I haven’t had a chance to try either of these yet, mostly because I have two more projects I’m juggling right now, but first break I get, I want to try both Enpi and WordGrinder. Both — particularly WordGrinder — look interesting as console-based word processors.
Personally I think that would be great just to keep on hand for the odd word processor file that I download, and don’t need to work with beyond opening and reading (like, for example, configuration instructions or something like that). Occasionally nano comes in handy, but nano is not truly a word processor, and to me doesn’t feel like one.
And of course, I go back all the way to Easyscript for the C64, so I can appreciate a text-driven, code-based word processor for being slightly easier to use at times. I’m sure if you were born after 1980 the idea of a console-based word processor is about as appealing as square wheels. But trust me: Sometimes the applications we take for granted now are comparatively obfuscated by our lust for superficialities.
Okay, that was way too many syllables. Back to the topic at hand: I don’t see packages for either program in Ubuntu or Arch, which means if you want to experiment you might have to do a little dirty work on your own. If you get either of them to work and you can offer a screenshot in action (yes, I know both home pages have screenshots, but hey, everybody loves screenshots!) I will thank you, for one.
Motho ke motho ka botho 
Hi – and thank you for reminder about the programs. FYI – there in a PKGBUILD of WordGrinder on Arch forum – here’s the link:
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=44386
I did not try it yet – but I plan to do it ASAP.
Have a nice and sunny day,
tami 🙂
I haven’t tried Wordgrinder yet; the website mentions that it’s not stable and having to remove packages I’ve compiled is a real pain!
I did have a go at Enpi:
(Enpi is just a wrapper script for TeX. The preview of the dvi it generated is GhostView, the images have me editing the file with vi, and running Enpi, respectively.)
Oops- the thumbnails didn’t show up. Everyone _does_ love screenshots, here they are:
Thanks everybody. I hadn’t seen that thread with the PKGBUILD in it, I’m going to try that right now.
Have been playing with (well, actually working in) WordGrinder since I built/installed it yesterday and I’m very pleased with it. The Functionality is pretty much limited to displaying menus and using customized shortcuts and formatting options corresponds to basic html but the ncurses interface is very intuitive and wonderfully unobtrusive (basically it’s your text and a status bar; the menus appear when pressing ESC). A neat little feature is that each wordgrinder file can contain multiple documents – great for keeping an in-file-clipboard alongside your regular document. Needless to say, as of now, you’ll need to export to html or plain text and do more intensive formatting in OOo Writer or the like but just for typing, navigation and basic formattting.
Screen shots (it’s running in my on-desktop-terminal in gnu screen):
Interesting! I thought it was broken at the code level. Can you explain how you installed it?
thank for your warm wishing
Hi everybody. I am the author of that minimalistic script enpi.
First of all, I would like to thank this blog for reviewing my simple program.
I have noticed that most visitors to the script site come from here, so I have decided to post here the announcement of the new version 0.3, as the thread in the Ubuntu Forums where I posted about versions 0.1 and 0.2
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=669599
seems to have been discontinued.
So, just wanted to announce that version 0.3 is out. Enpi 0.3 features a few improvements (support of hidden comments, strikeout superscripts and subscripts), and above all it is fully Ubuntu compatible now. Ubuntu users will not have to fiddle with the script to have it work under their OS. The only requirement for them is to install a couple of additional packages (see the enpiscript site or the documentation).
Best regards and ciao.
how do i install the wordgrinder? im using kahel os, its an arch based linux distro.
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