Console Adventures

Some things are just right for a GUI - think Gimp, or Firebird, or other similar applications; but others are amenable to the console environment. One that I find constantly irritating is the overwhelming dearth of console-mode word processors. It's so hard to find a text-mode word processor for linux that I see article after article discussing how to get WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS running in DOSEMU. Now THAT is CRAZY.

Don't get me wrong; I'm a senior Unix admin, and I can use vi with the best of 'em (and no, it's not "six", or "vie", it's "vee eye"), but I'm looking for something more transparent, for writing stuff for people to read. ( Ironically, I'm writing this in vi ) I'm looking for something that will hide the markup from me (unless I want to see it) and let me do [ctrl-i]to turn on italics, and [ctrl-i] again to turn 'em off. You get the idea. But there's nothing out there that produces a useful document. We have emacs with it's 'enriched text' mode, which is some odd kind of markup that's fairly lame, and destined for the scrapheap of textual history. We've got html, which I can write with my eyes closed, in my sleep, but is not very versatile, nor very precise. Then there's latex, tex, et al, that are cryptic and complex in nature, and still don't hide the markup.

I did, however, find 'aft' (almost free text) here; it's a fairly nice 'almost markup' that converts to a lot of formats and works very well for small projects - anything up to an article or so. I don't see it as ready for book creation, however. You can convert to html, latex, rtf, etc. Once you get to latex, you can make a pdf, and it's fairly nice by default. You can customize it for output, too.

AFT is fairly easy to learn, and nearly transparent - it's easy to read and understand AFT documents prior to translation. It's full of beauties like:

*Title: Welcome To My Nighmare
*Author: Y. Olde Geeke
*TOC
* First Level Section
** Subsection
_Bold Text_

That little snippet of code will populate your html meta tags, create an automatic TOC (Table of Contents) based on your section and subsection headers, and make your text bold. Like I said, it's easy to use and see through. I like it for anything under 50 printed pages, I think.

So, go get it and play with it. Let me know what you think - or if you have any reasonable alternatives that don't require me writing a new editor from scratch. (I'm thinking about hacking on lyx until I can get the code to use a console as a rendering engine. No, seriously!)