[topicmapmail] TM for Linux desktop

[Jack Park]

I can't help thinking that any move to a command line for anybody except 
blackbelts and ubergeeks would be a step way backwards. It seems clear 
to me that MS Word is far more popular than is any editor that requires 
command lines to make it work.  My comments span the range from Linux 
itself to topic maps editors.

In fact,  afik, those who are espousing command lines are already Linux 
users.

Jack

Murray Altheim wrote:

> Sam Hunting wrote:
>
>> Murray Altheim wrote:
>> [...]
>>
>>> Sam,
>>>
>>> Are you thinking command line or thinking GUI?
>>
>>
>> Definitely command line -- why I was diffident about intruding into a 
>> GUI
>> discussion -- but heck, the subject line is "TM for linux desktop" 
>> and the
>> command line is definitely part of that.
>
>
> Well, I've been using linux for I think about seven years now, and
> I think of it both as a desktop (like KDE) and as a command line,
> so I wasn't sure what you meant.
>
>>> A lot of Ceryle's
>>> functionality is command line operable, from XML validation and
>>> well-formedness checking, LTM and other format conversion to XTM,
>>> etc.  If you meant command line, is there something specific you
>>> had in mind?
>>
>>
>> See the first URL above, for my KT presentation. Basically, it seems 
>> to me
>> that if its sensible to navigate the linux file system with its tree
>> nature (ok, a graph with links) its sensible to navigate a topic map 
>> with
>> its graph structure. One would cd to a topic, etc.
>
>
> Well, "sensible" I leave to you to define. A very large or complex Topic
> Map doesn't seem too sensible to navigate via command line, but perhaps
> query. Some Topic Map structures are pretty complex under the rug, at
> least mine are. But I think I get your point: treating it a bit like a
> file system. I'll check out your presentation tomorrow -- it's getting
> pretty late here.
>
>>> Editing seems a bit difficult, but perhaps query if
>>> we had a query language, etc.
>>
>>
>> Not perhaps so very hard, if we are dealing with URIs, names, and small
>> chunks of #PCDATA most of the time (as at least with XTM we are or -- 
>> some
>> would say should ;-) -- be doing. XSH makes it pretty easy to work at 
>> this
>> level. Not that I'd want to author a humongous topic map in the 
>> shell, of
>> course, but adding value to an existing map shouldn't be so hard.
>>
>> Of course, there's lots of back end stuff to work out ...
>
>
> Yeah. A lot so far as I can see. Having built up an application
> that started on the command line (there wasn't a GUI for quite a
> while), I've not spent that much time with it for months, but it
> does things like:
>
>   % ceryle -l ./data/authoring.ltm -o ./out/authoring.xtm
>
>   % ceryle -l ./data/authoring.ltm -o /dev/null
>        (for LTM validation, as normally it'd spit it to system.out)
>
>   % ceryle -x ../../text/canasta.html (XHTML validation)
>
> etc.
>
> The difficulty I see in doing stuff from the command line isn't so
> much the machinery behind the scenes or under the rug, it's trying
> to figure out how you'd create an XUpdate-like syntax for XTM. I
> think Kal has something along these lines in TM4J, and Ceryle uses
> TM4J (Tolog?), so I may have more tools at my disposal that I had
> thought.
>
> Yeah, and I should be asleep. 'night...
>
> Murray