CORE application request

[Member PDP-8]

I’m using bare-naked antiX CORE more and more reliving my cli-only days.

I noticed that in the antiX-cli-cc menu system, the “office and more” subsection is missing a *critical* component that I think should come with core as standard:

(Oh sure, I could just apt install it, but having the bits already on board would be so cool.)

The “SC” spreadsheet. Still works! Debian still maintains it, and got it working well for 64 bit too. Think Visicalc or Lotus 123. So – yeah, no pivot-tables, but otherwise I’d like to nominate it as coming standard with core for the office section.

Sure man page is cool. Built in ? help is ok. Even firing up the tutorial

sc /usr/share/doc/sc/tutorial.sc

is fun. If one really wanted to go there, add the JOE editor for the office-submenu, and call it up as jstar to push the wordstar diamond around. 🙂

Good times. One can still be productive with core if they put their mind to it.

• This topic was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by PDP-8. Reason: updated pathname

[Moderator BobC]

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The tilde editor is available now. I haven’t tried it on core, but it works great from a terminal.

Jed is another good terminal editor, but I wasn’t able to configure it without asking for help. It ships with a wordstar mode, but you need to select it.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by BobC.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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I never really developed an interest in Wordstar or any other early DOS text editor programs, though I did use edlin a couple of times. To me the early DOS was desperately lacking in tools and applications. By the time the applications were available I had become interested in UNIX systems and software.

I remember the initial challenge to learn how to use the vi editor and the same challenge all over to learn how to effectively use the Emacs editor. Without a doubt they were large challenges, but I have yet to find anything else with as much power and flexibility. Any good editors that come close have been commercially distributed. Though a few of them were good, for example I used two good XML editors a few years ago, I could have used either vim or Emacs at no cost if my company used either of them.

Anywhere I could download tools I’d grab both vim and emacs. Vim is fast, can be quickly started from a command and ready in an instant. Emacs is best when you can start it up and keep it running for editing and other things throughout the day. I understand that many people will never want to invest the effort to learn them well and that’s why other tools are available.

--
Brian Masinick

[Moderator BobC]

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Jed has many “modes” available, Wordstar being just one. Emacs mode was another if I recall.

VI is just atrocious in my view. I understand there was once a day say pre 1995, when it was needed for the geeks needing to use it, but it is just too hard for normal people to learn and is to be avoided, from a standpoint of ever creating anything suggesting or requiring it’s use, today. The same goes for things like edlin after about 1985 or so.

[Member PDP-8]

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So no objections to the SC spreadsheet? 🙂

Re editors: Interesting thoughts here being that maybe vim should not be on the iso, and for those that want it, apt install it. Since busybox is on board already,then maybe just put a softlink for it in /bin for those that are ok with the lightweight version..

ln -s busybox vi

Saves space, although perhaps not much from an individual one-off standpoint, but small things like this add up if mirror-traffic and such are an issue. Up to devs obviously.

Same kind of thinking for something like JOE emulating nano/pico, emacs, wordstar, and itself depending on how it’s called. Might be a space saver serving differing userbases.

Just thinking off the top of my head. Heck, I’ll still bang out a 6-line configuration file with cat / ctrl-d or even herefiles. Muscle memory.

Just my 2p. 🙂

[Member seaken64]

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Thanks for the lead on the sc spreadsheet. I looked for it in cli-aptiX but didn’t find it at first. I used all upper case, as in “SC”. I found it with lower case “sc”.

I used Wordstar in CP/M but I did not use a spreadsheet until I switched to DOS. I used Borland QuatroPro in DOS along with Wordstar 5.5.

I’m looking forward to playing with sc. I never used vim though, so I will have to learn my way around. I still have some WS and QuatroPro key commands emblazoned on my brain, but no vim.

Seaken64

[Member seaken64]

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I was able to get sc installed and working.

How do I add it to the antiX-cli-cc Office & Other menu?

Seaken64

[Moderator BobC]

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seaken64 wrote:

Thanks for the lead on the sc spreadsheet. I looked for it in cli-aptiX but didn’t find it at first. I used all upper case, as in “SC”. I found it with lower case “sc”.

I used Wordstar in CP/M but I did not use a spreadsheet until I switched to DOS. I used Borland QuatroPro in DOS along with Wordstar 5.5.

I’m looking forward to playing with sc. I never used vim though, so I will have to learn my way around. I still have some WS and QuatroPro key commands emblazoned on my brain, but no vim.

Seaken64

LOL, I bought Wordstar and then MS Multiplan when it came out for my CP/M machine… Never had QuatroPro or Wordstar on a PC.

[Member seaken64]

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BobC,

Our CP/M machine was a NorthStar Advantage. I think they also sold MultiPlan but we had an AccPac accounting system and WordStar. Never had a stand alone spreadsheet with that system. We never really used the AccPac system and ended up using only WordStar for written contracts. We printed the contracts on a Smith Corona daisy wheel impact printer.

When I switched to DOS I fell in love with Borland Quatro Pro and did all my pricing and estimating on spreadsheets. But still used WordStar for contracts, but now we were using an Epson or Citizen dot matrix printer with three parts forms.

To this day I still do my estimates and contracts on a spreadsheet. I use LibreOffice and print to PDF.

Seaken64

[Moderator BobC]

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I’m sorry, I took the thread off topic, I think. I built an S100 Bus machine from boards and stuff.

I am wondering how the cli menu gets created and if there would be some way to maintain/regenerate, or maybe that already exists?

I don’t actually use core for anything, but there are some machines that don’t need to browse the net where using core makes sense, I’m sure…

[Member fatmac]

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Back when I started using Linux, it was command line, & I would always install sc & mpg123 along with mc, (which includes an editor, but I’ve got used to vi now), & often I’d add sqlite too. 🙂

Linux (& BSD) since 1999

[Member seaken64]

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As I recall there is a script that sets up the menu. One of the developers pointed it out to me once but I can’t remember where it is.

It’s a dynamic menu and the script scans for the pieces and creates the menu. But I guess just installing sc doesn’t trigger it to be added. I’ll look around.

Seaken64

[Forum Admin BitJam]

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seaken64 wrote:

I was able to get sc installed and working.

How do I add it to the antiX-cli-cc Office & Other menu?

Here is a patch:

diff --git a/bin/antiX-cli-cc b/bin/antiX-cli-cc
index caa702d..78e8129 100755
--- a/bin/antiX-cli-cc
+++ b/bin/antiX-cli-cc
@@ -430,6 +430,7 @@ make_off_menu() {
     add_cmd wordgrinder   $"Word Processor"
     add_cmd calcurse      $"Calendar/Schedule"
     add_cmd nano          $"Simple text editor"
+    add_cmd sc            $"Spreadsheet calculator"
     add_cmd vim           $"Advanced text editor"
 
     end_menu_list
@@ -444,6 +445,7 @@ off_cc_cmd() {
                calcurse) run_cmd  $cmd    ;;
                    nano) run_cmd  $cmd    ;;
                     vim) run_cmd  $cmd    ;;
+                     sc) run_cmd  $cmd    ;;
                       *) db_msg "Would do action %s" "$white$cmd" ;;
     esac
 }

The line numbers are off because there were other changes in the pipeline.

You can also download the latest version with this change from my Console-grid-gui repo.

Context is worth 80 IQ points -- Alan Kay

[Member seaken64]

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Thanks BitJam. I will try to see what I can do with that. Or should I just wait for an update to antiX-cli-cc thru the normal apt dist-upgrade?

Seaken64

[Member PDP-8]

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Whoa! BitJam thanks for that!

I think the discussion is fascinating and not OT because it serves to show how influenced we all were by the mini <> micro evolution allowing normal consumers to get involved. And of course to get speed out of them, quite frequently they bypassed normal system calls, and used assembly language – foregoing portability.

Thing is, I’m not a luddite and not going to do my banking by cli, nor pine for the past in my rocking chair.

But a wise gray-beard wizard raised on minis in an academic, learning, sharing sense, warned me about the “micro” culture, where it was the wild-west and every man for him$$elf. The emphasis was not about learning skills, but selling “applications”, and skilled marketing made sure to point out that new users were “too dumb” to learn the cli, or that it was too “old fashioned”. Or that software has a shelf-life.

The wizard is probably where I learned that through practice and putting things to use, if you used the vi editor (or shell or whatever) back in the PDP-11 days, you would still have those skills today with your $5K Mac laptop. Lacking any interface whatsoever, there is no worry about all the menus changing places every few years. 🙂 The point was to retain the knowledge, not re-purchase applications every few years.

Case in point: most of my co-workers use spreadsheets as simple graph paper. Only the most advanced will actually sort a column of data with it. “Hey, Excel won’t come up! How am I going to do this? Dude, just use the sort command. The what?” And the guy isn’t dumb – he was just told that the cli was far too difficult and old fashioned to use and actually believed that and thought he had to be a master at everything before being able to do anything productive.

Sorry – getting on a rant, so I’ll stop. Especially because I’m using a gui right this very minute! Balance is the key – I enjoy both cli and cui/gui depending on need.

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