Free text mode software for linux

UltraText is a library that fills the almost empty niche of user interface frameworks for text-based terminal applications. While graphical user interfaces have proliferated dramatically, their terminal equivalents have been largely left behind, creating a shift to graphical interfaces in pretty much all applications currently under development.

This is rather unfortunate, as the graphical frameworks are considerably larger and slower. There is also the concern of being locked in to the continued use of X11, a large beast by itself, and whatever GUI framework has been chosen. Finally, most applications do not really need the advanced capabilities of graphical display and could just as easily be ran from the text console without launching X at all.

Back in the "good old days" of DOS, there were numerous text-based applications; word processors, spreadsheets, file managers, finance trackers, telnet clients, and even games. These applications demonstrated that usable and attractive interfaces are entirely possible to implement in text mode. In Linux, things have not gone quite so well. Due to a lack of a decent terminal output library (curses is not one of those), text mode applications look and act rather poorly under Linux. Some support only monochrome output, most accept only alphanumeric keys as input, and all keep a flashing cursor around even when nothing is focused.

In the UltraText library you will find the necessary tools for creating beautiful and usable text-mode application in the prevalent visual style of the last days of DOS. That style is typified by Borlands TurboVision toolkit, although only a few applications actually used that toolkit. It features a look similar to what we find in GUIs today; windows, menu bars, dialogs, interactive input fields and other UI elements.

From a programmers point of view, I have tried to create an interface similar to that of Microsoft Foundation Classes, with the document-view architecture and an event-driven environment that takes care of the low-level details of output rendering, focus management, event routing, and error reporting.

RefDB integrates nicely into Emacs. Combined with editing modes for SGML, XML, and RIS documents, youll get an integrated authoring environment with direct access to your bibliographic data.
"Cite-while-you-write", document transformation, and previewing is just a few mouseclicks away for DocBook SGML and XML as well as for TEI XML documents. Emacs support is not included in the RefDB sources, but available separately.
If your editor of choice should be Emacs or XEmacs, the RIS major mode (ris.el) will make editing RIS datasets a little bit more comfortable. Font-locking will help you to spot syntax errors. Especially the end tag (ER - ) is prone to lack the trailing space if youre not careful.
The ris-mode displays valid tags in blue, except the special type (TY - ) and end (ER - ) tags which are shown in red. The tag contents are colored according to several criteria. If the contents of a field is limited in length, the color will extend only up to that limit. Author/editor, publication date, and reprint fields are checked for a valid content. ris-mode also provides the following commands:
- insert-set (C-c-C-s): inserts a new skeleton dataset (a "reference"). The function will prompt you to enter the publication type. You can use either the auto-completion feature of the minibuffer to enter a valid type or the history feature to select a previously entered type. The function will create a newline, a type tag with the type you selected, default sets of tags for a selected range of types, as well as an end tag.
- insert-tag ( C-c-C-t): insert a new tag. Use either the auto-completion feature of the minibuffer to enter a valid tag or the history feature to select a previously entered tag.
duplicate-tag (M-RET): insert a new line below the current line with the same tag as the current line. This command is convenient if you add multiple keywords or authors, each of which have to go on separate tag lines.
- backward-set (C-x[) and forward-set (C-x]): move between RIS datasets.
- narrow-to-set (C-xns) and widen (C-xnw): narrow the buffer to the current RIS set and widen to the full buffer contents.
The mode currently does not check the length of author entries, nor does it handle continued lines in any way. It does not attempt to check whether a reference is complete (e.g. it wont notify you if there is no author)
Enhancements:
- Support for Muse documents was added.

dot-mode.el is a minor mode for GNU Emacs / XEmacs that emulates the . command in vi. The original version was written in 1995 by James Gillespie.
I took over maintenance in 2000 and did a much needed update to code portability and also added some nice features. Much of the code was re-written, but the original design was sound and remains intact. dot-mode.el project is distributed under the GNU General Public License.
Why was it written?
For those of you not in the know, the . command in vi simply repeats the last edit made. In my experience, this is/has been the biggest feature that vi users claim they just cant live without. After having developed this feature for emacs, Id have to say I agree with them.
dot-mode.el was written so that vi users no longer have an excuse for not switching to an emacs variant. Emacs is, of course, superior in every other way...
Main features:
- New keybinding C-. emulates . command in vi.
- Calls to extended commands (M-x some-command) are also captured.
- There is an "override" mode that allows you to record keystrokes that dont change the buffer.
- You can specify whether dot-mode remembers "undo" commands.
- dot-mode can either share a single command buffer between all windows with dot-mode on, or each window can have its own command buffer.
- You can copy the saved keystrokes into the keyboard macro.
- Works on GNU Emacs (including NT Emacs) and XEmacs.
Version restrictions:
- Certain interactive commands such as query-replace or query-replace-regexp are not recorded properly. There is no plan to fix this. You can still record a keyboard macro to capture these types of functions.
Enhancements:
- A bug where dot-mode would give an error if you used dot-mode-override to record a [right] and then tried to call dot-mode-execute was fixed.

Text::Graph is a Perl extension for generating text-based graphs.

SYNOPSIS

use Text::Graph;
blah blah blah

Some data is easier to analyze graphically than in its raw form. In many cases, however, a full-blown multicolor graphic representation is overkill. In these cases, a simple graph can provide an appropriate graphical representation.

The Text::Graph module provides a simple text-based graph of a dataset. Although this approach is not appropriate for all data analysis, it can be useful in some cases.

Text::Templar is a document-generation object class.

SYNOPSIS

use Text::Templar;

my $template = < title >This is the title: < % METHOD title % >< /title >< /head >

< body >

< % METHOD body % >

< address >
< % METHOD footer % >
< /address >

< /body >
< /html >
EOF

my $templateObject = new Text::Templar
[ $template ];

$templateObject->title( "The Rest of the Story" );
$templateObject->body( @content );
$templateObject->footer( "Page 1" );

print $templateObject->render;

Text::Starfish.pm and starfish is a Perl-based System for Text-Embedded Programming and Preprocessing.

SYNOPSIS

starfish [ -o=outputfile ] [ -e=initialcode ] [ -replace ] [ -mode=mode ] file...
where files usually contain some Perl code, delimited by < ? and ! >. To produce output to be inserted into the file, use variable $O or function echo.

(The documentation is probably not up to date.)

Starfish is a system for Perl-based text-embedded programming and preprocessing, which relies on a unifying regular expression rewriting methodology. If you know Perl and php, you probably know the basic idea: embed Perl code inside the text, execute it is some way, and interleave the output with the text. Very similar projects exist and some of them are listed in "SEE ALSO". Starfish is, however, unique in several ways. One important difference between starfish and similar programs (e.g. php) is that the output does not necessarily replace the code, but it follows the code by default. It is attempted with Starfish to provide a universal text-embedded programming language, which can be used with different types of textual files.

There are two files in this package: a module (Starfish.pm) and a small script (starfish) that provides a command-line interface to the module. The options for the script are described in subsection ""starfish_cmd list of file names and options"".

The earlier name of this module was SLePerl (Something Like ePerl), but it was changed it to starfish -- sounds better and easier to type. One option was `oyster, but some people are thinking about using it for Perl beans, and there is a (yet another) Perl module for embedded Perl Text::Oyster, so it was not used.
The idea with the `starfish name is: the Perl code is embedded into a text, so the text is equivalent to a shellfish containing pearls. A starfish comes by and eats the shellfish... Unlike a natural starfish, this starfish is interested in pearls and does not normally touch most of the surrounding meat.

Text Text Revolution project is a text-based ncurses DDR clone.
Text Text Revolution is a text-based Dance Dance Revolution clone.
It supports pyDDRs .step file format (which has now been superceeded by the .dance format), and plans to stream OGG, MP3, or WAV files.
Enhancements:
- Joystick (DDR mat) support is working now. use the -j switch. Its currently hardcoded to use /dev/input/js0.
- Some graphics code was cleaned up, and it is now possible to specify the difficulty (--light, --standard, --hard, or -ln, where n is 1, 2, or 3).