A list of text applications that can be found in Linux Ubuntu – Part 2

Posted on October 5, 2009 by Bart Westgeest

In part 1 of this series of 3 posts I wrote about what text editing applications I can install on my computer using the options available under Linux Ubuntu 9.04.

I listed the text editing software available that can be found when clicking on

“Applications” -> “Add/remove” -> “Office”


Click here if you want to visit that post.

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In this post I look at the software found under “Applications” -> “Add/remove” -> “Accessories”.

Concentrating on the text-editing software I found 1 journal or diary and 11 different text editors and some other versions of them.

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In part 3 of the 3 posts about Ubuntu software I will look at programs that can be found under “Applications” -> “Add/remove” -> “Internet”.

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I again copy/pasted the text that is given for each program and took a screenshot of the programs as they appeared on my screen.

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Journal -Diary:

Almanah Diary


Almanah is a small application to ease management of a personal diary. It has basic editing and linking abilities like:

* adding links to other content to diary entries

* database encryption

* search and printing support

Homepage: http://tecnocode.co.uk/projects/almanah/

Text Editors:

GNU Emacs 21 (X11)

GNU Emacs is the extensible self-documenting text editor.

An almost mysterious program as it isn’t so easy to understand right away.

But this page helps to understand it: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/

In short the Emacs programs are exstensible and customizable editors that can be used for more than just text editing. There are for example also designed to handle many programmer- languages.

They are available for many operating systems, including Linux, Windows and Mac.

After installing the Emacs programs the following 2 items can also be found under accessories:

Emacs 22 (clients)

Emacs Snapshot (GTK)

GNU Emacs 22 (GTK)


GNU Emacs is the extensible self-documenting text editor. This package contains a version of Emacs compiled with support for GTK+ 2.x

Seems to be like the Emacs21 in a different layout.

GNU Emacs 22 (X11)


If you have GTK+ 2.x installed on your system, you will probably have a better experience with the emacs22-gtk package, instead of this one.

GNU TeXmacs


GNU TeXmacs is a free scientific text editor, which was both inspired by TeX and GNU Emacs.

The editor allows you to write structured documents via a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) and a user friendly interface. New styles may be created by the user. The program implements high-quality typesetting algorithms and TeX fonts, which help you to produce professionally looking documents. The high typesetting quality still goes through for automatically generated formulas, which makes TeXmacs suitable as an interface for computer algebra systems. TeXmacs also supports the Guile/Scheme extension language, so that you may customize the interface and write your own extensions to the editor. This package contains the architecture dependent files.

Homepage: http://www.texmacs.org

GVIM


Vim is an almost compatible version of the UNIX editor Vi.

Many new features have been added: multi level undo, syntax highlighting, command line history, on-line help, filename completion, block operations, folding, Unicode support, etc. This package contains a version of vim compiled with a GNOME2 GUI and support for scripting with Perl, Python, Ruby, and Tcl.

Homepage: http://www.vim.org/

Kate


Kate is a powerful text editor that can open multiple files simultaneously.

With a built-in terminal, syntax highlighting, and tabbed sidebar, it performs as a lightweight but capable development environment. Kate’s many tools, plugins, and scripts make it highly customizable. Kate’s features include:

* Multiple saved sessions, each with numerous files

* Scriptable syntax highlighting, indentation, and code-folding

* Configurable templates and text snippets

* Symbol viewers for C, C++, and Python

* XML completion and validation This package is part of the KDE 4 Software Development Kit module.

Homepage: http://www.kde.org

In the program itself there is a reference to this site: http://www.kate-editor.org.

Note that this program is not mentioned in the right alphabetical order in the list of applications. It is a little longer down the list.

Kwrite


KWrite is the KDE 4 simple text editor. It uses the Kate editor component, so it supports powerful features such as flexible syntax highlighting, automatic indentation, and numerous other text tools.

This package is part of the KDE 4 base applications module.

Homepage: http://www.kde.org/

Also here there is a reference to this site: http://www.kate-editor.org.

Leafpad


Leafpad is a simple GTK+ based text editor, the user interface is similar to Notepad. It aims to be lighter than GEdit & KWrite, and to be as useful as them

Homepage: http://tarot.freeshell.org/leafpad/

Indeed a light and quick simple text editor.

Medit


Features:

* Configurable syntax highlighting.

* Configurable keyboard accelerators.

* Multiplatform – works both on unix and windows.

* Plugins: can be written in C or Python.

* Configurable tools available from the main and context menus. They can be

written in Python, or it can be a shell script, or in MooScript – simple

builtin scripting lanugage.

* Regular expression search/replace, grep and find frontends, builtin file

selector and whatnot.

Homepage: http://mooedit.sourceforge.net/

The build in Terminal feature looks interesting for Linux users.

Mousepad

Mousepad is a graphical text editor for Xfce based on Leafpad.

The initial reason for Mousepad was to provide printing support, which would have been difficult for Leafpad for various reasons. Although some features are under development, currently Mousepad has the following features:

* Complete support for UTF-8 text

* Cut/Copy/Paste and Select All text

* Search and Replace

* Font selection

* Word Wrap

* Character coding selection

* Auto character coding detection (UTF-8 and some code-sets)

* Manual code-set setting

* Infinite Undo/Redo by word

* Auto Indent

* Multi-line Indent

* Display line numbers

* Drag and Drop

* Printing

As mention in this text, this is a program identical to Leafpad. But Mousepad is said have added printing support to the program, where as my version of Leafpad of today actually has printing support and even print preview. When I click on “Print” in Mousepad I get a error “Can’t open pipe to process”.

Scribes


Scribes focuses on streamlining your workflow. It does so by ensuring that common and repetitive operations are intelligently automated and also by eliminating factors that prevent you from focusing on your tasks.

The result is a text editor that provides a fluid user experience, that is easy and fun to use and that ensures the safety of your documents at all times.

Homepage: http://scribes.sourceforge.net/

Made to function under the Linux Gnome Desktop.

A well documented program with an interesting homepage. Some features can be found in the right click pop-up window (see screenshot).

Tea Text Editor


TEA provides you hundreds of functions. Want some tea?

TEA features are:

* Built-in file manager Kwas

* Spell checker (using the aspell)

* Tabbed layout engine

* Multiply encodings support

* Code snippets, sessions and templates support

* RTF-reader

* SRT-subtitles preview with Mplayer in a current subtitles position

* Text analyzer called UNITAZ

* Hot keys customizations

* “Open at cursor”-function for HTML-files and images

* Misc HTML tools

* Bracket matching

* Preview in external browsers

* String-handling functions such as sorting, reverse, format killing,

trimming, filtering, conversions etc.

* Bookmarks

* Drag’n'drop support (with text files and pictures)

* Built-in image viewer (PNG, JPEG, GIF, WBMP, BMP)

Homepage: http://tea-editor.sourceforge.net/

Unfortunately the “fine english manual” and the “read the fine English manual” as it is called in the help section opened first in Konquerer and when I click a link to a chapter it opened the code in Screemr.

But it indeed has many options, so I am sure this can be changed.

Here is a link to a community homepage: http://community.livejournal.com/tea4linux/

TextEdit


TextEdit is a relatively basic text editor. It handles plain text, RTF, and RTFD has a nice “Wrap to Page” mode, has search/replace functionality, and can display any file as text

Homepage: http://www.nongnu.org/backbone/apps.html

With a layout existing of different windows. Part of the Backbone system.

Text Editor


gedit is a text editor which supports most standard editor features, extending this basic functionality with other features not usually found in simple text editors. gedit is a graphical application which supports editing multiple text files in one window (known sometimes as tabs or MDI).

gedit fully supports international text through its use of the Unicode UTF-8 encoding in edited files. Its core feature set includes syntax highlighting of source code, auto indentation and printing and print preview support. gedit is also extensible through its plugin system, which currently includes support for spell checking, comparing files, viewing CVS ChangeLogs, and adjusting indentation levels.

Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/projects/gedit/

This is the standard build in text editor of Ubuntu at the moment. Known as gedit.

Zim Desktop Wiki


Zim is a WYSIWYG text editor. It aims at bringing the concept of a wiki to your desktop. For example every page is saved as a text file with wiki markup. Pages can contain links to other pages, and are saved automatically. Creating a new page is as easy as linking to a non-existing page. Pages are ordered in a hierarchical structure that gives it the look and feel of an outliner.

This tool can be used to keep track of TODO lists or ideas, to take notes during a meeting or to draft any other kind of text (blog entries, important mails, etc.).

Homepage: http://zim-wiki.org

An interesting wiki-like concept. Create new pages by creating a link in the “home” document. In this way pages (in a “notebook”) are always interlinked. The TODO list view and the calender gives it extra possibilities.

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Link to part 1 of these three posts – software found under “Office”

Link to part 3 of these three posts – software found under “internet”

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A list of text applications that can be found in Linux Ubuntu – Part 1

Posted on September 30, 2009 by Bart Westgeest

To start off the exploration of the world of text orientated software I had a look at my own computer.

I am running Linux Ubuntu 9.04 at the moment and had OpenOffice.org Writer and gedit installed plus Wine (a program that makes it possible to run some Windows programs in Linux) with The Journal and for some reason Notepad.


In Linux there is a section where you can add and remove programs. These programs are just a selection of what can be installed on a Linux computer, but for some reason they are offered conveniently under this add/remove section.

When you click add/remove you’ll see a list of all the programs available and the different subsections that arrange the programs after subject.

I thought I could just name them in a post, but they are too many, so I will divide it into three posts:

  1. Programs that can be found under the header “Office”

  2. The ones found under “Accessories”

  3. and other programs found under “Internet”.

Part 1: Programs that can be found under Applications -> Add/remove.. -> Office

Besides OpenOffice Writer there were 13 other programs that I downloaded to have a look at. Many of them are LaTeX editors which I will mention briefly in the end.

I copy/pasted the text that is given for each program. The Screenshots are taken from my screen.

Wordprocessors:

KWord



KWord is a FrameMaker-like word processing and desktop publishing application. KWord is capable of creating demanding and professional looking documents. It can be used for desktop publishing, but also for “normal” word processing, like writing letters, reports and so on.

This package is part of the KDE Office Suite.

Homepage: http://www.koffice.org


IBM Lotus Symphony.


IBM Lotus Symphony provides three powerful editors by which you can create, manage, and edit documents in Open Document Format(ODF): Lotus Symphony Documents, Lotus Symphony Presentation, Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets. With Lotus Symphony Documents, you can create and edit simple or highly structured documents, graphics, tables, and charts. With Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets, you can perform standard and advanced spreadsheet functions to calculate, analyze, and manage your data. With Lotus Symphony Presentations, you can create and edit professional screen shows that include charts, drawing objects, and text. You can also import, edit, and export Oo 1.1 files and Microsoft(R) Office files in Lotus Symphony

Homepage: http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home


This is a big office suite that comes with the above mentioned 3 programs in one. It opens with a “home” screen from where one can choose to open one of the three programs. Besides that is has a build in browser.


The second screenshot is the Lotus Symphony Documents wordprocessor.


It took a while for the program to open the first time, so I suspect it had a close look at the documents on my computer. After that all my .odt files open now by default in Lotus Symphony but I can choose “open with…” to choose another editor.


Go to the OpenOffice.org homepage Lotus Symphony is based on OpenOffice.org Technology and supports the ODF standard, ISO 26300

Abiword


AbiWord is a full-featured, efficient word processing application. It is suitable for a wide variety of word processing tasks, and is extensible with a variety of plugins.

This package includes many of the available import/export plugins allowing AbiWord to interact with ODT, WordPerfect, and other formats. It also includes tools plugins, offering live collaboration with AbiWord users on Linux and Windows (using TCP or Jabber/XMPP), web translation and dictionary support, and more. Additional plugins that require significant amounts of extra software to function are in the various abiword-plugin-* packages.

Homepage: http://www.abisource.com/

Full Screen text-editor:

PyRoom



PyRoom is a free editor that stays out your way – and keeps other things out of your way, too. As a fullscreen editor without buttons, widgets, formatting options, menus and with only the minimum of required dialog windows, it doesn’t have any distractions and lets you focus on writing and only writing

Homepage: http://pyroom.org/


A simple fullscreen dark (text colour is customizable) texteditor. Does what is promises.


LaTeX editors:

(If you don’t know what LaTeX is than you very likely don’t need these editors).

Texmaker

Texmaker is a clean, highly configurable LaTeX editor with good hot key support and extensive LaTeX documentation. Texmaker integrates many tools needed to develop documents with LaTeX, in just one application. It has some nice features such as syntax highlighting, insertion of 370 mathematical symbols with only one click, and “structure view” of the document for easier navigation

Homepage: http://www.xm1math.net/texmaker/

LyX Document Proc

LyX is an almost WYSIWYG-frontend for LaTeX. It makes the power and typesetting quality of LaTeX available for people who are used to word processors. Since LyX supports LaTeX’s concept of general mark-ups, it is even easier and faster to create professional quality documents with it than with usual word processors. It is also possible to use LaTeX commands within LyX, so nothing of LaTeX’s power is lost.

You can extend the functionality of LyX by installing these packages:

* chktex: check for typographical errors

* dvipost: display tracked changes in DVI format output

* gnuhtml2latex: import HTML documents

* groff: improved table formatting in plain text exports

* linuxdoc-tools: export SGML LinuxDoc documents

* noweb: import noweb files

* rcs: integrated version control

* sgmltools-lite: export SGML DocBook documents

* tex4ht, hevea, tth, or latex2html: export HTML documents

* texlive-latex-extra: more styles and packages

* wv: import MS Word documents

Homepage: http://www.lyx.org/

I found it on my computer after installing by right-clicking on a text file and then choosing “open with…” – > “Open with Other Application….”


Kile


Kile is a user-friendly LaTeX source editor and TeX shell for KDE.

The source editor is a multi-document editor designed for .tex and .bib files. Menus, wizards and auto-completion are provided to assist with tag insertion and code generation. A structural view of the document assists with navigation within source files. The TeX shell integrates the various tools required for TeX processing. It assists with LaTeX compilation, DVI and postscript document viewing, generation of bibliographies and indices and other common tasks. Kile can support large projects consisting of several smaller files.

Homepage: http://kile.sourceforge.net


I wasn’t able to open the kile handbook that is mentioned in the help section of the program, but it can be found at this address: http://kile.sourceforge.net/Documentation/html/index.html


Winefisch LaTeX Editor.


Winefish is a GTK+ based LaTeX editor, which was forked from Bluefish. The main features are autotext, auto-completion, function references, syntax highlighting, customizable external tools and UTF-8 support.

Homepage: http://winefish.berlios.de

Has a very clean look out-of-the-box.


JabRef


JabRef is a GUI to manage BibTeX databases, the standard LaTeX bibliography reference format. JabRef is built to be platform independent (requires Java 1.5). It merges and extends the functionalities of BibKeeper (Morten O. Alver) and JBibtexManager (Nizar Batada)

Homepage: http://jabref.sourceforge.net/


GNU TeXmacs editor


GNU TeXmacs is a free scientific text editor, which was both inspired by TeX and GNU Emacs.

The editor allows you to write structured documents via a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) and a user friendly interface. New styles may be created by the user. The program implements high-quality typesetting algorithms and TeX fonts, which help you to produce professionally looking documents. The high typesetting quality still goes through for automatically generated formulas, which makes TeXmacs suitable as an interface for computer algebra systems. TeXmacs also supports the Guile/Scheme extension language, so that you may customize the interface and write your own extensions to the editor. This package contains the architecture dependent files.

Homepage: http://www.texmacs.org


After downloading it can be found under Applications -> Accessories


Other:

Referencer


Referencer is a GNOME application to organise documents or references, and ultimately generate a BibTeX bibliography file. Referencer includes a number of features to make this process easier:

* Automatic metadata retrieval from PubMed, CrossRef and ArXiv

* Smart web links

* Import from BibTeX, Reference Manager and EndNote

* Tagging

Homepage: http://icculus.org/referencer/index.html


I have to find this one out – available when you (right mouse) click on a document -> “open with” -> Open with Other Application…


Txt Reader



Txt Reader is a general text viewer, especially suited for reading novels.

Features:

* Automatically remember the place before you closed

* Support fullscreen mode

* Support hiding reader to tray with Esc

* Support page-scrolling with arrow keys

* Support bookmark

* Support encoding selection

Homepage: -

Txt Reader had a slight problem for me (see first screenshot)

It is possible to change the language of the gnome desktop icon. (see second screenshot).

This program is not a text editor. At a first glance this seems to be a rather simple reader.

Update aug. 2010 -The homepage (http://www.minisrc.com/?q=taxonomy/term/2) is no longer connected to Txt Reader

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Link to part 2 of the three posts: Software found under “Accessories”

Link to part 3 of these three posts: Software found under “internet”

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Dropped Drupal

Posted on September 29, 2009 by Bart Westgeest

grey-mAfter 20 days of reading, building and experimenting with Drupal I finally got my new blog up and running… in WordPress. It took me 5 hours to make WP work for me and I am rather satisfied already, convinced that it can function as a Contents Management System as well

The final reason why I turned away from Drupal was that it took me too long to find out which navigation system was best for my Drupal site. I had a thorough look at taxonomy and the taxonomy- and taxonomy menu module, the menu options, primary and secondary links, but couldn’t figure out how best to use it for my purpose. The only thing I achieved was the creation of a tagcloud for the blogpart of the site using taxonomy and the tagadelic module. But it was disappointing to see that for that I needed extra modules and some thinking to install it, and that creating a category “widget” was rather impossible for me at the moment. And I knew that I still had a long way to go, finding out about the complicated views-module and the CCK module for example, and that it would take me a couple of weeks more to get the basics in place.

Maybe it was the amount of choice and the many different opinions and manuals that frustrated me. Drupal probably can do more than WordPress, but that certainly doesn’t mean that it is easier to take the right decisions.

Drupal is a good choice for those that want to build up a more complex site from scratch without having to write code from the first line to the last. Or people who enjoy learning and discovering the possibilities of this particular system.

For an end user like me, eager to write content and to get started, it is not userfriendly enough yet.

Probably as a reaction to my struggle the last weeks to understand the terminology and manuals I now choose a nice WordPress theme (out of the richness of well functioning themes) with many features that work right out of the box – not very challenging or creative perhaps -but I actually like it a lot and it works well. Now I can start blogging and tweak the site as it develops.

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10 things I want my future word processor to do (daydreaming).

Posted on September 28, 2009 by Bart Westgeest

If I allow myself to daydream about the perfect writing program then I see a Personal Assistant Robot in my word processor. It will help me with everything, and even more.

It will be able to

  • Speak all the languages I speak, know all about grammar but also about style and the building up of sentences.

  • Look up sources for me while I type and suggest corrections, further reading or persons to contact, both for me and for the readers.

  • Go through all my previous writings and, whenever I want of course, inform about what and how I wrote about the subject previously. It will only mention relevant writings and thoughts and make suggestions about how to benefit from it in the current text.

  • Know literature so it is able to compare and inform me about styles, scenes, or thoughts that have been used before.

  • Follow the storyline in the book or short story I am writing and propose plot changes, characters or settings. And of course correct me if I write anything that is inconsequent or impossible.

  • Suggest layout, sounds, structures when I am writing poems. It will have different voices in different languages that can read me the poem and it will play beautifully with sounds and rhythm, inspiring me and helping me to learn.

  • Show me all sorts of notes and information on screen in a practical way and clever way so that I won’t get confused or get lost. It can speak to me while I write or just silently and unintrusively give me pointers.

  • Publish, print, turn into an ebook, sent to others conveniently and quick.

  • Load extremely fast so I can write my thought down before I forget it.

  • Be very small so I can carry it with me on whatever device I am using, always synchronized and informed.

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RedNotebook

Posted on September 23, 2009 by Bart Westgeest

RedNotebook is a relatively new lightweight Journal and Diary software. It has surprisingly few features and a effective interface making it a pleasure to use for adding small notes or for logging your activities.
I am a happy user of Windows based The Journal that works under Linux using wine, but I must admit that I have been looking for a quick loading, easy to use journal that runs directly under Linux.
RedNotebook is under quick development, the developer, Jendrik Seipp, seems to be very ambitious with this project and new versions show up regularly.
The current version 0.8.6 shows a middle section for daily entries with a calender and a clever search and cloud module on the left. On the right there is a column that can be adapted to display small notes like a todo-list or tags.

To me that is just about all it has and can do, as it hasn’t a wysisyg editor yet (that might come in version 1.0) so the formatting of text is rather rudimental with a button to show the preview of the text. It can export the entries, or one of the entries into .txt, html or latext files.

But I will use it on my netbook as it is a joy to quickly open it and add some notes on the fly, and I am curious to see how the setup, the search and cloud module, works with a larger amount of data.

(via the german tuxtux.org)

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My first impressions of Drupal.

Posted on September 14, 2009 by Bart Westgeest

drupliconlargeAfter some years experimenting with several blogging systems as for example Blogger and WordPress.com and .org I almost by coincidence, finally, understood what a Content Management System (CMS) actually is. As I had been thinking about starting a (yet another) new blog/homepage, I had a look at some background information and got interested in Drupal. As my web-hotel provider only allows one mySQL database per domain I decided to buy a new webhotel to install and experiment with Drupal.

Now, a little more than a week later, I start to get closer to understanding what such a CMS is. I read the beginner-chapters on Drupal.org and the “cookbook” that also can be found there, and I now know that Drupal is software that tries to make it easier to build a homepage without losing too much of the flexibility when building one using templates. Unlike for example WordPress, Drupal doesn’t work with “standard” pages that together form a blog, but it constructs blocks of information or content that can be used on different places and in different combinations. In Drupal you don’t build a page but you build blocks that appear whenever the presence is triggered by someone clicking a link or a query… something like that.

This makes Drupal more flexible than for example WordPress but it definitely also makes it harder to understand its concept for a beginner like me. Drupal has many modules that can be installed to add functionality to the core, but it is not easy to know which ones are needed now or later. One has to understand the basic concept of Drupal first and then one has to plan a website/blog well before the actual building can start.

WordPress is proud of the fact that it “only takes 5 min” to install and start running a blog with their software. Drupal will might take a week for most people but it probably indeed can add more functionality to a site. When used clever it can for example fairly easily handle multiple users with different rights and possibilities for each and every block of information or adapt a site to the operating system or the location of a visitor. It has different ways of building menus and can create many types of input or output “blocks” that can be placed in the often many places/regions on a page that the chosen theme allows.

I am not perfectly sure whether I really need all this, I actually don’t at the moment, and at some occasions during the last week a quick switch to WordPress definitely crossed my mind, but for now the learning process is exciting and might provide good possibilities later.

I look forward to continue building and to start using Drupal, as I sense that all the explanations, suggestions, instructions and information about possibilities I read this week can make it more confusing than it actually is.

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