Skip to content
Posts
Revisiting an old article
Way back, I wrote a quick blurb on Window Managers for running under X.
Well, a while back I switched to Ubuntu for my OS of choice. As you may know, the fine folks at Ubuntu switched to default window manager to something called Unity, which caused a stir. I tried it for a while, but decided that it was too heavy, and too mouse-centric.
So, what to do? Well, I went back to my old standby wmfs, Window Manager From Scratch.
cmus project restarted Just a quick note. The cmus project has been restarted recently, and they are working on a new release. This one should have better integration with things like PulseAudio.
Good news!
Go check out http://cmus.sourceforge.net/ for more details.
Making life easy over flaky links I tend to work over VPN, which we know can be flaky at times, Since I work on server, I spend a lot of time ssh’ed into hosts. I was getting tired of the lost time having to restart what I was working on every time the VPN dropped (which could be as much as every 15 minutes on a bad day). While I already used screen to handle the lack of terminals (Alas, I am forced to use a Windows laptop to VPN in with), I thought there could be an easier way to do this.
Search your email! One of the features that most of the pretty GUI mailers offer you is the ability to search your email. While this is not a feature I use regularly, it is one which when you need it, you really need it. I have used grepmail in the past, but it slow for me (it scans the mail files every time) and the big thing for me is that is only supports mbox files, and I use maildir since I use offlineimap.
wifiroamd, Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG, and Fedora One of the things that has annoyed me about Fedora has been the decision to switch over to using NetworkManager to manage all network connections.
Now, on the service this has a lot of advantages. A lot of work has gone into it, and it just works for a vast majority of the installations out there. They have made it so the move from wired to wireless and back can be done without the user doing anything.
C*MUS - A music manager for the terminal C*mus is an advanced music juke-box for *inx and Window operating systems. It can handle the modern audio file formats: FLAC, Ogg/Vorbis, MP3 , Wav, AAC , MP4, .mod, .s3m, .mpc, mpp, .mp+, .wma, and .wv . It also can deal with many different types of audio output systems: ALSA, libao, ARTS, OSS, Sun, and WaveOut on Windows. The typical features of an electronic juke-box are supported like play lists and random/shuffle play, in addition to easily switching between playing from the library, an artist, or a single album with a simple keystroke.
Google’s Calendar on the Command Line! You love your comfortable command line, but all the cool kids are playing in the Web 2.0 web space, and you want to stay true to your roots? Want a Web 2.0 calendar, but still love (or need) command line access?
I just found the answer: gcalcli. This little tool will let you list your appointments, get an list your events, get an agenda, print ascii rendering of your calendar for the week or month.
Alerting with Remind Back in my article on Remind, I talked about the simple power of remind to power your scheduling needs. That is all fine and good, but how to you get it to tell you when you have an event?
In its simplest form, when you run remind from the command line, it will not only display the current day’s reminders, but it will run in the background and wake up to tell you about other reminders on the screen while you work.
Pizza Party - Command Line Pizza ordering program Want a pizza, and do not want to fire up that pesky GUI? We have the solution for you: Pizza Party - Command Line Pizza ordering program
Currently, only from Dominos, so if you do not have one near you who accepts on-line orders (sigh, mine does not), then you are out of luck.
So you need a calendar? So, one of the things we have been using computers for is to keep track of our lives. And this means a scheduling or calendaring tool. Some tools out there do this fine, and some do it very well.
I have to keep track of a lot of appointments. From conference calls for work, to each member of the family’s schedules, to random, but highly important reminders.
Command-Line blog posts So, it only seems fitting that I should talk about a command-line interface to posting on this blog. No, I do not mean using links or the like, but a way to post from the command line.
So, this post is being typed up in vim on my Fedora 8 laptop. I will use this great little tool I found called wppost to post. wwpost is part of the perl module WordPress::Post.
Pacman for Console You are tired of hearing your GUI friends talking about their games? Tired of playing simple Adventure? Why not try Pacman for Console?
The game play is just like the old quarter game you played long ago, and the best part, you can develop your own maps! Check out the screen shot:
Screen - terminal multiplexer I usually have one screen running at all time, and in that screen session, I ssh to various hosts that I am working, and have screen running on those hosts.
Additional Links gnu screen - Google Search GNU Screen - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF) GNU Screen - Summary [Savannah] GNU Screen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia GNU Screen - Jonathan McPherson Screen User’s Manual start [GNU screen] Deadman.
iKog - the simple todo list iKog - the simple todo list
So I am looking for a good to-to list manager, and I stumbled across ikog. ikog stands for “It Keeps On Growing”, and it is a pretty nice todo manager which has been influenced by the GTD school of thought. Currently, I am using it for my daily todo manager, and using the python gtd tool for my long term list management.
EDIT 2019-06-22: It seems like the BINS website is gone. Do not know if this is tempory or not.
BINS Photo Album The BINS Photo Album is a package to generate static web pages from the command line. Why would you want to do this? Well, most of the dynamic web photo albums require that the server do all the work when the client requests the images, thus either slowing it down, or requiring a very beefy server.
Strayed from the path In two ways…first, I have not updated the site in a while, and I need to get back to updating it.
Second, because I have not been true to my cli roots. I have moved from my default MUA of the last, oh, 8 years, and flirted with a GUI MUA, thunderbird. It was pretty. It was sexy. It let me see everything then and now. It tried to seduce me into using a GUI for more…
CLI Magic: Linux troubleshooting tools 101 When something goes wrong with your Linux-based system, you can try to diagnose it yourself with the many troubleshooting tools bundled with the operating system. Knowing about these tools, and how to effectively use them, can help you overcome many…
Read More…
cli bug/issue/task tracking system? Fresh from freshmeat:
http://www.ditrack.org/
What is DITrack? DITrack is a free, open source, lightweight, distributed issue (bug, defect, ticket) tracking system using a [Subversion](http://subversion.tigris.org/) repository instead of a backend database. It is written in Python and runs in UNIX environment (*BSD, Linux, MacOS X). The project is inspired by the idea of [Subissue](http://subissue.tigris.org/) issue tracking system. However, while Subissue aims in merely replacing the traditional database storage with Subversion repository, DITrack is a major rethought of the issue tracking system paradigm.
Window Manager for tty? The package screen is something that has been around for a long time.
With screen, you can have many session running on on tty, and you can switch to another session with out touching a mouse. With the proper configuration, you can get notified if there is some change (like if you have a IM client up) or if there is no output (say, if you are watching a compile session).
Disconnected IMAP So, in an effort to get to the office earlier, I decided to try to figure out how to do disconnected IMAP. Well, the route I took was to use a tool called mailsync which is a cool tool to allow you to sync IAMP mailboxes.
So, my tack is to sync it down to my laptop, and read the email on the bus. I sync email down in the morning, and then in the evening, sync again.
Screen Saver? Yes! So, a while back I found a screensaver which is meant for the command line. It is called tss. The latest version is 0.8.1, and it is looking pretty cool.
Under screen 4.0 or higher, there is a command called idle which is set in seconds. By default, it uses screen’s built in lockscreen function, but if you define the environment variable LOCKPGR, then you can call something else.
RSS Reader: Raggle Well, after getting some time over the US holiday to try to get raggle built, I gave up. I am guessing that Fedora Core 5/6 are not very ruby friendly yet, as I could not find everything I needed very easily. I was able to get it almost all the way there, but I could not get the ruby-Ncurses rpm to build, and I am very strict about using the native package management system (ie RPM on a RPM based system, portage on Gentoo, apt on a Debian deviant), so I will not be trying this until I can get the RPMS.
Another RSS reader? Well, it seems that someone is reading this after all.
So, tonight I have been given a pointer to raggle (http://www.raggle.org). I guess I need to install ruby to try it out…
Thanks to Philip McClure for the pointer.
Updates after I try it out some…
Window Managers? Why would a web site dedicated to the CLI have a section on Window Managers? Well, simple.
Some times, you just have to have X running. Some web sites I have to do research at use Flash, or photo editing/managing, or my iPod (none of the CLI tools let me manage play lists very easily).
Plus, I cannot get the same resolution on the console as I can under X.
What do I Use? Software
So, What major apps do I use daily? Well, this is the list of apps that I currently use daily:
bash - my shell of choice screen - a shell multiplexer and more mutt-ng - a mua on steroids centericq - IM. How do you stay in touch? snownews - an RSS feed reader calcurse - a calendar/todo manger bashblogger - the CMS for this site There are a few more, but I need to find URLs for them.