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The Command-Line Office

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Re: The Command-Line Office

#21

Post by parm289 »

doorhammer wrote: post #8

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…

You might be interested in the axlsx ruby gem: https://github.com/randym/axlsx

Haven't used it, but it allows the creation of pretty complex spreadsheets from ruby code. Not sure if it is able to read from spreadsheets, but it could be one part of the service layer.

Re: The Command-Line Office

#22

Post by [deleted] »

doorhammer wrote: post #20
omaranto wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

[deleted]

Re: The Command-Line Office

#23

Post by russellallen »

dfc wrote: post #19
russellallen wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, I'm not making that distinction. I'm just saying that text editors and word processors have historically and up to this day been somewhat different beasts written for different audiences with different focuses on their features.

Sure, I can do emacs with softwrapping to write my next legal contract. I can also do text editing in Word for my next LaTex document. But I wouldn't want to.

This is not an obscure distinction to make.

Sidebar: Actually I much prefer a recent Word to WordPerfect 5.1. But the question was command line tools, and WordPerfect 5.1 is a good example of a terminal based document creation tool focused on creating, well, documents. It should be easily possible to make a modern equivalent - a terminal based editor focused narrowly on the creation of the same sorts of documents Word is good at. But I don't know of one, and a tricked out emacs doesn't really get there.

Re: The Command-Line Office

#24

Post by brudgers »

dfc wrote: post #19
russellallen wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

WordPerfect was great because it was essentially a text editor with a markup language. When formatting wasn't coming out quite right it could be debugged easily with by pressing the key to "reveal codes".

The other thing that made WordPerfect great was their technical support. Free and unlimited over the phone...and they new what they were talking about and if it was a genuine bug, they would have an engineer call you back on their dime. Or at least that's what happened when I found a bug in Summer of 1992.

Microsoft Word buries its formatting. Sometimes it's easier to just nuke a file to text and reformat the whole thing than to try to solve conflicting formats overlapping.

Re: The Command-Line Office

#26

Post by dnr »

zx2c4 wrote: post #5

The author of this article uses pass [1] for password management. I'm the author of pass, if anyone here has any questions. [1] http://www.zx2c4.com/projects/password-store/

I've been using it for a while, thanks! I had my own cli-based password manager, but yours is simpler and better.

I've made a few tiny hacks to make it work better for me: - add a default length to the generate command - allow abbreviating 'generate' as 'gen' - default to copying to clipboard instead of stdout - use xsel instead of xclip (no real reason except I already had it installed everywhere)

Re: The Command-Line Office

#28

Post by archagon »

dfc wrote: post #19
russellallen wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Re: The Command-Line Office

#30

Post by ygra »

ams6110 wrote: 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.
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