Forum: Author Hangout

Thanks, I did Linux for a couple of years but my job required windoze so I switched back. Now that I'm permanently unemployed I can go back and see if I remember what all the shootings about. On my laptop I installed Manjaro I like it pretty well as My memory is shot and I can't. At least for now remember the cli commands.

The big job will be my desk top it'll take forever to clean and back up my files. Loll they're calling for another ice storm in about a week. This sucks lol

Manjaro is as good a distro as any other, the most important thing is that you're comfortable with it. With the current status of Linux and the different Desktops you will find that for general use you won't need the CLI anymore. Unless of course you prefer that way.
Use Linux to back up your files so you can use a real good file system instead of NTFS ;)

Bah. I used to do my work in vi. With hand-inserted LaTeX code. And I liked it that way.

Bah. I used to do my work in vi. With hand-inserted LaTeX code. And I liked it that way.

LaTeX is great if you are willing to spend the time to learn it. I won't start a discussion about vi :D
But do you still use vi/LaTeX for writing or have you moved on to a decent editor?

For those who don't know vi: remember edlin?

Hey now. vi was WAY superior to edlin.

Really, I switched to vim pretty quickly, tho... and I programmed a few shortcuts into it for stuff I did a lot of.

LaTeX is great if you are willing to spend the time to learn it. I won't start a discussion about vi :D

But do you still use vi/LaTeX for writing or have you moved on to a decent editor?

For those who don't know vi: remember edlin?

I can't see much difference between adding LaTeX coding in the text editor that comes with the TeXShop app in Mac OSX, or TextEdit, and adding it in vi. But you do need to learn the coding, for sure. ETA: Forgot to add, "vi" is really "vim" in Mac High Sierra.

Since my brain can handle 12.5 commands in memory at last count mi vi work is pretty slow, but you sure don't end up with crap.

Plus, LaTeX turns out really clean PDF if you're submitting to Lulu or someplace else that requires print-ready copy.

Surely there must be someone who wants to argue in favor of emacs, right?

~ JBB

Surely there must be someone who wants to argue in favor of [expletive deleted], right?

Why would anyone do something so unforgivable?

emacs is a fine Lisp machine emulator. It's a pity no one's written a decent text editor for it.

Plus, LaTeX turns out really clean PDF if you're submitting to Lulu or someplace else that requires print-ready copy.

Have to agree there. That's what LaTex is great at: turning out real clean documents in almost any format you want. There is a learning curve but it's easy to copy/paste the basic structure once you set it up like you want it to look. You can even export to html and then use the Calibre commandline tool ebook-convert to create epubs. All easy to script if you wanted to.

Bah. I used to do my work in vi. With hand-inserted LaTeX code. And I liked it that way.

And you did it while walking uphill (both ways) in the snow, with a Univac strapped to your back.

And you did it while walking uphill (both ways) in the snow, with a Univac strapped to your back.

Damn right. Now get off my lawn.

Try doing it on 80 column cards, where changing a line may mean retyping 15 more cards.

Been there, done that. Never again.

I use Open Office, on both my PC and Linux systems.

Why not LibreOffice? It's virtually the same but way better maintained. The most recent OpenOffice version you can download is over a year old.

Why would I need to update my word processor all that often?

No real need except for security fixes. I bet a WordPerfect version from 20 years ago would be good enough for most. I was just wondering if there was a specific reason.

That's why I use the oldest of file formats to store and edit my originals - plain text. :-)

That makes it easier to edit using vi...

easier mutli-file search and search/replace than using grep, sed, awk, and perl. :-)

Meh. Create a simple shell script, create a alias to let you execute it from other directories (or update your $PATH, I think that's how I did it originally) and you can do a global search/replace on every file in whatever directory you're in. It'd be easy enough to make it recursive, too...

That's why I use the oldest of file formats to store and edit my originals - plain text. :-)

- Platform/application independent.
- Takes the least amount of disk space.
- It's readable/editable with even the most basic editor.
- The easiest format to recover from a bad/crashed disk (a partial file is still readable).
- Can be searched with almost any search tool.
- Easy search and replace

There are a lot of very good reasons to use plain text, including html/css which of course is also plain text.

I think you mean Java rather than Javascript.
Sun bought StarOffice in 1999 and produced an Open Source version called OpenOffice in 2002 after a couple of years work. In 2005 OO started working towards using free implementations of Java after criticism of the role of non-free Java in OO, that is presumably what you are talking about.
Oracle bought Sun at the start of 2010 but generally showed very little interest in OO and most of the developers left a few months later.
Libreoffice started as a fork of OO at the start of 2011.
Oracle then gave OO to the Apache Foundation in June of that year. There was a major release of OO (4.0) in 2013, 4.1 came a year later and that was pretty much it - only minor version upgrades since then. They have been thinking of giving up altogether since late 2016 but inertia seems to have kept them alive.
Libreoffice were held to have won the battle for the developers around March 2015, even Oracle Linux has been using it for years now.

Here's a hint learned the hard way when working with "experienced" a.k.a. older computer users:

If you really want something that looks and feels like Windows you should do as Ernest does: use Zorin. Otherwise you are right that Linux Mint comes closest.
Ubuntu is one of the most used distributions for desktops but personally I hate it. Your "media distribution device" remark is on the spot. I don't need fancy, I need it to work.
Personally I have been using Debian exclusively for many, many years now. Since I hate change it will probably last for many more years :D

I would have gone with a genuine Turing machine.

I think he meant ENIAC. It was rather bigger than the Enigma device.

Irving Fisher's hydraulic computer, actually.

It seems to me (I could be wrong) that a writer would want to use the least intrusive method available to put his/her words "on paper".
Vi, LaTex, etc. seem about as intrusive and painful as an IRS audit.

In fact, any software that requires memorizing magical incantations just to get it to work is too intrusive for me.

EVERY editor requires you to learn how to use it. Imagine you had to learn how to use MS Word/LibreOffice Writer from the ground up. It would be a huge learning curve, steeper than say Vim or LaTeX.
It's simply about what you already know or not.

What is the best "what you see is what you get" editor?

TexMaker or similar if you're open to learn something for the long run. If not anything you're familiar with, probably something disgusting like Word ;)

LibreOffice

What is the best "what you see is what you get" editor?

Hasn't been invented yet.

For now we are stuck with: what you see is kind of, sort, of what you get, sometimes, under certain conditions.

Given the fairly limited needs of a writer who posts stories on line (no graphs, charts, tables, images, etc are required), it seems that all that is needed is the ability to italicize words and properly format paragraphs, then export to an acceptable format.

Really, for a lot of my academic writing (the parts that didn't involve equations) all that was really required was the same initial header (which I'd created a element in my .vimrc to copy into a file I was editing) and the footnote/endnote functionality, which I had memorized pretty quickly. LaTeX wouldn't require much of a learning curve for really basic documents, especially if you had someone generate a boilerplate setup that you could reuse.

LaTeX wouldn't require much of a learning curve for really basic documents, especially if you had someone generate a boilerplate setup that you could reuse.

So true. I even dare to state that if you only use the basics like bold and italic that it's easier than Word or LO. It becomes complicated when you want to enter large and complex formulas and then LaTex becomes a necessity since it's the only editor I know of that can display these consistently correct.

For SOL, all you need is a plain text editor. Notepad on windows, TextEdit on the Mac. You _italicize this_ and you *make bold* like this. Save as plain text.

i{italicized text}
b{bold text}

Not really more difficult.