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
