Linux widgets

[pirrone]

ptgoodman wrote:

> pirrone at localnet.com wrote:
>
>>For those for whom boredom (Does this refer to the pleasure of visual
>>effects and clicking a mouse pointer on little pictures?) is less an issue
>>than performance and productivity take a look at Fluxbox.
>>Frank
>>
>>  
>>
> I feel obligated to add fuel to the fire. <snip>
> I apologize in advance for anyone grievously offended,
> koyaanisqatsi

To Goodman and Benoit, et al.:

PT, I'm sure nobody is offended by your preferences, and root to you too 
E, but my only reason for mentioning Fluxbox was to suggest something 
small and easily tried out for anyone who hasn't looked beyond Gnome and 
KDE.

The absence of icons, themes, and a start button along with the presence 
of right-click (and center-click) menus and their simple configuration 
files, not to mention key bindings and its simple config file is the 
greatest departure from both Windows and Mac OS of any environment I've 
used.

It's a window-manager rather than a desktop, extremely fast, stable, 
efficient, and productive.  I pop up a terminal window with alt-t and 
I'm in business with the CLI if that's what I need.  Page with alt-F1 to 
F4 and I can fill 4 workspaces with segregated and organized work faster 
than you can move your open windows out of the way to click on a desktop 
icon.  A pleasing and simple color scheme can be created (if you don't 
like those provided) in a few minutes - same for new menu items (all 
categorized as appropriate or desired) and new keybindings. 

Right-click and up pops the cascading menus where the submenus can be 
torn off temporarily as needed and left open in the workspace.  Two 
windows, or more, can be dragged together and accessed, especially with 
sloppy focus, by simply flicking back and forth across their names in 
the window's title bar.  Even better, these programs can be opened 
initially in the same window by just listing them together on a line in 
the groups file.  Good example of this is opening the mixer and the 
editor windows of Ardour in one window frame.  Certainly beats buttons 
on a taskbar or zooming icons on a dock for cleanness, compactness, 
speed, and efficiency.

The mixture of CLI and GUI applications (I pop up my preferred file 
manager Midnight Commander - totally tricked out with bindings for 
everything, and it comes with enough as is, with alt-f, run wget in a 
small terminal window, process files with grep, cat, cut, sort, sed 
faster than it's even possible to open a graphical application, ssh into 
work in another terminal window, work in Pan, Firefox, Thunderbird, run 
countless graphical apps like The Gimp, Audacity, Ardour, Rosegarden - 
and the list really is mind boggling, all together makes for the most 
productive working environment and set of tools I can imagine.

I will confes to one minor meaningless amusement - MC along with some of 
that other CLI stuff does often run in a titleless, frameless, 
scrollbarless, transparent Eterm or sometimes a less dramatic Aterm.  
It's still a kick to see ls -la --color | more display directory 
contents as it hovers disembodied on my screen against the dark blue 
Fluxbox workspace background:

Eterm --trans --borderless --scrollbar off --buttonbar off --geometry 
100x44+185+65 --font 10x20 --foreground-color white -e mc

It just doesn't get any better than that...

Frank