch to a workspace using F1-F12, although that's fairly redundant. In superswitcher you can also create new workspaces and drag windows around between workspaces so it's more useful there.
(https://github.com/Frenzie/nimbler/blob/master/docs/images/screenshot-nimbler-20140921-fs8.png?raw=true)
On the "someday" list is to add a function to highlight windows matching a search term similar to superswitcher. You can already activate the GUI design for this by pressing colon (:) but it's otherwise useless.
A usable window list is structured like a text-based list consisting of icon + window title. That's the bare minimum. Xfce has that option nowadays, so it's alright. Unfortunately it's mildly hampered by some stupid transparency that can't (easily) be disabled. But like I said, that's just the bare minimum.
In Xfce, there is (always was, as far as I know) a window list like this (https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=7460)
(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fdocs.xfce.org%2F_media%2Fxfce%2Fxfdesktop%2F4.11%2Fxfdesktop_scrsh14.png&hash=2d87a498fdf2de26a21527f7c917c3e4" rel="cached" data-hash="2d87a498fdf2de26a21527f7c917c3e4" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://docs.xfce.org/_media/xfce/xfdesktop/4.11/xfdesktop_scrsh14.png)
Cinnamon has an equivalent to this on the taskbar. I always put that thing to the corner of the taskbar.
(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.linuxinsider.com%2Farticle_images%2F2015%2F82889_990x469.jpg&hash=93f3b2605fd26b44d1cf34c599093761" rel="cached" data-hash="93f3b2605fd26b44d1cf34c599093761" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://www.linuxinsider.com/article_images/2015/82889_990x469.jpg)
The problem with these lists is that they require mousework. Ever since I have a trackball, it's a lesser problem now. (Mousework also includes the fact that stacking window managers don't give an option to move the mouse pointer to the window you just switched to.)
I always found Xfce's and Cinnamon's Alt+Tab solutions pretty good, except, in Cinnamon, if you want to cycle through windows on ALL workspaces, you MUST use
Ctrl+Alt+Tab (at least I haven't found a way to configure it to mere Alt+Tab). And I also dislike the fact that when I minimise a window, then on the Alt+Tab list it's pushed to be the very last and it takes either much tabbing to reach or Alt+
Shift+Tab. This is where I like the behaviour (or configuration options) of Openbox most.
In i3wm there's no Alt+Tab equivalent (to
cycle through windows, not merely switch back-and-forth or move between them) whatsoever. That's where Rofi comes in. Rofi is nicely navigable with arrows: When you are on top of the list and you push the Up key, you get to the bottom. Very nice. And the way you can filter the right title up by typing immediately makes it perfect.
In Xfce, there is (always was, as far as I know) a window list like this (https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=7460)
That never quite struck my fancy, although if you add a keyboard shortcut to
xfdesktop --windowlist it is probably better than many a window switcher out there. The fact that navigating the list by arrow keys seemingly takes forever is exactly what nimbler adds on top of the principle. Graphically it's a perfect example of what Alt+Tab should look like, but except on small screens (e.g., an old netbook) it isn't that useful because it's more of a taskbar alternative.
A taskbar shows you windows in order of opening, although I would argue that a good taskbar allows dragging to reorder. I believe GNOME 2 did this, so MATE probably does as well. Note that in Windows the taskbar also allows Ctrl+click selection to tile windows, something missing from (all?) Linux taskbars to my knowledge.
The Opera/Presto tabbar is a very good example of what a tab/taskbar should be like, although its window list was even better. Its Ctrl+Tab was also a terrific tab/taskswitcher. But even vastly inferior mechanisms like in most other browsers are in many ways superior to the OS taskbars, which seem to have been transplanted straight from the early '90s. Of course many so-called new innovations are the complete opposite. Apple is a major offender in not adding any useful features to its OS since 2000 or so, adding only eye candy, but that hardly means the superior concepts of yore were finished in usability as Opera showed.
The Xfce Alt+Tab switcher is pretty good and I actually use it plenty, but I don't like its transparency (see screen).
A taskbar shows you windows in order of opening, although I would argue that a good taskbar allows dragging to reorder. I believe GNOME 2 did this, so MATE probably does as well.
I remember dragging windows in Xfce panel too, quite an available option. And Cinnamon panel does the same.
Other than this, what else is there that would make a taskbar good? I consider even Tint2 a good taskbar, my favourite when in Openbox.
Note that in Windows the taskbar also allows Ctrl+click selection to tile windows, something missing from (all?) Linux taskbars to my knowledge.
This must be a new amazing Windows 10 feature. As much as I have seen Windows 10 (which isn't much) I don't like its icons-only approach on the taskbar. Can it be configured to show window titles? I haven't found such an option. Windows' current manner of tiling essentially copies Android (if you have a multi-window Android like in Galaxy Notes).
I would like something like a "tiling mode" in window managers to blitz-tile all windows across the workspace and then you could drag the edges of windows to justify the grid so that the contiguous windows are dragged at the same time. No stacking window manager offers this properly.
The Opera/Presto tabbar is a very good example of what a tab/taskbar should be like, although its window list was even better. Its Ctrl+Tab was also a terrific tab/taskswitcher.
Yes. And Opera's pages can blitz-tile, even though not quite like in tiling window managers.
I remember dragging windows in Xfce panel too, quite an available option. And Cinnamon panel does the same.
Oh, I see. In the window button options you can set the behavior. You can sort it automatically by various algorithms, or by "none, allow drag-and-drop". Imo those shouldn't be mutually exclusive, but I guess the behavior for auto-sort combined with drag-and-drop would just be too complicated and possibly counter-intuitive.
Other than this, what else is there that would make a taskbar good?
Just like with the Alt-Tab switcher, it needs to show window titles. The Mac OS dock's large icons are useless. So are the copies in Vista and higher, in Ubuntu Unity, etc. And don't get me started on how since Windows 7 the quick start icons double as the taskbar. Want to start a new Explorer window? Better right click on it, buddy! And to switch between them, waste time hovering over that single indicator. Ugh!
In Windows ME I used to run something called LiteStep with a double or maybe even a triple height taskbar. A bit like how since Vista the taskbar is stupidly high by default, but actually useful because of it having regular window buttons.
From some screenshots it looks like Tint2 fulfills the job just fine. What I can't fathom is that some people would look at something like Tint2 and say something like: "oh, that looks just like Windows 95, which is old, therefore bad."
This must be a new amazing Windows 10 feature.
You mean Windows 95, when that taskbar thing was introduced. :P I wouldn't be surprised if Windows 8/10 somehow managed to get rid of it.
Yes. And Opera's pages can blitz-tile, even though not quite like in tiling window managers.
Yup, except in the Windows taskbar you don't need the window panel to do so — like I said, a defect of Opera's tabbar.
(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Ffun.drno.de%2Fpics%2Fcartoons%2Fenglish%2Fguis.jpg&hash=e757484a44fc52439686a7a728f8fa03" rel="cached" data-hash="e757484a44fc52439686a7a728f8fa03" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://fun.drno.de/pics/cartoons/english/guis.jpg)
The terminal is more efficient for some things and I use it plenty, but I can't help but notice that the terminal is used within a GUI in all but the first. :P
I remember dragging windows in Xfce panel too, quite an available option. And Cinnamon panel does the same.
Oh, I see. In the window button options you can set the behavior. You can sort it automatically by various algorithms, or by "none, allow drag-and-drop". Imo those shouldn't be mutually exclusive, but I guess the behavior for auto-sort combined with drag-and-drop would just be too complicated and possibly counter-intuitive.
To me it's most intuitive to have drag-and-drop there and it bothers me a little that it's not turned on out of the box and that the setting is sort of buried. When I began using Xfce, I had to search the internet to find it. Anyway, the good thing is that it's there and can be turned on.
Other than this, what else is there that would make a taskbar good?
Just like with the Alt-Tab switcher, it needs to show window titles. The Mac OS dock's large icons are useless. So are the copies in Vista and higher, in Ubuntu Unity, etc. And don't get me started on how since Windows 7 the quick start icons double as the taskbar. Want to start a new Explorer window? Better right click on it, buddy! And to switch between them, waste time hovering over that single indicator. Ugh!
Yes, Vista is bad, 10's taskbar is probably worse, and Mac and Ubuntu Unity are indefensible, but all (other) Linux panels and desktop environments qualify as okay.
From some screenshots it looks like Tint2 fulfills the job just fine. What I can't fathom is that some people would look at something like Tint2 and say something like: "oh, that looks just like Windows 95, which is old, therefore bad."
When preset in a distro, Tint2 is most often half-transparent and should not remind of Windows 95. But yes, it is rather basic and if you want to change anything, you have to hack the plain-text config file which puts off surprisingly many people. But it allows drag-and-drop and can display either icons or titles as you wish. And has a nice systray. It is quite complete in itself.
This must be a new amazing Windows 10 feature.
You mean Windows 95, when that taskbar thing was introduced. :P I wouldn't be surprised if Windows 8/10 somehow managed to get rid of it.
I checked and couldn't find Ctrl+click tiling in Windows 10. I didn't know such a thing existed.
Windows 10 has drag-to-edge tiling though, for two windows. It's very tablet-y. Once you have tiled one window to one half of the screen, all other open windows show up a la Expo to offer a second window to tile to the other half of the screen - exactly like in Galaxy Note. And, amazingly, Windows 10 combines the border of windows tiled this way, so that you can adjust the common border with a single mouse-drag - again like in Galaxy Note and like in true tiling wm's. This common border is what I would like to see in more desktop environments when in tiling mode (would be cool in Opera and Otter too).
Cinnamon and Xfce also have drag-to-edge tiling/snapping. They lack the common border, but are more flexible with the number of windows. Openbox can tile&snap even more flexibly to other window edges (not so much by dragging, but by keybinds). Unfortunately it's not been given any thought in vanilla state and it is a headache to configure to make it work intuitively enough.
When preset in a distro, Tint2 is most often half-transparent and should not remind of Windows 95.
Overuse of transparency is totally mid-2000s though, and thankfully mostly passé. Even KDE5 seems to have stopped doing it. :P Although now we've got that stupid flat trend.
Windows 10 has drag-to-edge tiling though, for two windows. It's very tablet-y. Once you have tiled one window to one half of the screen, all other open windows show up a la Expo to offer a second window to tile to the other half of the screen - exactly like in Galaxy Note. And, amazingly, Windows 10 combines the border of windows tiled this way, so that you can adjust the common border with a single mouse-drag - again like in Galaxy Note and like in true tiling wm's. This common border is what I would like to see in more desktop environments when in tiling mode (would be cool in Opera and Otter too).
They've been developing this functionality since at least Windows 7, although I'm not too sure about the single border thing.
I checked and couldn't find Ctrl+click tiling in Windows 10. I didn't know such a thing existed.
Ah yes, it looks like they broke it. Attached you'll find a screenshot from my Windows XP VM. Edit: already broken in Windows 7.
Unfortunately I don't have a Vista VM, but I imagine that's when they broke it.
(Looking at the screenshot) Ah yes, "Cascade"! I used that a lot. And "Tile horizontally" and "Tile vertically" was what Opera used to have in common with Windows desktop environment. Those were the days, except that I have discovered the potential of tiling on desktop more fully only recently with i3wm.
I guess my screen was too small earlier. I often needed two Word documents side by side - exactly side by side, not flipping back-and-forth between them one over the other - and it required hiding some toolbars in Word, hiding Windows taskbar, etc. to maximise the workspace. And, the job done, revert everything so that the next user of the computer would not get another heart attack.
Overuse of transparency is totally mid-2000s though, and thankfully mostly passé. Even KDE5 seems to have stopped doing it. :P Although now we've got that stupid flat trend.
Yes, the flat trend is stupid. I'd argue it's stupider than transparency. With transparency I can do something useful, such as put a transparent editor window or a terminal emulator on top of the web browser and type stuff while looking at the text on the webpage. Very useful when following instructions or summarising things.
Edit: I just understood you were talking about transparency in a different sense - as a general eye-candy effect. The first thing I do when I install a new Xfce or Cinnamon is to turn ALL effects off. But compositing and user-specified transparency are something else, something I use a lot.
In Mate (all distros I've seen with Mate) have compositing turned off at first. I don't know why they would do that. Compositing is not just eye-candy.
Without compositing things paint slower when drivers are working right, but I think that with, e.g., that basic VESA driver we were talking about last week compositing slows things down. But at least as a default I rather doubt I'd like the kind of transparency you were talking about.
But at least as a default I rather doubt I'd like the kind of transparency you were talking about.
When I began using transparent apps this way in Manjaro Openbox, it wasn't configured by default and I had to jump through hoops to enable it. I installed
transset and configured it to respond to mousescroll in titlebar so that the editor (or whatever) window
becomes transparent when I need it so. For terminal emulator, I simply have two of them: When I need transparency, I open up urxvt which has been configured transparent; when I don't need transparency, then xterm, and if the processes and apps are running in Tmux, they can be moved from one terminal to the other.
By the way, did you know that this scrollable transparency was inbuilt in Cinnamon?
(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2F1.bp.blogspot.com%2F-TlaiYFVSSRo%2FU0v2tLdtjhI%2FAAAAAAAASGQ%2FM1Ne3hLEJug%2Fs1600%2Fcinnamon-2.2-window-opacity_2.png&hash=ea14f57066c78394af3d75be0cfb977d" rel="cached" data-hash="ea14f57066c78394af3d75be0cfb977d" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TlaiYFVSSRo/U0v2tLdtjhI/AAAAAAAASGQ/M1Ne3hLEJug/s1600/cinnamon-2.2-window-opacity_2.png)
I have had very good times with Xfce (best times with Xfce+Openbox), but then left it to hop between Cinnamon, Openbox and i3wm, trying to figure out (again) where to settle and in what way.
Cinnamon is most complete out of the box and, to my taste, requires least after-configuration from vanilla/default state to perfection, compared to Xfce or Mate. Still, I miss some fine-tuning. For example, I wanted to turn off tooltips on the taskbar, but this option is dogmatically not implemented (https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/pull/4269#issuecomment-109457495). Instead, you have to hack the theme CSS (https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/issues/4549#issuecomment-193807643). It should not be like this.
i3wm has given me lots of further ideas about what my ideal desktop should look like and how it should work. Eventually, this means a stacking wm with many aspects of tiling. It requires plenty of creative configuration and fine-tuning that seems only possible with Openbox.
By the way, did you know that this scrollable transparency was inbuilt in Cinnamon?
Nope, though I seem to recall having used something like that in something else. Maybe Compiz in ye olde Ubuntu. I also used to have something like that in Windows back in the early 2000s.
Cinnamon is most complete out of the box and, to my taste, requires least after-configuration from vanilla/default state to perfection, compared to Xfce or Mate.
Probably true. Cinnamon is basically the sensible, modern form of Gnome Shell. Xfce is stuck in the past in a way, but when the present consists of stupid tiles and giant icons I'd rather be hanging out there anyway.
As always, I'm more likely to try these kinds of new things on my laptop. On my desktop I want to be able to actually work. My laptop is mostly for use with a browser, LibreOffice Writer, Zim or Geany anyway. On that I can stand something like Ubuntu Unity, which I actually ran on my netbook for possibly up to a year. What I can't (easily) deal with anymore is Windows. The way the US International keyboard layout (AltGr dead keys) and the Compose Key work can be mimicked but it's just not as good. It's killer. Also the touchpad in Windows is awful. Multitouch functions much better in X. And as we've established, many of the features that were once superior in Windows have been purposefully killed off over the last decade or so.
Need to rip a CD in command line without a hassle?
1. Install abcde
2. Insert the CD
3. In terminal, launch abcde
Just works.
It works fine out of the box, but you can also customize it slightly to your preferences. Here's mine:
$ cat .abcde.conf
CDPARANOIAOPTS=-z
#See http://www.andrews-corner.org/abcde.html for inspiration
FLACOPTS='-s -e -V -8'
OPUSENCOPTS="--vbr --bitrate 128"
OUTPUTTYPE="flac,opus"
Luakit has received a long-waited update https://github.com/luakit/luakit Long-waited, because it seemed abandoned (https://dndsanctuary.eu/index.php?topic=447.msg27093#msg27093). It's been updated to embed Webkit2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#WebKit2). Not sure how good an idea that is, but it's good to see Luakit is not totally abandoned.
Meanwhile, DWB still looks totally abandoned.
Nano 2.8.7 can wrap text at spaces now, instead of at the terminal edge.
In .nanorc set atblanks (along with set softwrap). When starting from command line, the option is -a or --atblanks. OMG making whitespace visible is a whole lot more sensible now!
I like visible whitespace so you can properly tell how many spaces there are (or whether there's secretly a tab). I'm surprised nano didn't offer a softwrap option until now. I never checked because I only use terminal editors for some quick changes. For about a decade SciTE was my preferred text editor, but these days it's Geany (also Scintilla-based).
I like visible whitespace so you can properly tell how many spaces there are (or whether there's secretly a tab).
For me, the most important indication would be to see line endings (or newlines or caret returns or whatever they call it). They are best visible in the way Mousepad marks whitespace - a huge return arrow.
Nano distinguishes between tab and space (blank), but unfortunately does not indicate line endings. To see line endings in Nano, I must enable line numbering.
I'm surprised nano didn't offer a softwrap option until now.
It has offered softwrap as long as I know it, but it wrapped at terminal edge - for the purposes of wrapping, the whole file contents was interpreted as a continuous string of characters (space and visible character were the same thing) and the wrapping occurred precisely at whatever thing hit the edge of the terminal emulator, so you got wrappings like
mad
cow sickness
or
mad
cow sicknes
s
The news right now is that it has been made to recognise blanks (spaces) as other than visible characters and finally wrap at blanks, keeping visible-character words unbroken.
Oh, I hadn't even really considered that as an option. I mean, it's so obviously *wrong* (unless for some reason you have 100 letters without a space, dash or dot).
I mean, it's so obviously *wrong* (unless for some reason you have 100 letters without a space, dash or dot).
It's wrong in the sense that it does not let to discern word-sequences from whitespaces easily - one had to be ready for spaces on the left side too. On the other hand, I am noticing now how accustomed I am to that old behaviour. The new behaviour left-aligns everything, which is nice, but this means the entire word jumps to the next row when it hits the right edge. This is scary when unexpected.
One day when trying to tweak Qpdfview to be more effective, I was surprised to discover there was no statusbar. Very weird.
Anyway, then I installed Zathura and found that it can be pretty amazing. It sports the same minimalist keyboard-driven interface as the minimalist browsers that I have advertised here. It even has a vi-like input field to make it do things. Zathura seems to open and load fairly fast and reliably even the worst pdf files I have. I expect it to be good for presentations.
The latest Manjaro iteration of bspwm promotes the 'micro' editor which basically works like 'nano' but with keybinds more inherited from MS Notepad https://micro-editor.github.io/
Edit: On Manjaro the package is micro-manjaro and it comes with (gasp!) dependencies, i.e. it is not really minimal. The dependencies are st (the suckless terminal emulator) and xclip. /edit
There is also 'mg', a tiny version of emacs http://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-current/man1/mg.1
Interesting. It's true that Nano's keyboard shortcuts seem a bit odd. Perhaps they have something to do with use in screen/tmux? It dates back only to 2000 or so, so it's not like it predates more standard keyboard shortcuts.
Yes, text editors are interesting. I have configured micro to be the text editor in my terminal browsers and I am trying it out right now.
For me it was instantly reminiscent of nano but this is a false impression. For example right now, typing a bit longer lines, I see that micro does not autowrap lines and I have no idea how to make it do it. I did Ctrl+e help wrap and got "Sorry, no help for wrap"
It features prominently some superfluous niceties like colour schemes and astonishingly convenient mousing support on terminal, evidently achieved with xclip and xsel. It also autocompletes parentheses and brackets and provides syntax highlighting, but at the same time there appears to be no thought given to spellcheck.
Whereas nano misses colour schemes (which is a good thing, because you mostly want your terminal apps look all the same) but there is some rudimentary way to plug in some spellcheck. And its quirky keybinds are not too much of a problem, because out of the box you get the helpful line with some commands that can be used in the given context. Then again, nano's so-called mouse support simply disables pointer access to the terminal emulator and its only function is to scroll big files. I mostly keep the so-called mouse support off to be able to select the way the terminal emulator lets me.
For example right now, typing a bit longer lines, I see that micro does not autowrap lines and I have no idea how to make it do it. I did Ctrl+e help wrap and got "Sorry, no help for wrap"
Ha, found it. Out of the box it creates a config file at
~/.config/micro/settings.json and there's the line
"softwrap": false,. So it does the config part conveniently too: Autocreate a human-readable config file at some sensible place and let people hack it.
Nano supports syntax highlighting too, but possibly not with color schemes.
Well, a colour scheme is how the editor looks. Syntax highlight is how the opened text looks, i.e. the specific language in the file should be recognised and colorised. The two (colour scheme and syntax highlight) should not really be related, even though they may mess with each other. Colour schemes are not available in
nano, except by giving the whole terminal emulator an overhaul.
By the way, I am already getting fed up with
micro. I am so much more used to with the cursor movements in
nano and also to the way selection and pasting works in pure terminal emulator. Nice little program, but
vim is more rewarding and
nano does all I need anyway.
Edit: And I did not give enough credit to mouse support in
nano: Mouse was useful to set mark (i.e. start selection). Now
nano has an updated man page and the mouse support has been extended even further. Anyway, I don't use it.
These days the man page starts as follows:
Starting with version 4.0, nano no longer hard-wraps an overlong line by default, and no longer automatically adds a newline at the end of the text if one is missing. Furthermore, it uses smooth scrolling by default and makes use of the line below the title bar.
These are all big changes over the past few years.
More markdown fun: mdp does slideshows based on text written in markdown.
Install mdp, download the sample.md (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/visit1985/mdp/master/sample.md) file and run it in mdp. The file is a tutorial. Not as instructive as vimtutorial but almost. And great to look at, even though I would like it to inherit my .Xresources colours out of the box.
Update:
patat is a markdown slideshower with great promises, allegedly employing pandoc. The input format is even slightly simpler - instead of requiring explicit rulers to divide the slides as in mdp, every new header starts a new slide. However, other styling requires some haskell hacking with its ridiculously strict indentation demands, so that it is not plain and simple markup anymore.
Moreover, patat absolutely fails at the number one basic premise of presentation slides: fit to centre. There is a bug report about it but it has not been touched for years. It seems that there is total indecision about centering in pandoc markdown language, but this should not prevent the maker of a presentation slide programme to do what a presentation slide programme should do.
And I found a serious bug in mdp too. As its colours are hardcoded with lack of forethought, its invert mode mdp -i sample.md produces crap on a dark terminal emulator. Luckily this is circumvented by mdp -ti sample.md. Make it mdp -fti sample.md (-f to remove the transition effect) and it becomes a more usable markdown slideshower that patat will never catch despite its initial great promises.
Update 2: Oops, mdp doesn't do markdown tables. What now?? Well, that's why the keynote speakers in hacker conferences use Emacs Org or some contraption script of their own making instead of terminal slideshow apps. These apps are just not quite there. I guess I must do more Emacs too.
The last time I figured I could do a fancy presentation at a place where I couldn't use my own laptop I was forced to cobble together some quickly plain thing in PDF last minute.
I was doing something like this:
https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/wiki/Creating-impress.js-slide-shows-with-pandoc
I did two or three pretty nice presentations that way before I ran into that slight "oh btw you can't use HTML" issue over at a thing in Brussels. :)
Anyway, I think it's still a decent concept. For a presentation next week that I haven't really come up with a content concept yet :insane: But on the technical side, I think I'll use Pandoc → Beamer (PDF). But properly this time, not done during a ~30 minute lunch break panicking because it's the only time I have in a day that lasts from about 8:30 to 20:00, trying to figure out how to convert my Pandoc → Impress.js to Pandoc → Beamer (or at least some kind of PPT/PDF situation).
Here's a tutorial how to run markdown to pdf with pandoc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dum7q6UXiCE (tutorial for me rather than you, because you certainly know it already) The one thing wrong in the tutorial is the title that that's the easiest way to do presentations. The easiest is actually suckless sent, which renders plain text. Markdown may seem easy, but plain text is still easier.
That sounds like a false dichotomy. You can also use "full" plain text in Markdown; you just won't get any of the things you may very well want (e.g., headers/bold/italic/lists/links/images). :)
Also useful, HTML presentation to PDF:
https://github.com/astefanutti/decktape
That sounds like a false dichotomy. You can also use "full" plain text in Markdown; you just won't get any of the things you may very well want (e.g., headers/bold/italic/lists/links/images). :)
When you want things like headers, bold, italic, etc. then you are obviously not wanting plain text. And when you have to escape things like brackets, then you are obviously not having plain text.
The very idea of markup languages is to go beyond plain text and this has its immediate drawbacks. Markdown's drawbacks are slighter than the drawbacks of, say, HTML, but the drawbacks are there, such as having to escape some stuff or the fact that a minus versus a plus in the beginning of a line loses its meaning/rendering. So the dichotomy is real.
Also the distinction of
mdp and
sent is real. In the first you have the source text in markdown, by which you get headers and other formatting and you are supposed to distinguish slides by dash lines, while in the latter you just use paragraphs, you do not get headers, but it does not tie itself to the terminal and provides a sort-of opportunity for images (I wonder, since it does not use the terminal as its base, why not provide more formatting?). They are too different to use just one or the other rather than choosing one or the other to suit a current purpose.
Markdown is an example of something that is far from perfect, but good enough to be successful.
termpub to view epub files in a terminal emulator. Edit: Navigate with PgUp and PgDn /edit
Funny I do not remember having installed it, but it was present in my opsys (Manjaro Linux). Possibly an accidental inclusion by the distro maintainers.
Curious concept but especially on lower-res LCD it just might work (because it's not like you can really do typography anyway).
I've been using Qalculate as my preferred calculator for a while now...
Wow, this is instantly likeable indeed, now that I need calculators. Great that it works in command-line also, with
qalc. It can even do moon phases :)
bc can do basic arithmetic, but it gets complicated when the calculation is more complicated. It supposedly can retain and revisit history with the help of
history and
readline, but I never figured out how that works. When I need history functions in the terminal, I use
fc instead, because
history redo and things like that somehow always failed for me.
Emacs has two calculators. The one is
calculator that stays in one line, very good for basic arithmetic again.
The other is
calc which is multi-line and collects numbers in a stack financial-style, which is the way I need it. It also keeps a visible trail of past numbers that are easy enough to reuse. Maybe I will some day find a separate graphical app that works similarly.
It can even do moon phases :)
I've never noticed and I don't even know what that means in practice. :lol:
Surely you know what lunar phases are, even in practice. In Qalculate they are under Functions > Date&Time.
Obviously I know what lunar phases are, but what do you mean by calculating with them? Like "what was the lunar phase on 15 April 1820" or something?
xmouseless is an instant solution for making mouse moves by keyboard. After installing and running the thing, it grabs control of the keyboard. The default features are sane enough:
- Cursor moves are under i, j, k, and l
- Clicks are under f, d, and s (left, middle and right respectively)
- n and p or plus and minus to scroll down and up, h and g to scroll vertically
- To accelerate mouse moves, there are left Control (slowest), a, left Alt, and left Super.
For example, to drag to select text, move the cursor to the needed starting point (i, j, k, l), hold f and simultaneously press l or i, depending to which direction you need to select.
To drag and drop a link, move the cursor to the link, hold f and simultaneously do the cursor moves again. To drop, just let go. Amazing how it works.
To exit and get your normal keyboard back, press q or Escape.
To configure the defaults, read and modify config.h, recompile and reinstall.
https://github.com/jbensmann/xmouseless
Did you know that console mouse exists?
Install
gpm (general purpose mouse).
Issue
# gpm -m /dev/input/mice -t help
In the output, the asterisked things are available for trial (and error). In my case,
sudo gpm -m /dev/input/mice -t imps2 makes the laptop touchpad work.
Learned here https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/General_purpose_mouse
Ayup ;) https://fransdejonge.com/2010/12/mouse-in-tty/
Your post is minimaler than mine.
Edbrowse is a combination editor, browser, and mail client that is 100% text based. The interface is similar to /bin/ed, though there are many more features, such as editing multiple files simultaneously, and rendering html.
Edbrowse is built on the principles of the line-oriented editor
ed. Going line by line, this is truly minimal!
Different from screen or display editors that display a buffer box for editing, a line-oriented editor displays the size of the file when opened with
ed {filename} and then just sits there waiting for a further input to perform the next action. The input is a command + Enter. For viewing a file in
ed, the main command is
p for "print", which prints a line. Issuing
,p + Enter outputs the contents of the entire file.
In Edbrowse, the most important command is
b for "browse", followed by the url (preferably the complete url with the http:// or https:// part), and Enter. This will display the size of the page and any possible errors, but we can still proceed with
z1 (and Enter) which outputs one line. After this, following Enter-presses output one line each.
It is possible to output a number of lines with e.g.
0z24 (roughly, "start at the beginning of the page and output 24 lines" as far as I have understood), whereafter every consecutive
z (and Enter) outputs the 24 following lines.
,p outputs the entire page, which is normally well beyond the limits of the terminal display.
To select a line with a link to go to, type
?somestuff, where the question mark means "search backwards" and "somestuff" is the text to search for that identifies the specific line. Then, pressing Enter, the output result is that specific line. To go to a link in that line, type
g1 (and Enter) for "go to the first link on the line". The output will be the size of the webpage behind the link and incremental output and navigation of the page starts all over again.
Quit with
q or
qt.
Forms and logins and such are supposed to work with Edbrowse, but I am far from it at this stage.
That is both amazing and terrifying. :)
Perhaps you're wondering why I called you all here? :)
My "new" late-2012 Mac mini has a severe case of what I call The Mysterious Mac CPU Spikes™...
[Yes, I took the time to read the last page of the thread in its entirety: Good stuff; some quite interesting!]
When it's having an episode of TMMCPUS™ and I still feel like using my computer, I've found that some of the older, "simpler" software works; and some even works reasonably well. For instance, Opera 11.64!
(Except -for some reason- it wouldn't post my comment... Had to copy/paste it via Vivaldi.)
Over the last few months I've tried many software-oriented "fixes", and none has really worked. I finally found someone who'd admit that it was a hardware problem: Something under the hood is causing excessive heat! (The machine's case is hot to the touch, but not so much that you could fry an egg on it -- unless you like yours runny.:)
And -I confess- I wouldn't be without this version of Opera, old as it is. I'll likely never completely abandon 11.64!
For much the same reason, among others, I'll keep Opera Mail around. And jEdit!
Watching the CPU monitor's 4 cores (...2 are "virtual") run like an energetic spastic four-banger headed for an inevitable seizing is a lot of fun, when I can do so while I actuall continue to use my computer! And seek your commiseration...? :)
Well, it's dinner time. I shall return. (Yes, ersi, that's a threat! :)
A hardware problem requires a hardware solution https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVVecO5CNX0
Sorry if your Mac Mini can't play the video - then buy a new computer, a proper one this time. I got a nice Thinkpad X60 (https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-IBM-Lenovo-Thinkpad-X60s-Notebook.3445.0.html) for 15 euros.
The anti-Mac Mac repairsman whose video I showed you the other day, he says that cooling (i.e. lack of it) is one of the more serious problems on Macs, and that's by design. Apple is not forgetting to include fans on the computers, but rather markets the missing fan as if it were an extra feature that somehow makes for a better (and pricier) product. On some occasion when the fan is included, it is deliberately misaligned, again as an extra service for the customers.
Even though I do not use Macs, I pay some attention to cooling. All the computers I own are bought second-hand, I have opened them up and taken a look inside to clean things up a bit if needed. And when I set up my desktop environment (around Linux obviously, never anything else in this life anymore), one of the things I put on the statusbar is the temperature.
Mac is allegedly close enough to BSD under the hood. This means it should be possible to install any free and open-source desktop environment or window manager on it. Or at least conky (https://teejeetech.com/conky-manager/) to show the system temperature.
I am simply assuming that those solutions would work, having never tried a modern Mac. Not my fault, if attempts to install them would screw up your computer even further. But please definitely report back if it happens.
Earlier (https://dndsanctuary.eu/index.php?topic=447.msg83839#msg83839) I discovered
bc, a command-line calculator for basic arithmetic that is likely preinstalled in your Linux. Now I discovered
dc, another command-line calculator, likely preinstalled in your Linux, except that
dc operates on a stack like financial calculators do.
'dc' is a reverse-polish desk calculator which supports unlimited precision arithmetic. [...] Normally 'dc' reads from the standard input; if any command arguments are given to it, they are filenames, and 'dc' reads and executes the
contents of the files instead of reading from standard input.
[...]
To enter a number in 'dc', type the digits (using upper case letters 'A' through 'F' as "digits" when working with input bases greater than ten), with an optional decimal point. [...] To enter two numbers in succession, separate them with spaces or newlines; these have no meaning as commands.
Basic arithmetic:
'+'
Pops two values off the stack, adds them, and pushes the result.
The precision of the result is determined only by the values of the
arguments, and is enough to be exact.
'-'
Pops two values, subtracts the first one popped from the second one
popped, and pushes the result.
'*'
Pops two values, multiplies them, and pushes the result. The
number of fraction digits in the result is the largest of the
precision value, the number of fraction digits in the multiplier,
or the number of fraction digits in the multiplicand; but in no
event exceeding the number of digits required for an exact result.
'/'
Pops two values, divides the second one popped from the first one
popped, and pushes the result. The number of fraction digits is
specified by the precision value.
'%'
Pops two values, computes the remainder of the division that the
'/' command would do, and pushes that. The value computed is the
same as that computed by the sequence 'Sd dld/ Ld*-' .
'^'
Pops two values and exponentiates, using the first value popped as
the exponent and the second popped as the base. The fraction part
of the exponent is ignored. The precision value specifies the
number of fraction digits in the result.
'v'
Pops one value, computes its square root, and pushes that. The
maximum of the precision value and the precision of the argument is
used to determine the number of fraction digits in the result.
Another thing worth noting is that the stack and the answers are not visible unless explicitly called. Therefore the most important call:
'p'
Prints the value on the top of the stack, without altering the
stack. A newline is printed after the value.
So first, launch it by issuing
dc in the terminal. Second, type two numbers either with a space between them (and operators-commands with no space required) or in successive lines, as follows, either
3 2+p
for "put three and two, add them, and show me the result"; or
3
2
+p
for the same. More calls:
'd'
Duplicates the value on the top of the stack, pushing another copy
of it. Thus, '4d*p' computes 4 squared and prints it.
'r'
Reverses the order of (swaps) the top two values on the stack.
'k'
Pops the value off the top of the stack and uses it to set the
precision.
Therefore,
2k6 3/p
results in 2.00 as in "set two-decimal precision, put 6 and 3, divide them head-first and show me". And immediately after this
6 3r/p
results in .50 as in "6 and 3, divide them tail-first and show me".
Some stack calls:
'f'
Prints the entire contents of the stack without altering anything.
This is a good command to use if you are lost or want to figure out
what the effect of some command has been.
'c'
Clears the stack, rendering it empty.
And
zp shows the depth of the stack (the number of items in the stack).
To quit, type q.
That sounds very 1970s. ;)
GnuCash is bloat. What if you need minimal double-entry accounting? Try BSD Ledger :)
John Wiegley's Ledger program (https://ledger-cli.org/) is intended for those who want to keep their transactions in an easy plain-text format. You just create a list of them in text files, and then run the utility to produce reports, balance sheets, budgets etc. All very cool, but entering stuff in an editor can be very tedious which is why I switched to GnuCash.
Entering accounting information in a text file can be tedious indeed, until you discover ledger-mode for Emacs (https://github.com/ledger/ledger-mode), provided by the developers of Ledger itself!
- Ledger never creates or modifies your data. Your entries are kept in a text file that you maintain, and you can rest assured, no automated tool will ever change that data.
- The amount of data required by Ledger is minimal. It figures out from looking at your data what you mean by it and how you want it reported back to you. Accounts are created as they appear; currencies are created as they’re referenced. Anywhere that a value can be calculated, you can leave it out.
- Ledger is a double-entry accounting tool, meaning that all entries must balance.
A more full-featured version of Ledger is Hledger, a reimplementation of Ledger in Haskell. Hledger is largely compatible with Ledger, but not identical. Hledger works around the need for an external text editor by means of the interactive
hledger add function. However, there is also a specific hledger-mode for Emacs (https://github.com/narendraj9/hledger-mode) even though ledger-mode might largely work.
hledger is a Plain Text Accounting system. Some strengths of the PTA approach:
- Runs on your local computer, keeping your financial data private and under your control
- Simple model of operation: put a log of transactions in, get reports out
- Simple, expressive, human-readable, future-proof plain text format
- Can be version controlled, eg with Git, to safeguard your data, track changes, or collaborate
- Edit with your favourite text editor, or a data entry UI, or import from other formats
- Easy to script, automate, and integrate into custom workflows
- Lightweight, fast, non-distracting to use
- Great for learning more of double-entry bookkeeping and accounting.
Besides having more features and extensions, Hledger also seems more extensively documented. However, both Ledger and Hledger are being actively maintained. Edit: I think both of them are worth trying side by side, as they seem different enough. An important difference I discovered is that Hledger apparently has difficulties understanding the file if it's written in other than English, whereas Ledger can munch through the file, calculating everything properly as long as the terminology is consistent, regardless of the language.
termpub to view epub files in a terminal emulator.
Now there's even some competition in the terminal epub-reader space https://github.com/aeosynth/bk#comparison
Dclock may not have a minimal codebase, but it does little, so I guess it qualifies as a minimal app.
Dclock displays a graphical window with clocktime in digital format only. No analog.
Some keybinds and options:
- m toggles 24-hour format
- s toggles seconds display
- d toggles date display
- q quits
From terminal, dclock -miltime -seconds launches in 24-hour format with seconds.
More options at man dclock.