Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[vovchik]

Dear 01micko and MochiMoppel,

We can give that svg a little eye candy with linear gradients and not much extra bloat, e.g.:

[MochiMoppel]

[MochiMoppel]

Update 2017-05-22 (see also initial post)

I consider this the most important update so far because it gives real power to this little script.

Commandbox
This emulates ROX-filer's "Shell command box" which opens when the user presses Shift+!. It allows to execute any command, script or application.

In ROX-Filer this feature is severely crippled by the lack of any output. Hard to tell if a command was successful or not. More a nuisance is its habit of closing the box after the command has finished, which makes repeated runs cumbersome. And lastly there is a danger of freezing the computer completely by an unsuitable (interactive) command.

In MMview these shortcomings are fixed. Commands are run in a visible terminal emulator and commands can easily be repeated for other selected files by pressing F4 (in MS Excel F4 is the tremendously useful shortcut to repeat a previous command or macro). As for stability it should always be possible to stop a command gone berserk by pressing Ctrl+C or - as a last resort - by closing MMview altogether.

F4 allows efficient workflows. Examples:
- View image files and rotate selected images (e.g. with imagemagick)
- Copy or symlink selected files into a specified directory
- Send selected files to trash

For a comparison between ROX-Filer and MMview see below table.

Terminal
Gtkdialog's terminal widget is rarely used and not fully documented. A good chance to try its features and discover its bugs. By default it is limited to a dismal 100 lines of output. With the undocumented tag attribut "scrollback-lines" this value can be changed. I set it to 1024 lines, the urxvt default.

All options are accessible from the Terminal menu. Tooltips try to explain them. Shortcut Ctrl+T toggles visibility on/off.

Which of the options is most suitable depends on the commands. Some commands like "hexdump" or "stat" are useless without a visible terminal, so "Keep open" should be a useful option. For other commands like "cp" or "mv" the opening of a terminal could be rather distracting, making "Never open" a better choice.

Of course the terminal can be used like any other terminal emulator, with commands entered directly into the terminal pane. Still there are advantages by using the command box. Editing and copy/paste is easier. The command never scrolls off the screen and the output keeps tidy. The command box also sets the tab width of the terminal to 4 characters, thus compatible with Geany, while the "raw" terminal uses the traditional 8 character width.

Other changes
Some menu items changed location. Audio/video play is not a saved preference anymore. WIth Ctrl+Z there is now a convenient way (at least with a US keyboard layout) to start/stop audio.

Comparison of "Shell command box" features in ROX-Filer and MMview

[drunkjedi]

Good one MochiMoppel, will test it out ASAP.

[zigbert]

First time I have seen the gtkdialog terminal widget in use...
Great!

[smokey01]

It was working on Fatdog-710 but this version isn't, segfault.

[step]

[01micko]

[step]

For Fatdog64-70x Users:

To use the new command box feature, first you need to install this package from the package manager: gtkdialog-vte-514-x86_64-1

[SFR]

[step]

[mavrothal]

It would appear that the fatdog issue is related to the gtkdialog compile rather mmview or gtkdialog configuration. Was it in FD710?
Compiling gtkdialog in df710 according to the FD recipe, with or without the disable-vte and/or enable-inotify patches does not segfault. No terminal with the disable-vte patch of course but still no crash.
Might need to recompile and update the package.

BTW m2_view or 2m_view sounds better in "exotic" languages than mm_view
BTW2, hardcoding busybox calls may limit its use in no-busybox based distros or with busybox configured "strangely". They may not be mm_view target now, but you never know!

[step]

[MochiMoppel]

[MochiMoppel]

Update 2017-06-21 (see also initial post)

This update was born out of curiosity. I was curious as to what it takes to convert HTML into pure text. I can convert text into HTML, and all I need is any text editor and a fair knowledge of (X)HTML and CSS. But converting into the other direction I've never done.

I didn't find anything useful on the net, so I decided to roll my own conversion routine. Basically strips all tags, all <style> and <script> sections and displays what's left. I added bullets for some semantic tags, but apart from that no style is applied simply because the edit widget is not able to format text.

In order to convert a page select View => Additional info from the menu or push F1.

HTML
Many files can be found in /usr/share/doc/. Most of them display decently well though none of them uses good HTML .

My locally saved Gtkdialog reference files display the "Definition" section well. All other sections, using tables, are less impressive. Rendering HTML tables with a proportional font and a widget that knows nothing about pixel dimensions is close to impossible, but if anyone has a good idea how to format tables, let me know.

Of course anything beyond simple HTML should be left to a dedicated browser, but to push the envelope I tested with locally saved webpages. Not so bad. The result is close to what I get when in Opera I use "Save as text", sometimes even better. The acid test were webpages of the Washington Post since they use multiple <style> and <script> sections in the <body> part and almost no newline characters. The most extreme and concise HTML I found in Google pages: Giant one liners, not a single byte wasted.

Abiword
Abiword files use HTML and can be viewed as well. How well? Don't really know. I don't use Abiword and I have no other examples than what's already in Puppy.

Notecase
Same as with Abiword. In principle possible, but no experience and no examples.

Have fun!