On Mon, 20 Oct 2014 17:31:34 -0700 John Jason Jordan <[email protected]> wrote:
> I can use a minimal desktop like Xfce, but I'm trying to imagine how I > could function without any desktop at all, even if I was a master at > shell scripts, which I most definitely am not. > I started my day by writing a couple pages with LO Writer where I > alternated between American English and polytonic Greek, which uses > not only a different alphabet, but up to three diacritics per letter. > Then I wrote several pages for phonetics students where I used the > International Phonetic Alphabet extensively (Unicode 250 to 2AD, plus > a few outside of that block). Then I downloaded a pic from my phone, > spent 15 minutes altering it in the GIMP, then uploaded it to > Craigslist using Firefox. (I am assuming [HAH!] here that X is not running in this scenario. If I'm wrong, please feel free to correct me. But gently, please. It's been One of Those Days, and I have a strong urge to throw heavy objects through my monitor.) > > Can I do all of this without a desktop environment using just shell > scripts? > Not easily, I think. The writing part is do-able, so long as you don't insist on seeing polytonic Greek characters in your editor. The reason for that is that the Linux VT (which you're stuck with without X running) does not have all of those characters. You would need to use a text processor, like Groff or TeX, and specify your characters that way. Not that while Groff does have some Greek characters, they are for technical communications -- there are no diacritic marks. So you'd have to install a polytonic Greek typeface. I think you'd have to do the same thing for TeX. TeX has modern Greek built in, I think, but that's not what you're looking for. The same goes for the IPA characters; you'd need to install your IPA typeface of choice. Of course, you still need some way of profredding <*grin*> your text, and you can't display a PDF in a VT. You'd have to print it on paper. If you're like me, and check every. little. thing, it would use up a lot of paper. (BTW, if you do want to try Groff or TeX, I _strongly_ suggest using a macro set of some sort. MOM is my choice for Groff; LaTeX is the choice for TeX.) That said, Groff and TeX can both produce some beautiful text. (Now, if X _is_ running, you could fire up the PDF viewer of choice, and you'd be home free. And, since you'd have access to more complete font sets, you could actually see polytonic Greek and IPA in your text editor.) Web access is probably the easiest of the three applications you mentioned. There are a number of text-only web browsers out there. They do take some getting used to, but they are quite practical. Heck, you can even find one or two that run in Emacs (the text editor that thinks it's an operating system). The killer, in my opinion, is the graphical work. Yes, it is possible to modify graphics files from the command line, but it's not exactly intuitive. ImageMagick is probably the best known command-line graphics program for Linux. It has a _lot_ of commands and functions. Each one by itself isn't terribly difficult to learn, but did I mention that there were a lot of them? Plus, using them effectively requires that you learn how to tie them together into a program. Not shell scripting so much as C, Perl, Lisp, and so on. Given your current workload, I doubt you'd like to add learning ImageMagick _and_ a programming language to the list. Anyway, those are my opinions, and they're worth everything you paid for them. Add $3.50 and you can buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks. --Dale -- Delusions are often functional. A mother's opinions about her children's beauty, intelligence, goodness, et cetera ad nauseam, keep her from drowning them at birth.
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