[Blend-fluxbox-devel] Wiki update

Fri Jan 1 07:03:20 UTC 2016

Quoting Jedi (2015-12-31 19:22:47)
> I've recently begun experimenting with luakit browser.  Highly 
> configurable and it is so light it floats!  Worth checking out.

All these browsers use the GTK+ 2.x port of WebKit, which means their 
quality in rendering real-World web pages should be on par:

  * LuaKit
  * Midori
  * Surf
  * Uzbl
  * Claws (for optional html email rendering plugin)

Differences between (the browsers of) above seems to be in UX (how to 
interact with it), and how well it is maintained.  I suggest Midori as 
that seems best maintained and more friendly towards non-technical 
users.  Specifically, LuaKit is explicitly described as targeted power 
users, and the package in Debian unstable was releases more than 3 years 
ago (i.e. a lifetime in the field of web browsers).

This does touch an interesting point: What types of users do we target 
with this blend?  Non-technical users or power users?  Can we (and do we 
want to) perhaps maintain several flavors, to target *both* 
non-technical and power users?

> Over the past year I've pretty much given up on Iceweasel in favor of 
> Chrome.  Another pig of a browser, but decent security and updated 
> alternatives to Flash. (pepper?)

I personally do not use nor miss Flash content on the web, and none of 
the times that I helped others getting it to work have I noticed it 
being lightweight.  If really needed, then I believe it rules out WebKit 
based browsers, but Mozilla-based (or, techically, NPAPI-based) browsers 
support both the free Gnash and the non-free Pepper plugins.

...which raises an interesting point: Should this blend be lightweight 
also in its choice of programs, or only in desktop helper tools?

> A 3rd grader could hack your Iceweasel/Firefox setup.

Great if even 3rd graders can get involved in developing Free Software 
;-)

Joke aside, I suspect you mean to say that Iceweasel has some security 
flaws compared to Chrome (and WebKit-based browsers?).  Care to 
elaborate on that?

> Also qutebrowser comes to mind though it's been a while since I tried 
> it.

Qutebrowser seems not packaged for Debian.  If you think Debian would 
benefit from having that browser available then please file a so-called 
"RFP" (request for packaging) bugreport to raise awareness about it: 
https://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/#l1

> I also use Icedove.  It is huge, and a pig.  If your looking for tiny 
> mutt is the way to go.  Claws is good too.

Mutt again touches question on targeted users - and Claws maybe too 
(sorry I wasn't more explicit when bringing it up at first).  For power 
users there are other tools, but I won't elaborate until we've 
established if we wanna go down that road.

> Wicd is totally awesome pretty light and very easy to configure.

That's good to hear.  I have only little experience with it, and my 
concern - other than its look'n'feel, is how well it keeps up with the 
changing infrastructure of Debian: Looking at 
https://packages.qa.debian.org/wicd it is missing a maintainer since a 
few months, raising concerns also about upstream activity.  If we choose 
to rely on wicd, we should probably try (e.g. through blogging or 
similar) to find someone to step up as maintainer of wicd for Debian, 
and/or get involved upstream.

> Another even lighter way to go would be Ceni.  A bit more technically 
> challenging, but not by much.

Like Qutebrowser this is not packaged for Debian: Please consider file 
an RFP: https://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/#l1

> Network-Manager will pull a ton of dependencies...

Actually, the biggest hurdle of network-manager seems to be its pulling 
GTK 3.x, so if someone steps up to write a GTK 2.x frontend it can stay 
pretty lightweight.

> Oddly enough, I've never tried mpv.  Smplayer is a great alternative 
> to vlc which can also be quite a hog.  (i'll confess to having them 
> both installed)

Mpv emerged relatively recently - available since Jessie.  That might 
explain why you haven't heard of it.  It is a fork of and sort-of 
successor to mplayer and mplayer2.

smplayer is a Qt wrapper for mplayer (and mplayer2), so *not* 
lightweight in a GTK+ 2.x environment.

> For the audiophiles among us, squentin's GMusicBrowser (perl based) is 
> spectactular and very feature rich.  Designed for huge libraries of 
> music.  Terry has contributed to that project as well with a ton of 
> add-ons, widgets, etc.  Being friends with it's dev means quick fixes 
> if one is ever needed.  (so far none has ever been needed that I can 
> recall) It is also light in resource usage!

Thanks for bringing up music.

I distinguish between playing a single file and browsing a catalogue of 
organized music.

For one-off playing I use mpv, and for structured play I use mpd and 
recommend Ario frontend for non-technical lighweight GTK+ 2.x use 
(personally I use either ncmpcpp or an Android frontend).

For getting my music well-structured, I use Picard (sadly Qt-based but 
only rarely needed - another lighter tool may adequately replace it).

> Recently I switched shells from Bash to Zsh.  With this change I also 
> switched to urxvt-unicode.  There are tons of sweet configs, and if 
> your an emacs or vim guy/gal you'll love the way they work together.

References to those mice configs?

> Also the way it is so easily turned into an IDE for python, perl, ruby 
> etc.  If your using Git with github there are some really nice configs 
> that will integrate into urxvt-unicode to make all your github tasks 
> way easy!

That raises another question: Do we want to maintain a flavor (or 
plugin) for programmers?

> Running urxvt in daemon mode via the 'urxvtd -q -f -o' switches makes 
> things really fast and opens up the use of multiple terms really 
> simple.

In Debian, urxvtcd handles "-q -f" parts of above.

I guess the "-o" part could be done by adding a snippet to 
/etc/X11/Xsession.d/...

> I'll happily share any of the rc files for the above as I happily 
> stole them from some one else! :) (FOSS you know!)

...but I am quite curious to learn how others have done it, so please do 
share!

 - Jonas

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

 [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
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