Re: [dev] Suckless word processing solution?

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 04:06:16PM +0100, Anselm R Garbe wrote:
>I'm looking for such thing as well. On IRC in the #suckless channel
>someone posted a link to Word 5.5 just now, I think that might be an
>option for the interim. I think Word 5.5 is the most usable MS Word
>release ever created, it definately sucks less than any FOSS
>alternative. But I'm uneasy on relying it in the long term.

I think Corel was a lot better than Word in the Office 5 days.

>> I was looking for something that would suit my needs for quite some time.
>> AbiWord is bloated, slow and buggy and has numerous GNOME and other
>> dependencies. Ted got updated recently, which means that it finally got
>> UTF-8, gtk interface and proper font rendering, but at the moment is still
>> buggy and it is uncertain, in which way will it improve. Other than that, it
>> is a really nice word processor. WordGrinder has a nice interface concept,
>> but CLI interface can show many style features of the text, which is why WG
>> supports only a limited number of formatting capabilities. Besides, it can
>> only export to troff and html. Finally, it wasn't updated since late 2008.
>
>Well all these alternatives aren't any.

Lyx and TeXmacs are actually pretty nice. They're definately a
bit over-complicated in a few places, but they're lightweight
and fairly easy to use (except that they requier LaTeX, which is
pretty huge).

>RTF sucks.

It's better than the alternatives.

>Well usbl or surf aren't really lightweight, they only appear to be.
>(The binaries for themselves are lightweight, but that doesn't tell
>you on which mountain of complexity they rely on). I think writing a
>decent less sucking word processor is much more achievable than
>writing a lightweight browser. So this sounds like a good idea.

I tried building surf. The dependency on ICU alone is a 9MB
binary. GTK+, gstreamer, and a few Gnome libs add another
25-30MB. It's absurd.

-- 
Kris Maglione
Projects promoting programming in natural language are intrinsically
doomed to fail.
	--Edsger W. Dijkstra