- This topic has 1 reply, 2 voices, and was last updated Nov 21-8:47 pm by seaken64.
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PPC
Once in a while I find some software pearls out there. I already knew about Wordgrinder- a word processor for the terminal, but I recently tested the latest version in my Virtualbox antiX 21 (that has the latest version available).
A first glance, it’s wierd.- It’s an empty teminal window, with lines and arrows delimiting the top and the bottom of your document. Since you haven’t writen anything yet, it only shows an empty line between those delimiters.
If you begin typing, you see the text appear on the screen, nothing fancy…
The true beauty of Wordgrinder happens when you press the “Esc” button on your keyboard, that sommon the menu. Yes, you get a menu, much like what happens in GUI programs. And from there you learn that you can format your text. You can use Bold and underlined characters, that come up on screen. You can also use italic, but my terminal fails to render that.As in any normal word processor you can copy and paste, find and replace text. Also you get unlimited undos and redos.
Unfortunately, wordgrinder uses it’s own file format.
Unfortunately, it also has no way to “print”.
Fortunately, you can import and export documents to and from ODF and HTML. The ODT part left me amazed. I have a huge LibreOffice text document in ODT that takes ages to load, because it’s about 600 pages. In Wordgrinder it opened in a few seconds, and displayed correctly.
If you like writing, you can dust off that old laptop/netbook that you’ve been using as a door stop, install antiX on it, and then Wordgrinder, and type your master piece anywhere you want. Then you can export it to .ODT, and edit it on a more powerful computer, formatting it as you want (using several fonts, and character sizes, inserting images, tables, etc), and then print it or export it to latex and convert that file to pdf, and print that…On a more realistic note, you can use this word processor to write without distractions- write your homework, a thesis, anything that just needs simple text.
The possibilities are endless, and turn even a computer that can’t even run a graphical interface into a reasonably powerful word processing machine…
Note: if you want to make an old computer useful again, there are terminal apps that work wonders: file managers, word processors, ebook readers, image viewers, music players, internet search engines, calendars, calculators, web browsers, e-mail clients, stream music, play games, use instant messengers (telegram can work from the cli) or social networks (like twitter and facebook)… These are strange “new” days
P.
seaken64
This reminds me of the days when we used WordStar or PFS:Write to write our text content and then “pour” it into a text object inside our layout program, like Ventura Publisher or Serif Page Plus, Aldus PageMaker, etc.
The printing part always came from the layout program. We didn’t always print directly from the word processor. Eventually it all merged together and a word processor morphed into the all-in-one layout software we use today.
The text console can be very useful, if only it wasn’t so castigated by the average computer user today.
Seaken64
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