Linux widgets

[ptgoodman]

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
>
>
Excellent. I haven't offended anyone...at least others have not 
expressed indignation ( yet ). I like the Virtual Windows capabilities 
under Redhat. I'm still at Redhat 8.x with my Linux box still packed 
away until I have room to unpack. The window manager to manage text 
windows is perfectly acceptable...in fact, it is desirable if I may be 
so bold as to say so. GUIs and Desktops simply conceal too much from me 
to allow me any level of comfort and confidence. Command lines allow me 
to see quite explicitly what I'm requesting on a single line. GUIs with 
several layers of submenus simply frustrate me.

Thank you,
koyaanisqatsi