L123: A Lotus 1-2-3–style terminal spreadsheet with modern Excel compatibility
11–20 of 24 posts
Re: L123: A Lotus 1-2-3–style terminal spreadsheet with modern Excel compatibility
#12Re: L123: A Lotus 1-2-3–style terminal spreadsheet with modern Excel compatibility
#13It would be great to have a terminal compatible Wordperfect alternative, like in the MS DOS days. Can you use Vim to edit documents for printing?
Re: L123: A Lotus 1-2-3–style terminal spreadsheet with modern Excel compatibility
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, if you use a formatter like LaTeX. The beauty part is, "Reveal Codes" is always on!
As a big fan of WordPerfect on my first DOS machine (286 clone), I agree. I respect authors like GRRM for sticking with WordStar, but whenever I get nostalgic and wondering about WordPerfect in DosBox, I remember I use emacs and typst. All the good things about WordPerfect, but vastly superior.
Re: L123: A Lotus 1-2-3–style terminal spreadsheet with modern Excel compatibility
#15Re: L123: A Lotus 1-2-3–style terminal spreadsheet with modern Excel compatibility
#16I don't have any nostalgia it, I just appreciate how thoughtfully it was designed for data-input efficiency. I actually ported the official UNIX version of 1-2-3 to Linux a few years ago, I still use it regularly. It uses some tricks to get the original UNIX binaries working on Linux: https://github.com/taviso/123elf
I had been thinking about how to add UTF-8 support, it only supports LMBCS (Lotus Multi-Byte Character Set) by default. It's actually worse than that, it stores everything internally as LMBCS but in a lot of cases can only display ASCII, so it transliterates a lot of characters (e.g. é -> e).
It's also possible to run the real DOS version in dosemu - in terminal mode it's basically indistinguishable from an ncurses application, although dosemu is just cleverly sampling the framebuffer and translating it on-the-fly.
I wrote a display driver to make that work a little better: https://github.com/taviso/lotusdrv
Re: L123: A Lotus 1-2-3–style terminal spreadsheet with modern Excel compatibility
#17Re: L123: A Lotus 1-2-3–style terminal spreadsheet with modern Excel compatibility
#18Re: L123: A Lotus 1-2-3–style terminal spreadsheet with modern Excel compatibility
#19It would be great to have a terminal compatible Wordperfect alternative, like in the MS DOS days. Can you use Vim to edit documents for printing?
I started this project because I was nostalgic for Lotus 1-2-3, but I really really really loved WordPerfect. I'm afraid of starting that project, however, as it might take over my life :) I used to use WordPerfect 5.1 on a 386 PC to edit my school newspaper with multiple columns, graphics, custom fonts, etc. No WYSIWYG, just the power of Alt+F3 (Reveal Codes)!
Reveal codes in a small way made me swear off word processing for good. We had an office document in wp 8 or 9 if remember correctly, you know the type, it lived on a shared drive and whoever needed to make changes did. anyhow it was a complete mess, internal corruption all over the place, no consistent style. one night I sat down with it and thanks to reveal codes I was able to clean it up. At which point I had a revelation, most of the sins of the document were due to the WYSIWYG interface. I was able to fix it because I could(almost) see the source. Why not cut the middleman write the document in source and render it to the final form. So I rewrote it in html. and have had a lingering resentment of word processors ever since.
You know why they call them word processors right?... Ever see what a food processor does to food?
Re: L123: A Lotus 1-2-3–style terminal spreadsheet with modern Excel compatibility
#20It would be great to have a terminal compatible Wordperfect alternative, like in the MS DOS days. Can you use Vim to edit documents for printing?
I started this project because I was nostalgic for Lotus 1-2-3, but I really really really loved WordPerfect. I'm afraid of starting that project, however, as it might take over my life :) I used to use WordPerfect 5.1 on a 386 PC to edit my school newspaper with multiple columns, graphics, custom fonts, etc. No WYSIWYG, just the power of Alt+F3 (Reveal Codes)!
My boss was impressed, thanked me profusely, and told me to STFU about it. We’d come to work in the morning and knock out the day’s work in an hour, piddle around until lunch, then go home and enjoy the San Diego weather for the rest of the day.
That was a pretty terrific couple of months.