The Renderfarm

4:32 PM

@gandalf3 Ooh, how is it going with Khal?

I've tried using it but it seems a bit counter intuitive to me

Calendar and Email are the two pieces of open source software that I just can't seem to find

The ones that are out there just don't make sense to me

Usually they are just missing a couple of features, but it varies quite a bit

I've been trying to use mutt, but it needs to be modernized a bit for me to be able to use it properly

For example, attachment management is a bit awkward

And you have to pull together like 10 different pieces of software to get it to be fully featured

I feel like I would almost be better off using a file based approach that uses vim to compose messages and less to view them...

For calendar, I really want something that integrates into task warrior

And uses a similar command line interface

I also want budgeting software that works in a similar way

So basically I want warrior os... (everything based on the taskwarrior interface), I wouldn't even matter if there wasn't a gui...

Well, I guess I would also need a command line web browser that's actually good for extended use

Also, the web needs to stop being so bloated

I cringe thinking of all the time I spent working with react and similar technologies when making static sites

Javascript isn't needed for 90% of web work but it gets used for everything instead of smart server design

So we are left with simple web pages taking ages to load because of all the extra things they added that weren't needed

And with the current situation, it's unlikely it's going to change

Chrome practically has a monopoly now, and the w3m is made of a bunch of similar companies

The people that actually care about this type of thing are in a minority that neither cares about

So we're basically stuck with huge, slow loading web pages that require huge, bloated browser to function

Duarte Farrajota Ramos

5:24 PM

Anyone else been getting extremely slow load of images from bse?

11:19 PM

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos Fine here

@TARDISMaker It needs a bit of configuration to do anything..

Although I hadn't heard of taskwarrior until you mentioned it..

pacman -S

:)

I like it a lot

@TARDISMaker I have a friend who's professor used emacs for ~~everything~~ email. They had a notice on their syllabus that html emails will not be read :P

I can't blame them

@gandalf3 Haha!

That's pretty great

What I want to see is markdown based email

It's the perfect format

@TARDISMaker Is it not the other way around?

From daringfireball.net/projects/markdown

> Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters, the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.

Whoo. This is one chatroom I haven't been in for years.

11:26 PM

@rahuldottech Welcome!

@gandalf3 Hello! :)

@TARDISMaker FWIW, asciidoc is pretty great too

Duarte Farrajota Ramos

hey

Markdown, with slight improvements

@gandalf3 I think of markdown not as a conversion tool, but a format on it's own

I write almost everything in markdown now

Duarte Farrajota Ramos

@gandalf3 probably my crappy rooter needed a reboot, lets see if it solves the issue

11:28 PM

@TARDISMaker Same

Syntax comparison: asciidoctor.org/docs/user-manual/#comparison-by-example

@TARDISMaker Me too!

:D

\o/

There used to be this amazing word processor which used Markdown

But it's abandonware now, and unfortunately doesn't work on Windows 10 :(

markdownpad.com

I really wouldn't mind an email client which rendered incoming messages with markdown formatting, and rendered my outgoing emails to an embedded an html copy

11:30 PM

I want something like that

@gandalf3 Yes, or even better, render it to html but also send a markdown version

@TARDISMaker There's a chrome extension which allows you to write markdown in any text field iirc

@TARDISMaker Well of course

So the email goes out with html, markdown, and plaintext

Thunderbird sends both plaintext and html by default

Markdown would just be ignored by most clients at least at first

11:31 PM

> Write your email in Markdown, then make it pretty.

chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/markdown-here/…

A friend of mine uses this

@TARDISMaker

@TARDISMaker I mean, plaintext is basically markdown anyway, no?

@gandalf3 More or less, but I feel like you could run into some overlap issues...

@gandalf3 Yep, plaintext with minimal parsing == markdown

I would rather have it try to replace html

Which might never happen :P

But the format is so much better suited than anything else out there

@TARDISMaker It doesn't have enough features to replace HTML email. But you can always write in MD, and convert to HTML before sending

11:33 PM

@rahuldottech I would argue that the features html supports that markdown doesn't are anti-features

@TARDISMaker I don't think I've ever seen any markdown where the syntax gets in the way to the point where reading it formatted is a pain.

@TARDISMaker html has a whole different design goal.. I mean, you can't write forms in markdown for example

@gandalf3 I'm meaning more plaintext, but my argument there isn't all that good anyway...

@TARDISMaker I think the main point of markdown is that the source functions perfectly as (well formatted) plaintext

To clarify the anti-feature statement, I'm meaning more for email

I don't really want companies sending me emails that are completely styled

I'm okay with a couple pictures, but the main format should be text, imo

Well, rendering html in emails was probably not the best move in hindsight

11:35 PM

@gandalf3 Yeah, you're right

I just don't really like the idea of labeling a format as something that it isn't :P but that's my only argument that carries any weight

And it's entirely an opinion

@gandalf3 Yeah

@rahuldottech Does asciidoctor do anything with the commandline or is it entirely a graphical application?

@TARDISMaker Atom has that as a native feature, but last I used it it has some performance issues (years ago)

Right now I'm using pandoc to convert markdown to pdf but I'm still looking for a better solution

What I'm looking for is something that I can apply some sort of stylesheet to, and be able to edit the stylesheet is a sort of WYSIWYG system, but do all of the conversions in the command line

@gandalf3 Sure, that sort of works, but I'm ultra picky and don't want to use electron :P

(I have 4GB of ram still :P)

Understandable

I wonder if gvim has a way to render formatted markdown

Looks like perhaps not..

People seem to be just stuffing it into a browser: github.com/iamcco/markdown-preview.vim

Better than nothing I suppose

Yeah

It works, but it seems a bit counter-intuitive to me

@TARDISMaker Maybe markdown -> html -> pdf is what you want?

That way you can do the styling with css

I've done that before for rèsumès and such

11:49 PM

Yeah, the idea of doing the conversions turns me off a bit, but it might be the best solution...

I mean, markdown -> html is what it was designed to do in the first place, and html -> pdf isn't that bad

Yeah, it's really just conceptual ideas that seem off to me, in practice they're probably fine

I've seen attempts to convert between formats with far less shared information..

I'm not a super big fan of pdf in any case

But everyone seems to use them

so..

@gandalf3 I use pdf because it is an easy way to move documents back and forth while ensuring the formatting stays the same

My computer isn't actually connected to a printer so I have to move files to another computer to print them

Do you have a replacement you use for that type of thing or do you just avoid the situation?

No, I mean that's what it was designed for

My complaint is more about other features which seem bloated to me (form-filling capabilities for e.g.)

11:56 PM

Oh, yeah

Those shouldn't be there

They have no place

It drives me crazy because the Eagle Project Proposal system is based around a pdf with form filling capabilities

It requires Adobe Acrobat which isn't available on Linux

And it's apparently way too easy to terrible things like render the entire document to a huge bitmap and embed that

I've met an annoying number of pdfs which were like that for no apparent reason :/

I just used markdown and pandoc to render everything and just did a lot of copy and pasting

@gandalf3 Yeah, I think that's pretty common

@TARDISMaker Last time I had to fill out a pdf okular was able to do it to some extent. IIRC I ended up converting to an SVG and using inkscape though, so there must've been some problem