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The Command-Line Office

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51–60 of 67 posts

Re: The Command-Line Office

#52
I'm writing a book, in my terminal. Have been for a while now, maybe 6 months, and all done through an amazing application called Wordgrinder. An old version should be in your distros repository (I know it's in Debian anyway). It's awesome to boot up to TTY1 and just start writing, no distractions possible. It's also entirely written in C and Lua so it's quite fun to hack on as well.

Re: The Command-Line Office

#53
I've finally hit upon an electronic calendar scenario I am happy enough with to try for a few months. I use calcurse, with the main directory for daily, and subdirectories for Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, and Yearly.

I have aliases defined to reach these subdirectories because I am lazy:

       # calcurse stuff
	export Week='-D .calcurse/Weekly'
	export Month='-D .calcurse/Monthly'
	export Quarter='-D .calcurse/Quarterly'
	export Year='-D .calcurse/Yearly'
I use tmux and a startup script to open daily, weekly, and monthly

  #!/bin/bash
	# Start a session named cal, name the window "Day", 
	# pane.  Detach the session for the setup process.
	tmux new -s cal -n Day -d
	# Create second window named "Week", split it and      select left pane
	tmux new-window -t cal:1 -n 'Week'
	# Create a third window named "Month", split and select left
	tmux new-window -t cal:2 -n 'Month'
	# Load the calendars
	## Note ^M and Enter seem to do the same thing
	tmux send-keys -t cal:0 'calcurse' ^M  
	tmux send-keys -t cal:1 'calcurse $Week' ^M
	tmux send-keys -t cal:2 'calcurse $Month' Enter
	# Select window 0 and re-attach the session so we can reach it.
	tmux select-window -t cal:0
	tmux attach -t cal
Now I can set up tasks and priorities, and update according to the work plan. Share via rsyn. And not dependent on the cloud (I can rsync to a stick). Drawback; it is not integrated with Evolution or Thunderbird.

Re: The Command-Line Office

#54
post #29

Shameless plug for more terminal-based slide/presentation software: now with fading, 256 colour transitions and experimental PDF export! http://github.com/jclulow/vtmc

allow for both the Correct and the American spellings …

Very funny. :-)

Re: The Command-Line Office

#55
post #29

Shameless plug for more terminal-based slide/presentation software: now with fading, 256 colour transitions and experimental PDF export! http://github.com/jclulow/vtmc

Very nice! I have made one as well[1], it is based on Markdown and not nearly as fancy.

[1]: https://github.com/arnemart/slid.js

Re: The Command-Line Office

#56
post #38

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.

Wordstar before then. It's a real shame that it is still legally encumbered, I'd love to use it on a modern system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordstar I actually found the other day I have a ROM for Wordwise+, the first word processor I ever used, for the BBC Micro. I might see if I can get away with doing some "real work" in it :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordwise

Had a Microsoft Z-80 card in my Apple ][ just to run CP/M just to run Wordstar. Once AppleWorks came out, never booted to CP/M again. Also, ImageWriter and Epson MX100. :-)

Re: The Command-Line Office

#57
post #30
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.

Or with ed. But to many that's equally painful.

Or, God forbid, MS-DOS's version "edlin".

Re: The Command-Line Office

#58
post #41

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.

Many people would role their eyes at the idea of using a chain of console tools for document production, think of it as contrived. But it's not such a fancy idea. One of the first things to work on unix was roff, an ancestor of the man page system. It processed text documents into a printable form. Most serious document production company (publishing companies and newspapers; legal firms are probably less sophisticat…

The mainstream tool will be some kind of style editor. Maybe it'll incorporate a spellcheck and some other monolithic features. There'll be a pipeline underneath - to send things to paper or web or archive or accounts.

LyX is already (mostly) there: http://lyx.org While it's mostly LaTeX based, I could easily see it using any number of backends (another feature of pipelining underneath), such as markdown, roff, etc.

Re: The Command-Line Office

#59
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wait, can you style text in Emacs? Fonts? Colors? Bold, underline, italics? Isn't that the whole point of a word processor?

Yes you can do all of these things in emacs.
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