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The Command-Line Office

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11–20 of 67 posts

Re: The Command-Line Office

#11
I'm a big command line fan, but vi/emac/nano are not word processors. They're text editors.

You might be able to get close if you are using them to edit Markdown and running it through Pandoc (especially if you add in a non-commandline PDF viewer). But still.

WordPerfect 5.1 - now that was a curses/command line word processor :) I don't know of a modern equivalent though.

Re: The Command-Line Office

#13

I'm a big command line fan, but vi/emac/nano are not word processors. They're text editors. You might be able to get close if you are using them to edit Markdown and running it through Pandoc (especially if you add in a non-commandline PDF viewer). But still. WordPerfect 5.1 - now that was a curses/command line word processor :) I don't know of a modern equivalent though.

Also, vi/emacs/nano are not one would call "command-line" text editors (they are text-mode/console-based though). See "ed" for one.

Re: The Command-Line Office

#14
post #12

The author seems to be advocating text mode, not strictly command-line. Editing files with sed is command-line; editing them with vi or emacs or nano is not.

Maybe terminal is a better phrase I should of used than command-line, or maybe non-X or non-Windowing environment

Re: The Command-Line Office

#15

This is convenient timing for me. I was just thinking about dual booting to a stripped down cli only arch install on my netbook for fun. I hadn't even thought about having some basic spreadsheet functionality. Should be interesting to mess around with. Not an office app, but I think tmux is probably my favorite all around need-to-have, for when I'm working cli only. edit: this also makes me think it wouldn't be too h…

Using a cli for everything is an extreme proposition! You'll probably get tired of it quickly and choose to add some fullscreen text mode programs to the mix, like vim or emacs. For a "full featured" console environment, add some programs that use the frame buffer to display images, you can probably setup your netbook to be pretty serviceable without installing a windowing system at all.

Re: The Command-Line Office

#16

I'm a big command line fan, but vi/emac/nano are not word processors. They're text editors. You might be able to get close if you are using them to edit Markdown and running it through Pandoc (especially if you add in a non-commandline PDF viewer). But still. WordPerfect 5.1 - now that was a curses/command line word processor :) I don't know of a modern equivalent though.

What is your definition of "word processor"? Emacs + auctex? Emacs + orgmode? Words are text.

Do you feel better if section headings are bigger and take up more space than the text you are supposed to be working on:

latex: https://i.stack.imgur.com/etFst.png

org-mode: http://blog.nozav.org/public/images/tangotango_org.png

org-mode with pd preview: http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/lsYdK0C2RvQ/maxresdefault.jpg

Or is emacs excluded from being a word processor because you can also use it for powerpoint presentations: http://salomie.ro/tudor/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/orgmode_p...

Re: The Command-Line Office

#17
post #16

I'm a big command line fan, but vi/emac/nano are not word processors. They're text editors. You might be able to get close if you are using them to edit Markdown and running it through Pandoc (especially if you add in a non-commandline PDF viewer). But still. WordPerfect 5.1 - now that was a curses/command line word processor :) I don't know of a modern equivalent though.

What is your definition of "word processor"? Emacs + auctex? Emacs + orgmode? Words are text. Do you feel better if section headings are bigger and take up more space than the text you are supposed to be working on: latex: https://i.stack.imgur.com/etFst.png org-mode: http://blog.nozav.org/public/images/tangotango_org.png org-mode with pd preview: http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/lsYdK0C2RvQ/maxresdefault.jpg Or is emacs exclu…

Well Emacs can almost but not quite be everything of course.

But this is a pretty common distinction, surely?

Words are text, but word processors have historically been focused on preparing documents for printing (or nowdays viewing a visual representation of a printed document onscreen, eg PDF).

They handle differing visual layout (fonts, page breaks, margins, indenting). They are softwrapped and paragraph based not line based. Often they deal with formatting through styles - headers, bullet points, numbering. They usually handle inclusion of tables, images and other non-text elements.

The most common example of a word processor, Word, also handles collaborative writing with tracked changes and notes, and has inbuilt features such as on the fly word count, spelling and grammar checks.

As I said, for a command line word processor look at WordPerfect for DOS or equivalent.

What you are saying (and it is not entirely wrong) is that you can approximate a word processor by matching a text editor with a bunch of other programs (TeX, Pandoc, aspell etc). But that doesn't make the text editor a word processor.

Re: The Command-Line Office

#19
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your definition of "word processor"? Emacs + auctex? Emacs + orgmode? Words are text. Do you feel better if section headings are bigger and take up more space than the text you are supposed to be working on: latex: https://i.stack.imgur.com/etFst.png org-mode: http://blog.nozav.org/public/images/tangotango_org.png org-mode with pd preview: http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/lsYdK0C2RvQ/maxresdefault.jpg Or is emacs exclu…

Well Emacs can almost but not quite be everything of course. But this is a pretty common distinction, surely? Words are text, but word processors have historically been focused on preparing documents for printing (or nowdays viewing a visual representation of a printed document onscreen, eg PDF). They handle differing visual layout (fonts, page breaks, margins, indenting). They are softwrapped and paragraph based not…

The unstated distinction you are making is between a program a novice can use for word processing and a program that requires some level of experience. I will grant that ed/edlin/nano are not word processors. But excluding emacs from the category is just as absurd as including ed.

Have you used emacs in the past decade? Some of your requirements are laughable. Softwrapping? visual-line-mode has been baked in since 23. Word count? wordcountmode. Tables? I will take orgtbl mode over the libreoffice/ms-word interface any day. Bullet points? Nothing comes close to orgmode for manipulating/moving/adding bullet points.

Apple's Pages did not get "track changes" until 2012. Was it just a text editor prior to that?

Sidebar: It is kind of funny that you like WP 5.1 and are a lawyer. Were you ever a lawyer in the states? The only people I have ever heard gush over WP5.1 were lawyers. I never realized the fetish was global.

Re: The Command-Line Office

#20

This is convenient timing for me. I was just thinking about dual booting to a stripped down cli only arch install on my netbook for fun. I hadn't even thought about having some basic spreadsheet functionality. Should be interesting to mess around with. Not an office app, but I think tmux is probably my favorite all around need-to-have, for when I'm working cli only. edit: this also makes me think it wouldn't be too h…

Using a cli for everything is an extreme proposition! You'll probably get tired of it quickly and choose to add some fullscreen text mode programs to the mix, like vim or emacs. For a "full featured" console environment, add some programs that use the frame buffer to display images, you can probably setup your netbook to be pretty serviceable without installing a windowing system at all.

Yeah; I use vim as my editor of choice (outside of my job which is actually .net, heh).

I have other computers I use a lot, and I'd never 100% give up on gui's. Mostly I'd be setting up an environment that boots quickly, reduces background processes, and gives me a nice retro place to code in when I'm tooling with haskell or c. I also like having an environment that I've fully optimized for keyboard only.

The excel part would just be an interesting convergence of what I do at work with windows, and what I use mostly at home.

I've never messed with frame buffers in terminal; that'd be really interesting. Maybe I'll see if I can get to something more fully functional after all. I've always gone pretty much easy-mode when it comes to linux. I want to get more hands-on with the distro

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