Scrolling between desktops in JWM, and terminal text editors

[miriam_e]

In previous versions of Puppy Linux, scrolling the mouse wheel while the pointer was over the desktop backdrop switched virtual desktops. In the latest version of JWM this behavior is no longer default. (JWM is Joe's window manager — a very capable, but small, fast window manager.) I have spent days, on and off, trying to work out how I might reinstate this behavior. ChatGPT, when I enlisted its help, sent me off on multiple wild goose chases, weirdly making up commands that don't exist. It was worse than useless because I wasted time on its hallucinations.

I even managed to crash my computer using a command very similar to the one that was the actual solution. Scarily, I couldn't start up the graphical interface. I had to use the commandline to fix the problem, which would have been easy if this version of Puppy had a simple terminal text editor. Previous Puppies had mp, or Nano, or another minimal text editor I can't remember the name of just now, but this one didn't even have tiny, ancient ed! The only text editor it had for the terminal was vi, which is decidedly not minimal. I ended up using sed (stream editor), which every linux has. It is a weird little program — more an editing language than what you'd think of as a text editor, but it did the job. My GUI (graphical user interface) restarted. Whew!

This morning I finally solved the original problem:

    <Mouse context="root" button="4">ldesktop</Key>
    <Mouse context="root" button="5">rdesktop</Key>

So simple! Now I can switch desktops with a simple scroll of the mouse wheel again.

For safety, I've installed some simple terminal-based text editors so I don't get caught having to edit something without the GUI again:

micro
ne
nano

Each of them is small and fast and has syntax highlighting, which makes life very easy.

• micro lets you navigate with keyboard or mouse. The keybindings are mostly pretty easy to remember.
• ne uses menus accessed via the escape key. The keybindings are either control keys (e.g. ^s) or meta (alt) keys (e.g. [Q)
• nano is the easiest to use, with only 12 commands I think, and all displayed constantly at the bottom of the screen. If started with options -S and -a (nano -Sa test.txt) it softwraps text at spaces, which is very handy to have. This is the one I'm most likely to use.

As an afterthought, I've also installed ed, which is a weird little line editor, the predecessor to vi, and I'll probably never use it — really only used it a couple of times before — but it is tiny, and just in the off-chance that I might need it...

Hmmm... times like this make me wonder, again, whether investing time into learning vi might be worthwhile. It is extremely powerful and many old-time programmers swear by it, but it was made long before the "Common User Access" standards were developed, which let us use more or less the same key-combinations for most programs (Ctrl-S to save, Ctrl-Q to quit, Ctrl-C to copy, Ctrl-V to paste, and so on). As a result vi uses lots of totally weird key combinations that nothing else does. I have taught myself to use it before, but it doesn't take long for my memory to fade, and I have to relearn it all over again.