Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Command-Line Office

ebeab.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 67 posts

Re: The Command-Line Office

#41

Post by cturner »

russellallen wrote: post #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.

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 sophisticated) have a similar pipeline within their firm. Text (raw or rigidly styled), version-controlled, running through a pipeline of reviews and signoffs and markup and arrangement.

   > I don't know of a modern equivalent
I don't think monolithic word processors will be a feature of the future. 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.

We'll think much more in terms of snippets of styled data, and its lifecycle. We'll laugh at memories of these laborious monolithic word processing systems, and how we thought that this was productivity.

Re: The Command-Line Office

#42

Post by reirob »

timonv wrote: post #40

Hah. Great article! Also: * https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup for decentralised and lightning fast email. Written in Ruby, very hackable. * http://orgmode.org/ Although I'm a vim user, I use orgmode for: All my todos, clocking hours for clients, spreadsheets for my training, research notes, calendar, anything else that needs organising and planning.

How do you use orgmode in vim? I would love to have orgmode in vim.

Re: The Command-Line Office

#43

Post by abdullahkhalids »

dfc wrote: post #16
russellallen wrote: post #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.

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…

The crucial distinction between a word processor and a text editor is that the word processor hides the formatting instructions from the user, and instead displays formatted text. Text editors display text in all it's glory. Nothing is hidden.

Re: The Command-Line Office

#44

Post by ghoul2 »

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/

Whoa, fancy seeing you here.

pass is pretty much the ONLY password manager I have actually found useful, and I have tried a LOT of them. I wrote about it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7175888

Also, I have a personal use "fork" (scare quotes cause its not really a fork, just an personal work-in-progress) on github:

https://github.com/abgoyal/password-store2

Its an attempt to fix the "leak" of sitenames/usernames I talked about in the HN thread linked above. I am sorry, I have not gotten around to fixing the READMEs etc yet. Is this something you would be interested in merging?

In any case, big thanks for making "pass". Its a pleasure to use.

Re: The Command-Line Office

#45

Post by ygra »

616c wrote: post #31
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 eventually want to make a GUI equivalent as I learn to program, and had some other ideas that you have inspired as I try to get back to programming. THANK YOU! I love your tool and it is one of my favorite tools. I check your git for other cool stuff as I stumbled upon your stuff many times. Question: would you want to add a parameter to escape non-aplhanumeric characters? It took me a while of playing to figure ou…

Random question (I have no clue of mutt or Unix shells (the code there looks like one)): But isn't that a problem of the receiving application? You can't really ask every single application that outputs text to sprout arguments to support every possible escaping that might be needed eventually. And whatever comes out of the `foo` part shouldn't be interpreted or parsed anyway, right?

Re: The Command-Line Office

#46

Post by JetSpiegel »

gaius wrote: post #39
brudgers wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

You need a ruthless discipline to use Word in anger, do everything through styles and nothing "manually" otherwise it all goes to hell. Unfortunately Word makes it all too easy to do.

Which makes it nearly impossible to collaborate with other that don't think like that.

It seems like nobody I work with even knows what styles are.

Re: The Command-Line Office

#47

Post by icebraining »

reirob wrote: post #42
timonv wrote: post #40

Hah. Great article! Also: * https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup for decentralised and lightning fast email. Written in Ruby, very hackable. * http://orgmode.org/ Although I'm a vim user, I use orgmode for: All my todos, clocking hours for clients, spreadsheets for my training, research notes, calendar, anything else that needs organising and planning.

How do you use orgmode in vim? I would love to have orgmode in vim.

I think timonv uses vim except for orgmode. In any case, there's https://github.com/hsitz/VimOrganizer

Re: The Command-Line Office

#50

Post by patrikj »

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/

Great tool! I found out about it just now from the article.

Any thoughts of cross platform compatibility for the future? I find one of the best features of KeePass is the fact that it can be used on all my computers (even the ones not running Linux).

Post reply on HN