[Sussex] Round up of last night

[Gavin Stevens]

Steve,

On Fri, 30 Nov 2007 10:44:53 +0000
Steve Dobson <steve at dobson.org> wrote:

> Hi Mooters
> 
> First a big thank you to Gavin for his talk on "Life without X".  As a
> long time command line junkie it is always nice to come across a new
> commands.  Gavin introduced me to sc(1) a text-based spreadsheet with
> VI-like key bindings, well that's how it describes itself.  
> 
> Of course I had to install and play with it.  I entered a very simple
> test spread sheet, saved it to a file and then looked at the file
> produced.  No binary encoding here, it's a nice and easy to read ASCII
> file:
> 	# This data file was generated by the Spreadsheet Calculator.
> 	# You almost certainly shouldn't edit it.
> 
> 	let A0 = 45
> 	let A1 = 23
> 	let A2 = A0+A1
> 	goto A2 A0
> 
> I ignored the comment on the second line and hacked the file:
> 	let A0 = 45
> 	let A1 = 23
> 	let A2 = A0+A1
> 
> 	let C0 = 2
> 	let C1 = 4
> 	let C2 = C0+C1+A2
> 
> 	goto A0 A2
> 	goto C0 C2
> 
> This didn't produced any changes to spreadsheet so I changed both
> "goto" lines with:
> 
> 	goto A0 C2
> 
> Bingo.  I now have a spreadsheet that I can easily generate from a
> script!

I am delighted that you enjoyed the talk & very happy that you like SC.
I shall be revisiting SC myself.

I enjoy all the modern things like Gnome, OOo, etc., but I definitely
have a penchant for old, simple apps as well.


> VI
> ==
> 
> Jan's moot will be about vi(1) the love it or hate it editor - there
> just no middle ground.  I have wanted to do such a talk for a while
> but I didn't think there was enough interest.  As several people last
> night said that they would like to get to know vi better I have
> decided to go ahead.
> 
> The talk will not just be a procession through the various commands. 
> I will show them but they will be quickly skipped over.  The best way
> to learn vi is to use it.  So just print yourself one of the vi quick
> reference guides and sit there and use it for a few days.
> 
> For the talk I plan to show where vi came from and what it can do. 
> The idea being at the end that you still won't really know how to use
> vi, but you will have pointers to the commands so which the help of a
> book or the web you can then learn how to do it for yourself.

I am looking forward to this.

Gavin.