Linux GUI FAQ/tutorial?

[John G. Heim]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Octavian Râsnita" <orasnita at gmail.com>
To: "Linux for blind general discussion" <blinux-list at redhat.com>
Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2010 12:53 AM
Subject: Re: Linux GUI FAQ/tutorial?


> 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 what you really want is a character based program for linux that 
works like Windows notepad. I asked around about something like that a 
couple of years ago and couldn't find anything. But gedit is pretty close if 
you're using gnome.

PS: Vi was invented way back when people were using 300 baud modems. There 
used to be religious wars between emacs users and vi users. I was an emacs 
user and I once complained about how unnatural vi's user interface was and 
somebody told me that it was because it worked really well when editing a 
file remotely.  I'm not 100% sure that's true but his explanation made sense 
at the time.