DSL Tips and Tricks :: mousless OS



i just took look at the documentation of fluxbox - it seems like that thing can do everything which i want it to do with a little effort of time to setup the keybindings as i need them. Should be the work of a day for the whole thing to setup. very nice.
i guess i´ll have a sleepless night tonight and loads of things to do ;-)

Thanks for your support.

Greetz
Escay
Escay,
I was just wondering about this myself - I am a keyboard person too!  I'd love to hear how this goes for you and perhaps you can give some pointers to this noob!

MDG
hi mdg,

i am just @ the beginning of the configuration of the system for use without a mouse.

what i can tell you so far, is too read the documentation of every single programm. as i see things right now, it is possible to have a softwareset which is completly keyboardcontrolled.

So where do we have to start?
if you use jwm as WM it is quite easy to configure a controlset for your Keyboard. In your /home/dsl directory you will find a file .jwmrc - that is where you can configure your keybindings. see the jwm homepage for more details.

i am not sure right now, if there is an "embedded"(?) Keygrabber in JWM.

AFAIK in Fluxbox there is on. When i got it the right way, you need a keygrabber to launch applications via keystrokes (as windowskey + e launches the explorer) - i am not really familiar with linux now - but i am working on that ;-)

What i can do is, making the config and posting it step by step if you like....

greetz
escay
Hi,

I am trying to do the same right now basically (: I'm amazed with ion2 window manager, I think If you could spend some time with it it would benefit in many ways. I've tried wmii-3 yesterday and it lacks (or I couldn't find) features that I found in ion2 (from wm_apps repo).

By the way is it possible to compile ion3 on DSL ? Or upgrade lua to 5.1 ?

I haven't touched a mouse for about one year (just the touchpad) so I know some good console apps to start with, I try to choose aps that can be configured to use transparent terminals and If you wish can provide you my configs later.

Ok, now my favorite apps list:

text editor: vim ( +vimshell - already ccompiled, works great - just google 'vimshell' )
when you learn keystrokes and read few tutorials (ask for links) it is really powerfull tool ( + you can go to www.vim.org and read tips & scripts sections ) I hate the way Beaver does the 'find text' action. Vim also has mouse support (6.4 - I will soon add dsl with vimshell patch (mikshaw - can I add dsl compiled with '-march=pentium-mmx' ? ) , you can compile it easily with gcc1-with-libs.dsl ) binary is just 1.1 MB and additional scripts are about 11MB - you can remove them or learn to use them (:

web browser: elinks, dillo, ffox and opera for bigger tasks. Ok, but why elinks ? -> It gives you the best 'commandline browsing experience' , has even more features than dillo, can be extended with lua, is small and fast - If you have doubts just read this , be sure to read about 'URI rewriting' <- that's the most useful feature, and fits great into mousless OS.  Elinks supports mouse and it also has experimental BitTorrent support and many other features...

pdf viewer: I found someday an app that let me view pdf's in console (not terminal) , guess you could google 'fbi fbida pdf' it's console image viewer (framebufferimage..?) and as I remember you also need gs. It converts pdf page by page to tiff, and displays it with fbi. But it was too slow for me. (linuxpackages.net - it should be there)

mp3: of course you could use mpg{123,321}, but I would choose mpd with ncmpc although personally I use noxmms ( gui-less xmms, about 90kb ) , and control it via xmmsctrl ( 20kb ) with keybindings, and I am displaying current playing songs' title with torsmo. I couldn't find ncurses based xmms playlist editor that would suit my needs (tried xcplay,ncxmms), I still find ncmpc the best. Recently I have found 'moc' (music on console), it looks like it could be it , but it has some dependencies, but I might try it in the future.

file manager: Midnight Commander - it's hard to find something better, give it transparent theme on transparent terminal , nice background and it looks ... nice (: And functionality is its other advantage, properly configured it can replace emelfm with ease.


p2p : giFT & giFTcurs (+giftares , giftfasttrack) , you can also use edonkeyclc for overnet end edonkey2000 , or mldonkey (supports overnet,ed2k,gnutella,g2,bt...) - it's really powerfull, but I've not  used it a lot, couldn't configure it properly (:
For DirectConnect you could use microdc

rss reader: snownews, it's simple and good. Some of the rss feeds you can monitor via torsmo.


irc : irssi
IM : ekg (it supports gg protocol only) I can't say anything about other messengers as I don't use them (:

Well, guess that'll be it, now I just want to encourage you to try ion2.dsl
First it'll look ugly, get ready for that.
You won't have your dockapps launched by default, you won't have a toolbar, you won't have right click menu.
Encouraged enough ? (:
Ok, don't bother with it's look , you can change it later and it can look as good as fluxbox ( I hope ) .

What do you like in fluxbox ?
tabbed windows ? +checked

nice menu ?
+you can make your own, better (: so checked

dockapps ?
+I read about it , but I'm not sure how, but... checked (:

keybindings ?
+can be done in ion

toolbar to see the windows and time and switch to other workspaces ?
+well I don't know yet, I would like to have a toolbar with a clock, cpu %,  processes , up/down k/s , uptime , raam and swap and of course title of the song playing in xmms. Ok maybe one toolbal is not enough for me (: And I would like to be able to toggle it with Mod1+<key> , and it schould have transparent background. Is it too much ?



And the most IMPORTANT : ion2 is fast, ...well rather FAST !

Did I mention that it can be totally controlled from keyboard and it can tile windows automatically for you, no need to manually resize them ?
And of course you can use it like you use fluxbox ( I mean moving windows with mouse and resize them as you wish )

And I think that the true power of ion2 is in combining those two modes of window managing

Sorry for such a long post (:

Ok, now it is really the end.

PS. I know that this comparison is not objective
PS2. And now I am about to click 'Quick Post'... hmm ... funny
Wow! Respect - that´s a bunch of information to take a closer look at. I guess there are a lot of WM´s which can be controlled by keyboard only. well, what do we have now...

ratpoisen
evil-wm
fluxbox
ion2
jwm

these are just 5 of a heck of a lot of different wm´s...

i found something on sourceforge.net i will try later.
if you´d like to have a ncurses-based multimedia-mulittalent take a look at

http://lienmp3.sourceforge.net/

(hope it´s ok to post links here)

well, i guess our goals divide a bit here. i´d like to have a keyboard driven dsl-distro which should only be altered as much as necessery. i´d say in that point: less is better.

so this means to me: use as much from the stuff which came along with dsl as possible. so what we´ve got is fluxbox or jwm. as i read before fluxbox should be the better choice because it has a keygrabber.
so here is how the config of fluxbox works:

http://fluxbox.sourceforge.net/docs/en/newdoc.keybindings.php

as you can see it is quite simple to make your own set of keybindings. i´ll go for a try tonight - and post it as an example, if you´d like to see what i´ve done.

as i posted before you can control xpdf via keyboard. an it is quite simple. the keybindings can be found in the helpfile of xpdf. if desired, i can make list an post it here

regards
escay
Next Page...
original here.