DSL Talk

I almost started to like flua. Then i found the esc-key closes the application. I might get interested again if there is a good solution for this anoing thing.

esc key is a keyboard shortcut to escape from application.
I like keyboard shortcuts. I put many of them into the control panel.

What I had trouble with was finding commands that Flua understands. I finally saw that I could look at a Lua 4.0 manual to get them.

Since your post I've been wondering what the coolest posible thing to make in Flua is. The best I could come up with was an IRC client. I see that there is a /KNOPPIX/usr/lib/libluasocket.so.2 library, and I wondered if you had any way of loading it or using it in Flua? That might open up some oportunities.

The Ion2 (window manager) extension in the repository also uses Lua...may be something else to play around with.

alt-f4, ctrl-x, ctrl-q are all good shortcuts to close an application.
esc is a good key to cancel a dialog. if this http://www.fltk.org/faq.php?17 can be done in flua, then i am happy.

Hmm, poked around a bit, and now have Lua (5) running on my Psion (Symbian OS) - coolness.

As an added plus, it's interpreter/compiler has a *much* smaller install footprint than Perl does (about 300kb vs 3Mb). Will have to rewrite some of my Perl file crunching scripts in lua to see how speed compares on the 'ole 18MHz ARM CPU.

At a glance of their pages I don't think Lua-FLTK works on the Psion - bummer. Oh well, it'll still be better if it doesn't take 5+ seconds to fire up the compiler, like Perl does.

I found this star trek lua game on Tom's root boot disk site, of all places. It's an ANSI/curses style game, very Ol' School, but it's an example of what can be done with a little imagination. Oh, those crazy ANSI escape codes.

Given that Flua can be made to print to the STDOUT and read from STDIN, is there a good way to make some of the programs more universal? Say checking for a running X windows and writing an ANSI menu instead of a dialog if someone is "text only" at that moment. Can you even check for a running X windows?

Another thought I had that might be nice was that we could make better interfaces to some of the dsl packages, especially the greens. Take xdesktopwaves. I had to put it into it's own directory under /opt and it works fine as long as you call it from that location. But what if a user wants to call it? He/She needs to know where it is first. And there are many more options than I provided in the menu choices: a user might want to run -rain 2 instead of -rain 5. Had I made a nice flua dialog, they could have chosen any value (0-10) they wanted. Dialogs can provide a nice intermediate step between the command line and the user.

It seems to me that Flua/lua is really only a window/button language. Anything "hard core" needs to be done elsewhere. Most of the scripts in 0.9.0.1 look like they rely on "pipe" files (files created by piping the output of other programs). Can it call libraries itself? It's more of a buffer between the multitude of command line options and the user than the next coming of Forth (but I still wait...).