[OT] Granny-friendly Linux Distros?

[H. S. Teoh]

On Tue, May 07, 2019 at 11:07:47PM +0000, Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Tuesday, 7 May 2019 at 22:46:07 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> > I've been entertaining the idea of writing my own browser just so I
> > don't have to deal with the crap anymore. It would be basically
> > ELinks with graphics
> 
> try links2, it is already basically that.

Interesting.  I'll have to check it out.


> But I have also been tempted to do this, because my D libraries are
> actually... basically capable of it. I have html to text (which I use
> for my email) and even did a basic layouter with css support once. And
> it kinda worked - I could view my websites of the time. But meh, I
> keep being forced to use crappy websites that require crappy browsers
> so no point even trying.

What I'd love to be able to do, is to automatically extract website
content apart from useless cruft so that I can, e.g., read articles
without being inundated with banner ads, popups (JS, CSS, and whatever
else these days), useless splash pages, and weird formatting / styling
(like overly-wide, fixed-resolution layouts).  Of course, given the
general quality of your general crappy website, this probably has to be
done on a per-site basis.


> > Throw out title bars and other useless deco, junk useless
> > overlapping windows
> 
> I find these things to be so useful it drives me nuts when programs
> try to remove them. Overlapping is useful when you disable click
> raises windows!

I used to use overlapping windows somewhat.  These days, I just
full-screen maximize everything, no exceptions.  The only time I really
need to see more than 1 window at a time is when copying/transcribing
stuff. So really, all I need is (1) full-screen, maximized, and (2)
split-screen, 2-panel (horizontal or vertical).  Everything else is
dispensible.


> You should write your own window manager tho. I still haven't exactly
> done it... I forked blackbox years ago for myself tho, so I still am
> using a custom one, just not from scratch.

I've been tempted to.  While dipping my toes in Android development
recently, I wrote a crude X11/Xlib wrapper module just so I can test GL
code on my PC before the more painstaking and annoying process of
uploading and running it on my phone.  So I do have the beginnings of an
X11 API module that would be necessary to write a window manager in D.
I've also written a crude wrapper over libfreetype for my equation
graphing project, so I do have the pieces necessary for primitive text
rendering. (Not really interested in beautiful text rendering for a WM;
it should most of the time stay out of the way anyway -- I can't stand
wasting precious screen real estate on needless deco and other WM frills
-- and only bare basics text rendition is necessary for the occasional
WM interactions.)


T

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