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Topic: dsl texttools

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gunnix

Group: Members
Posts: 6
Joined: Mar. 2005

Posted: Sep. 10 2005,23:58

I'd love to see a project like dsl but then focused on texttools instead of the quite clumsy gui dsl (no offence!) has.

grml is a great texttool focused live cd distro. They have nice scripts to setup mutt cfg file, etc. But it's quite big. dsl on the other hand is a very small distro but I don't like the gui.

I'd like a mix of both. Something like dsl with ion3 wm, muttng, elinks, ncftp, cplay, madplay, ctorrent, slrn, aterm, vim, xzgv, less (with lesspipe.sh script to view .doc, etc), giftcurs, mplayer, firefox maybe as backup.., irssi.

Anyone know of a distro in that direction?

I don't have a computer and not electricity where I live (I don't care to have it for now), but I've always loved to be on the internet and install+configure computers... If I had a comp,electricity, and internet i'd probably try remastering dsl.

I find many ncurses based apps very user friendly and efficient. Muttng is a great example, my computernoobie girlfriend had no trouble using it. My mom prefers the simple interface over outlook express or anything too.

I think dsl went in the wrong direction making everything click and point. No, i did explain myself wrong. dsl always was in that direction and does a very good job at it. It's just that I feel it could be better for myself and others in a texttool, keyboard driven focused form. Not only do I think they are more usable but with a transparent aterm, a good looking background and a nice ion3 theme ut definatly looks good and robust. Not clumsy, no overlapping windows, ...

And the less viewer with lesspipe.sh script (to view html, doc, pdf, ...) is great. What if dsl used it and improved it to show ppt, xls and more too? 1 command to view multiple types of files is great for user friendlyness. I was thinking of having some scripts like "view" and "edit" which then automaticly find the needed real app to view or edit the file in question (using mailcap or mimetypes or whatever). Making the command line simple in use is, I think, easier then making a simple to use and resource efficient gui which looks good as well.

I use the numpad to navigate trough frames and apps. It's great.

I don't want this to sound like I found something new or that I have this superb desktop or anything ;). I just wanna see if there are some other texttool fanatics out here on the dsl forums

grtz

mikshaw

Group: Members
Posts: 4856
Joined: July 2004

Posted: Sep. 11 2005,01:36

Mutt or similar text email application would be great in DSL....it still amazes me that DSL has only a gui email client.

As far as going in the wrong direction, i disagree completely. DSL has always been a general purpose distro, and it caters to a wide variety of users. Restricting it to text configuration and keyboard-driven tools would be a mistake IMO. It would alienate the noobies who currently seem to find DSL a very easy distro to use.
There is an Ion2 myDSL extension in the repository for those who want it. I didn't keep up with it because i'm currently building wmii, which is similar to Ion but better =o). Personally i think it's a better idea to allow new users to have a system with which they can be comfortable, while those who can customize are free to do so....no point in making a "general-purpose" distro too geeky when the geeks have the ability to do that ourselves.

--------------
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/index.html

ke4nt1

Group: Members
Posts: 2329
Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: Sep. 11 2005,02:35

There is the elmo.dsl in the repository..
A small light surprisingly good email client that is cli only.

Same with ctorrent.

easy to add..

73
ke4nt

gunnix

Group: Members
Posts: 6
Joined: Mar. 2005

Posted: Sep. 11 2005,07:59

@ mikshaw: yea I don't think dsl is going in wrong direction at all either. I better just deleted the sentence instead of saying it was wrong afterwards. It would be more clear. It's going great. I'd never wish that dsl would be text only or whatever. But that there would be a texttool kind of dsl distro, which is easy for noobs as well, and powerful for experts. (not that dsl isn't powerful, don't understand me wrong plz)
Because I think it would be something obvious to use texttools when efficiency of resource usage is to be maximized.

I'd like to make such a distro or form of dsl.
I would want to get a lot of stuff out of dsl, or make some kind of ncurses variants.

A screenshot of the interface I'd have in mind (nothing special): http://users.skynet.be/six/gpure/screenshot.png

wmii-2 I tried a bit but it's definatly slower then ion. There seems to be a delay in some things I do (even on a 2ghz!). It uses more resources.
It looks very interesting, nice features but also maybe a bit too complex. It does seem nice structured though.
At the end I did not see anything special in wmii that ion3 can't.

Is there anyone here with such an interest for texttools..

How long do you think it would minimally take to remaster dsl, get out many apps and add many.. for someone who never tried it?
Because I have not much time on computers.

grtz

3 replies since Sep. 10 2005,23:58

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