Recently I upgraded to Mint 17 to get back on an LTS revision. I couldn’t wait for KDE to come out so I went with the version built for Gnome 3 (Cinnamon). It’s not as ugly as Gnome usually is. Graphics drivers seem better as does the font rendering. It might even be slightly faster on this 4Gig 64-bit AMD dual core netbook that the previous version was.
I was kind of shocked to find Thunderchicken was still the default mail client. Would have thought the boys and girls working on Evolution would have finally gotten their act together. Guess not. Thunderchicken is horrible no matter what platform it runs on.
Work at my client site has dropped to the point I no longer need to work 7 days per week to keep us on schedule. Seems like every IT project goes through that stage, at least the ones consultants are brought in to work on. The free time is allowing me to get back into book writing and blogging. I mention this because Gnome is still icky here.
Yes, it has the same LibreOffice for writing books and yes, I can install FocusWriter if I really need distraction free writing, but it really fails when it comes to blogging. I don’t use or need a lot when it comes to blogging.
There was a time when I tried/used Blogilo on KDE. When it worked it was great, but getting it to work was quite hit-or-miss. I’m not dissing the developers. Their problems will increase now that WordPress has rolled out automatic updates for sites. API and feature changes will be even harder for them to chase which means the package will suffer from far more misses than hits.
All I really need for blogging is KWrite. A test editor which is not going to insert any kind of formatting either on-screen or in the file. I need it to have dynamic word wrap and spell-as-you-go. It is really nice when the editor also has sort capability for both selected text ranges and the entire file. When I’m done writing something I select the entire thing and paste it into the WordPress editor then create any links the article needs and finally click on the full justification format button. That’s it, that’s how I blog.
Today I tried writing blog posts with the Mint 17. It’s hurt. Gedit can turn on word wrap and spell-as-you-go but cannot sort. Not a nice looking editor either. You can make it work, sort-of. I’m using it to write this, but, I cannot see myself doing much blogging using Gedit.
I tried a few other editors. Despite the fact nobody should really install or use Java anymore, I installed jEdit. It looks a lot nicer now, but still doesn’t have spell-as-you-go spell checking. A quick Web search turned up a discussion from 2005 requesting this feature, but it still isn’t there.
Tea has had a problem of adding formatting information which manages to survive cut & paste into WordPress, then causes WordPress all kinds of intestinal discomfort. While I admire the grit of the developers, it crossed a threshold which now limits its use.
Juffed installed but wouldn’t run. Seems to me this package doesn’t run much anymore. I cannot remember the last time I installed it on a distro and had it actually start.
The editor which was quite simply perfect for my needs was KWrite. It is a subset of KATE, for lack of a better description. KATE is quite incredible for both programming and text editing. KWrite is light weight and has all of the necessary features.
I really can’t wait for the KDE version of Mint 17 to come out. Cinnamon simply can’t cut it.
