Linux GUI FAQ/tutorial?

[Octavian Râsnita]

Hi Trev,

From: <trev.saunders at gmail.com>
> Personally I prefer yasr to speakup, and like vim as an editor.  vi m 
> works well with yasr, and is useable with speakup.

Well, maybe my espectations are wrong because they are based mostly on my 
Linux - cli experience in a SecureCRT console from Windows, but I was lost 
each time vi started as a default editor.

To be more specific, I would like to be able to use an editor that lets me 
to use the arrow keys to read the text line by line and word by word and 
char by char with up and down arrows, control+left and right arrows, or 
simply the left and right arrows, allow me to select the text using the 
shift key, selected text that can be read by the screen reader when I want 
to, to be able to copy/paste the text from a program into another with a 
simple combination of key, execute the currently open program source code 
with a specified interpreter that also offers me the possibility of 
specifying some parameters, find/replace using regular expressions with a 
simple combination of keys, and very few other things.

I ask if these are possible, because as I said, when vi was opened in an SSH 
console and I tried to use the arrow keys, I used to hear only some beep 
sounds, without beeing able to read anything, and instead of giving 
combinations of keys for exiting/saving like Control+S, Control+Q or 
something like that, I needed to type simple text commands like ":", which 
is very strange for a modern editor.

> I think by far the best option is mutt.

I guess mutt is accessible under Linux. I have tried a Windows version that 
had big accessibility issues.
Is mutt able to create/display html mail messages?
Can it group the messages by conversation? Can we define more folders and 
rules for moving the messages automaticly in those folders based on some 
conditions?
I guess the answer is yes, but I want to know what I should expect.

> agreed, bash makes a pretty excellent file manager.

Well, for some tasks yes. I would be very happy if Windows command prompt 
would have the features of bash. But for some tasks a file manager like 
Windows Explorer is much better, but it is good if there is one for Linux 
also.

However as I said, my biggest fear remains the text editor. Under Windows 
there is no text editor without issues. The best is TextPad, but it doesn't 
fully support UTF-8 which is very bad.
I have tried tens of editors under Windows and all of them have issues, but 
under Linux I think I don't have so many editors to choose unfortunately.

Octavian