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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
FocusWriter is a cross-platform tool available to be easily installed on multiple GNU/Linux distributions, as well as Windows and Mac OS.
FocusWriter isn't super powerful, nor is it deeply extensible, but it's not entirely special feature-less either, with the FocusWriter website listing its features as:
- TXT, basic RTF, Docx, basic ODT file support
- Timers and alarms
- Daily goals
- Fully customizable themes
- Typewriter sound effects (optional)
- Auto-save (optional)
- Live statistics (optional)
- Spell-checking (optional)
- Multi-document support
- Sessions
- Portable mode (optional)
- Translated into over 20 languages
The program opens the editing interface in fullscreen on start. All you see on start is a blank text document and a wooden background; no menus, buttons or other interface elements that may get in your way. How do you interact with the program then? How do you exit it, load documents, or change some of the default options? All you need to do is move the mouse cursor to the top of the screen and move it back down a bit afterward.
Because, why not? We haven't had an all-out Vim/Emacs war in a while.
Source: https://www.ghacks.net/2018/05/06/a-look-at-focuswriter-distraction-free-text-editor-on-gnu-linux/
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Knowledge Troll on Tuesday May 08 2018, @10:43PM
The desire to say get off my lawn was almost won except then I realized someone wanted me to do that.
Anymore for projects I typically use Eclipse + CDT and EPIC. Vim in the default configuration if I need to change something on a box I'm running or any other quick job.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Snow on Tuesday May 08 2018, @10:44PM (32 children)
WIN+R notepad [Enter]. BAM! Glorious, glorious notepad. Black courier text on white background. Even spaces for letters. A row counter AND a line counter?! YES!! It has both. Find things, replace things, write things. It's all good, and notepad has your back.
For everything else there is grep and sed.
(Score: 5, Informative) by bob_super on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:05PM (13 children)
Notepad++, because I get really frustrated without column editing and selected word highlighting.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:35PM (12 children)
-sing Notepad++.
It highlights way too many things. I've gotten some of it to shut off but not enough yet.
Barebones withdrew TextEdit and replaced it with a fully-functional BBEdit demo. After thirty days some of the advances features are disabled but it's still perfectly usable.
I'm going to pay BBEdit's license fee when I get paid Real Soon Now.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:45PM (9 children)
I thought Bare Bones still had a working version of Text Wrangler (I still use it daily for some quick and dirty things). I've been using BBEdit for more than 20 years, though the UI changes in version 10 put me off it quite a bit. That being said BBEdit is certainly worth the money.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday May 09 2018, @05:12AM (8 children)
I heartily agree. Paying for BBEdit is entered into my budget for my upcoming paycheck.
The chances are quite good that I built my last QA release today. If my client's QA people are happy then I will get a check for More Money Than G-d.
BareBones replaced TextWrangler with the BBEdit demo I think a year ago.
BBEdit r0x0r5 my b0x0r5
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 09 2018, @03:32PM (7 children)
using and especially paying for a proprietary text editor is absurd and shameful.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday May 09 2018, @04:19PM
How absurd, and how shameful? Is it 60/40, or 40/60, or an even 50/50? Maybe closer to 75/25? For my part, I'd go with 70% absurd, and 30% shameful. That money could have been better spent on sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday May 09 2018, @04:20PM (2 children)
Exactly. Why on Earth should people get anything in exchange for the long hours they work to make a convenient, safe, and stable program ?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 09 2018, @07:44PM (1 child)
I assume the problem is not in the "paying" part, it's in the "proprietary" part.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Wednesday May 09 2018, @08:18PM
Exactly. Why on Earth should people get anything in exchange for the long hours they work to make a convenient, safe, and stable program ? We gotta punish those acting all uppity and selfish like the fruit of their labor is theirs, and they somehow have a right not to share their source code!
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday May 09 2018, @10:39PM (2 children)
Get back to me when I can use a Free As In Freedom editor on macOS.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @10:40PM (1 child)
Perhaps the problem is your choice of a propriety, closed OS?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday May 11 2018, @11:23PM
I I once tried to use GEdit for coding, but it had a really lame bug: it deleted all the text that was under the bottom of its window.
I put the Gimp on Bonita's Win2K box. She nearly burst into tears when she tried to use it, then begged me to uninstall it.
She thinks the highly proprietary Pegasus Mail is the best thing since sliced bread.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by urza9814 on Wednesday May 09 2018, @04:48PM (1 child)
I've configured a few custom syntax highlighting templates for Notepad++. Pretty easy to do -- just look under Settings > Style Configurator. If you want a certain element to not be highlighted, just find it and change the colors to your defaults. There's also a bunch of predefined themes if you don't want to spend too much time screwing with it...although while there's some dark themes for the syntax highlighting it doesn't affect the rest of the interface so those tend to look kinda weird...
I'm quite fond of Notepad++, but it's not quite ideal. I use it at work, because we have to use Windows and we can't get just any random software package installed...but at home I much prefer Brackets. My top choice would be Kate, but after I switched away from KDE (I'm using Enlightenment lately) and started having some stability issues with the latest releases I decided to try to switch. Tried at least a dozen different editors, and Brackets was the only one I found tolerable. The biggest issue for me though is the handling of multiple documents. For example, most of my projects have a file in the root named TODO, meaning I might have three or four documents open all with this same name. That means I need to be able to see not just the filename but also the path. But I also don't want to add entire directory structures to my documents list just to open one file. Brackets...doesn't really do that the way I want, but it's the closest compromise I've found.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday May 09 2018, @05:29PM
I'll give brackets a try
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:16PM (1 child)
> WIN+R notepad [Enter].
CTRL+space n [Enter] [launchy.net]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:51PM
Ctrl + space changes most of my keyboards to Chinese Traditional.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by corey on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:26PM (6 children)
Except if you open a file with \n's instead of \r\n's and its all on one line.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:47PM (5 children)
Exactly. That's when you open the file in WordPad ... ugh :-/
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Wednesday May 09 2018, @02:19PM (4 children)
I just saw a note somewhere that the next version of Notepad actually handles Unix line terminators. Crazy times.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 09 2018, @02:47PM (3 children)
Is there really any reason not to just treat /n as the line terminator and /r as a noop?
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday May 09 2018, @02:57PM
Classic MacOS files? Although they'd be no worse off than UNIX files these days, and probably a lot rarer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline#Representations_in_different_character_encoding_specifications [wikipedia.org] - third row down in the chart
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Wednesday May 09 2018, @03:41PM (1 child)
For those who weren't born with a phone in their hands, you should already know that
\n means New Line: the previous line is done; here begins a new one
\r means Carriage Return: the carriage should move right, placing the typewriter head at the left margin
Now, which one is hopelessly out of touch with what computers have been doing the last few decades?
But Billy Goats (curse his name forever) decided to put BOTH in EVERY text file just because he was too lazy to have his software move the carriage... whenever there still was a carriage.
(Score: 3, Informative) by hendrikboom on Friday May 11 2018, @02:25AM
Officially, the ASCII character designated by \n is a line-feed, and its official meaning is to move the printing position down one line. It is not supposed to go to the beginning of that new line. That's what \r is for. On old teletypes, you started a new line using \r\n. The \r would start the carriage returning; by the time the \n hd finished executing, the carriage would have reached the start of the line. If you coded \n\r, you would run the risk that the first character on the new line would be printed while the carriage was still returning, thus not at the start of the line.
Unix changed this by ignoring standards and established practice arbitrarily designating the line-feed character to mean new line. The device driver would insert any extra characters and delays necessary to get output appearing properly on the physical terminal.
ANSI later introduced an official newline character in the panel of extra control characters they added when they extended ASCII to an eight-bit code. That character has now been stretched to two bytes in UTF-8, but no one uses it.
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:41PM (7 children)
Snow has made himself even more pathetic in my eyes. It is so sad. He forgot to mention what Micro$erf has in your back! (Hint: what has a point and sharp edges and rhymes with "strife"?)
(Score: 2) by Snow on Wednesday May 09 2018, @01:19AM (6 children)
You can hate on MS all you want, but the fact is, the majority of us here are employed to support MS products either directly or indirectly.
Despite having both notepad++ and notepad on my Windows machine at work, I use notepad probably 10 times a day and rarely open notepad++. Notepad is much faster at opening large files, and for the most part works well enough for reading/basic manipulation of text files.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 09 2018, @05:57AM (3 children)
Extraordinary (stupid) claims require extraordinary evidence. Do you have any, Snow? Hairyfeet of the Challenge has not posted in more than a year. Other Microsoft shills, I hear, are being held in dungeons where the wifi signal is sporadic, and they have nothing but Exploder, Notebad, and Edge, mostly to see if, as in the Microsoft Movie, "Saw", they can find a way to kill themselves and thus release them selves from the suffering of being a Microsoft shill. Telemetrics on the demise will of course be uploaded to the Mother-cluster in Redmond, where the Shadows lie.
But, seriously Snow, this is not like your inane "dating" stories. Do you have any evidence that the majority of Soylentils are employed supporting the Great Satan? Or is this just a perverse assumption on your part, and a smear and a slight to the honor of each and every noble Soylentil? I may have to challenge you to a dual.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday May 09 2018, @09:40AM
Anyone with access to S/N Apache's server logs may obtain an estimate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Snow on Wednesday May 09 2018, @03:30PM (1 child)
I find it intriguing that something I have said has triggered you in such a way. My dating style has hit a personal nerve with you. Why is that, and why do you take it so personally? It's as if you feel I am personally attacking you. It's really weird.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday May 09 2018, @04:29PM
That is often times an indication that AC wants you, but doesn't feel that he/she has a chance. Smile, man, you have an anonymousey admirer! Have you been finding any presents in your car, your office, or your home, signed by "Secret Admirer"? Chicks go for that kind of thing. No presents? Then AC is probably a dude.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 09 2018, @08:21AM (1 child)
> Despite having both notepad++ and notepad on my Windows machine at work, I use notepad probably 10 times a day and rarely open notepad++. Notepad is much faster at opening large files, and for the most part works well enough for reading/basic manipulation of text files.
May I suggest trying Notepad2 [flos-freeware.ch]?
I regularly use both Notepad2 and Notepad++. N2 is the replacement for Windows' Notepad, lean and fast, in fact much faster than Notepad. I tested it just now -- for small files, they're both pretty much instant, but for larger files, depending on the file layout, N2 can be 100x faster. I had no problems opening 500MB binaries in N2 (to look for some strings), takes only a few seconds. It also offers stuff like regex search, colored syntax, rudimentary block editing, supports different line endings, etc.
(Score: 2) by Snow on Wednesday May 09 2018, @03:20PM
Very interesting! I'll check it out, thanks!
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Wednesday May 09 2018, @01:23AM
While notepad is suboptimal in nearly every situation, Microsoft does have a nice product that I really enjoy using in Visual Studio Code. It has that nice scrollbar-as-document-preview feature that Kate also has.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Justin Case on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:04PM (2 children)
No sale! When I'm writing, the mouse is a distraction. And a horrible one at that.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Wednesday May 09 2018, @02:52PM (1 child)
The only times I want my interfaces to hide from me is when I'm doing something that *requires* no interaction, like watching a movie. Otherwise I want to fucking *see* what I need.
But apparently that makes me terribly un-hip.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Touché) by Justin Case on Wednesday May 09 2018, @03:42PM
Wear that as a badge of honor.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:17PM (3 children)
Wang is the perfection.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:22PM (2 children)
No, we FUCKED YOU UP.
Wordstar Team
(Score: 3, Touché) by Appalbarry on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:39PM (1 child)
Wordperfect 5.1. It's been downhill since then. I still have my big fat copy of Acerson on the shelf.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday May 09 2018, @04:31PM
I'll agree with that.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:30PM (12 children)
We use vi son. They use emacs.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:32PM (11 children)
Eight
Megs
And
Constantly
Swapping
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:55PM (7 children)
Eat My Ass, Cock Sucker.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 09 2018, @02:47AM (1 child)
'Cause You're Gay, Right?
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday May 09 2018, @03:20AM
Only on Tuesdays. Oh, wait, shit!
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday May 09 2018, @03:49PM (1 child)
Vitriolic Invective, 'Mighty?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday May 09 2018, @10:38PM
Amusing acronym, amigo.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday May 09 2018, @04:38PM (2 children)
I don't have a dog in this debate, but I find it amusing that pretty much everyone has missed the stab at emacs. Looks like everyone thought you were insulting or propositioning Mud Duck Crawford. Allow me to reformat your post so no one can miss it:
Eat
My
Ass
Cock
Sucker
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday May 09 2018, @10:40PM
They're just butthurt that they didn't think of it first.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday May 10 2018, @09:23AM
Score: 3, Insightful guess you were right.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 09 2018, @12:02AM (2 children)
"Emacs is a great operating system, but unfortunately it lacks a decent editor."
(Score: 2) by srobert on Wednesday May 09 2018, @02:30AM (1 child)
But it's tolerable in evil-mode.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday May 09 2018, @05:14AM
It's been decades since I read his post about vi-mode but RMS liked vi's orthogonality.
That's why I always use Vim when I'm not on a Mac. On Macs I use BBEdit.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by corey on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:30PM (20 children)
LaTeX.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:37PM (6 children)
LyX?
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:54PM (4 children)
Mechanical typewriter, because fuck you Apple for ruining the laptop keyboard.
(Score: 4, Funny) by hemocyanin on Wednesday May 09 2018, @05:40AM (3 children)
Here's one of my clay tablets for you to smash it with.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday May 09 2018, @09:45AM
Where's my '+ Altruistic' mod?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Touché) by bob_super on Wednesday May 09 2018, @04:23PM (1 child)
Heretic ! Don't you know that Apple's excellent designs deserve no less than smashing-by-marble-tablet ?
Carrara marble, at that.
Gold trim optional.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday May 09 2018, @04:40PM
You'll have to put a lot of gold trim on that Apple device, to make it worthy of being smashed with some marble chips.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday May 09 2018, @01:50PM
I really like LyX, and use it for all my prose. It handles math and scientific symbols well, too. The output is beautiful.
I'm a little surprised it's mentioned so seldom. All the power of TeX, but user-friendly.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Wednesday May 09 2018, @12:30AM (12 children)
I've hopped on the Markdown for everything bandwagon. I do feel a bit limited at times (colours and highlighting for example), but overall it is a convent method of putting formatted thoughts in text quickly.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Arik on Wednesday May 09 2018, @02:41AM (11 children)
So, when you think "I wonder what's for lunch?" that thought has a *color?*
Or did you mean "putting thoughts into formatted text?" That would make a lot more sense.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 09 2018, @06:18AM (1 child)
The question for Arik, as always: can it handle non-proportional font? Arik only has lunch in non-proportional fonts. Black and white. Sad, actually.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday May 09 2018, @11:47AM
I don't think in fonts.
"Black and white."
But if I did, they would be in green phosphorus, not white.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday May 09 2018, @11:24AM (8 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday May 09 2018, @11:45AM (7 children)
And how does that choice 'represent the structure' of the thought of lunch?
Can the choice of a single font really 'represent' a more complicated structure? How?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday May 09 2018, @06:20PM (6 children)
Mu.
> And how does that choice 'represent the structure' of the thought of lunch?
Mu.
> Can the choice of a single font really 'represent' a more complicated structure?
Mu.
> How?
Mu.
You seem to making some assumptions about what I've written which were neither in what I've written nor in my mind when I wrote it. For a start - what's with your perverse obsession with fonts?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday May 09 2018, @06:50PM (5 children)
"You seem to making some assumptions about what I've written which were neither in what I've written nor in my mind when I wrote it."
I was just approaching the structure of what you posted and trying to make sense of it. So if I'm showing flawed assumptions why not correct them?
"For a start - what's with your perverse obsession with fonts?"
Speaking of false assumptions!
What I wonder is what's with all the rest of yas obsession with fonts?
I stick out precisely because I am NOT obsessed with them. Give me one good screen font that does the job and that's all I need, right up to the moment we start thinking about sending something to the printer at least. It's everyone else that seems to be font crazy. Why do people think they need a million different screen fonts? Why do they think they need to be able to pick the 5 least readable, cycle back and forth between them repeatedly in the same sentence, and then force you to read their text in that manner? What deep-seated attraction do the rest of you feel to this situation?
It seems to me quite silly and a total waste of time. Precisely because I am NOT obsessed with fonts. I prefer to dispense with such distractions and focus on the actual text, the underlying structure, which has nothing to do with fonts or colors.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 09 2018, @07:59PM (3 children)
> I was just approaching the structure of what you posted and trying to make sense of it. So if I'm showing flawed assumptions why not correct them?
There were two sibling posts, a post by an AC making a stab at your (frankly, almost unreadable) monospace, and a post by FatPhil who tried to help you with your bewilderment at the phrase "formatted thoughts". FatPhil made no mention of any fonts.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Wednesday May 09 2018, @08:07PM (2 children)
You don't see my font, the font you see is installed on your own pc, if you don't like it you should change it.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @10:51PM (1 child)
Sure, I could change it, but there are legitimate uses for a monospaced font that someone may use, and in that case I would want it to display properly. So I'm not going to change the font in my browser because of a special snowflake like you.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Saturday May 12 2018, @01:40AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by FatPhil on Thursday May 10 2018, @09:07AM
> Speaking of false assumptions!
Bullshit. It's not an assumption, it is a clearly demonstrable fact - you were the one who introduced the concept of fonts completely unnecessarily into our discussion. Why? Don't answer that, I really couldn't give a shit.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Informative) by Appalbarry on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:42PM (6 children)
It's really, really nice if you actually include a link to the actual download site.
https://gottcode.org/focuswriter/ [gottcode.org]
Especially since quite often the linked article also doesn't include that.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 08 2018, @11:57PM (5 children)
Automated submission via bot. Have a look at what the eds get to work with here [soylentnews.org]. I know I certainly appreciate them more when they're doing the copy creation as well as the editing.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Appalbarry on Wednesday May 09 2018, @01:27AM (4 children)
Oh yeah, blame the bots!
Seriously, wow. Maybe you need a minimum character length on submissions.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday May 09 2018, @01:50AM (3 children)
We keep using the bots because bad subs are better than no subs when you can't be arsed to do a write-up at the moment. Makes more work for the eds but then taking such abuse is why they make 50% more than us devs.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 09 2018, @02:12AM (2 children)
I tougth it was 400⅝ more
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday May 09 2018, @03:21AM
We give them a pay cut every time they get called out on an embuggerance.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday May 11 2018, @02:33AM
Yo are probably both right.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by requerdanos on Wednesday May 09 2018, @12:44AM (6 children)
That seems like an unusual feature if the goal is not only to reduce distraction but to be entirely free of it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Wednesday May 09 2018, @02:38AM (3 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday May 09 2018, @09:10AM
I see you're still sticking with the IBM Selectric.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday May 09 2018, @04:54PM (1 child)
Didn't think of that, until you said it. But, yeah, I'm one of those who has been using silent POS keyboards for a few years now. Over the years, I've had a number of keyboards that made noise. Not exactly the much loved clickity-clack of IBM, but still, some noise, and some tactile feedback. Alas, all of those have died horrible deaths.
I should probably invest in a good clickity-clackety. Hmmmm - Amazon, 99 to 149 dollars - Ebay, 49 to 500 bucks - Newegg has one offering from Cooler Master for 72 dollars.
Should I do it? The wife will spaz out. I think she caused some of those horrible deaths in the past . . .
(Score: 3, Funny) by Arik on Wednesday May 09 2018, @06:22PM
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I jest, I jest, of course.
I mean a good keyboard, and a good divorce attorney. We aren't barbarians after all.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Touché) by turgid on Wednesday May 09 2018, @09:09AM (1 child)
I bet there's 700 megabytes of well-designed C++ code behind that.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday May 09 2018, @09:51AM
701M with the latest patch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 09 2018, @04:11AM (1 child)
List of [wikipedia.org]. And yes, you will find emacs and vi there. :)
Probably better for prose than code but I like the idea of distraction freeness.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday May 09 2018, @09:54AM
And yet you post on S/N. Well, is suppose doing it may be anything but distraction for some.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Informative) by turgid on Wednesday May 09 2018, @09:08AM (3 children)
Those were the days. Or WordStar. Or that one on the Amstrad PCW 8256.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday May 09 2018, @09:58AM
Heh, nothing beats the Hollerith card punchers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 09 2018, @03:57PM (1 child)
I really did like WordPerfect.
Features like view code, where you could see the exact placement of invisible characters like and (or the WP equivalents) allowed you to figure out why the thing didn't come out right when your formatting wasn't quite right. Also, make it fit was great for writing papers that had to be X pages long. It was also fun telling it to make a sentence fit to 72 pages.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday May 09 2018, @06:16PM
You can always look at Word documents in DEBUG.COM if you want to see the codes.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday May 09 2018, @03:53PM
Nice to keep the traditions alive.
What's up next? BSD vs GPL? Linux vs BSD? Gnome vs KDE? C vs C++? CISC vs RISC? Bash vs Zsh?
(Score: 2) by Appalbarry on Friday May 11 2018, @01:28AM (1 child)
I actually kind of like the look of Focus Writer, installed it, and started writing. I set it to auto-save. I don't know if it's a feature or a bug, but the thing kept popping up "Save" dialogs every few minutes. Or, more accurately, dialog boxes asking if I wanted to save as plain text because I would lose all formatting. If I clicked "yes" it opened what looked like a file save dialog, except where it should say "Save" it said "Open." Being a careful guy I accepted every one of these and saved repeatedly.
Until it crashed. Totally and completely, and because of its design with no avenue for escape.
One hard reboot later I had lost twenty minutes of work. There don't seem to be any partial or incremental saved files anywhere. Whatever the "do you want to save as plain text" process did, it seems that it didn't actually save anything.
I don't care how cool you think you are, the one thing your software should never, ever do is lose people's work. If you can't recover from a program crash with minimal loss you shouldn't ship it.
(Score: 2) by Appalbarry on Friday May 11 2018, @01:33AM
Jeez. Now I find this gem: [wordpress.com]
I made a small but important release of FocusWriter, version 1.6.12, this morning. I have removed auto-save from FocusWriter because several users have contacted me about data loss related to it. I have not been able to solve those issues yet, so that safest thing to do for now is to remove it entirely and prevent other users from losing data. I have also tweaked the emergency cache to ignore completely empty cache files. This will also prevent data loss by not prompting to load from cache if there is no data to load. Let me know if you have any issues!