Linux widgets

[Eric R. Benoit]

:)

pirrone wrote:

> 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
>