Miriam's Dreamwidth blog

NOTE:  'ESC' is the escape character.

ESC[0m	  normal display (clear all F/X, use normal colors)
ESC[1m	  bold (bright colours in older rxvt)
ESC[2m	  dim or faint
ESC[3m	  italics (+ bright in some rxvt, not older ones)
ESC[4m	  underline
ESC[5m	  slow blink (or bright colours or bold)
ESC[6m	  rapid blink
ESC[7m	  reverse (swap background/foreground colors)
ESC[8m	  conceal (hidden)
ESC[9m	  strike through
ESC[21m	  double underline (or reset bold)
ESC[22m	  normal intensity (not bold, not faint)
ESC[23m	  not italic
ESC[24m	  not underline
ESC[25m	  not blinking
ESC[26m	  ???
ESC[27m	  not reversed
ESC[28m	  reveal (not concealed)
ESC[29m	  not strike through
ESC[3*m	  fg color (replace * with number below)
ESC[9*m	  fg bright color (replace * with number below)
ESC[4*m	  bg color (replace * with number below)
ESC[10*m	  bg bright color (replace * with number below)
	 *	color		bright color
	---	-----			------------
	 0	black		dark grey
	 1	red			bright red
	 2	green		bright green
	 3	orange		yellow
	 4	dark blue		bright blue
	 5	violet		bright violet
	 6	cyan		bright cyan
	 7	light grey		white

Commands can be combined: ESC[5;1;33;40m

Literal ESC character:
	shell scripts: echo -e "\e"
	sed  \x1b or \d27 or \o33 or \c[
	awk  \033 or \x1b
	rxvt or vi/vim/gvim  press CTRL-V then the ESC key. 

For more ANSI info study the output of 'infocmp' command.

1. “You shall worship no other god, for the Lord, whose name is
   Jealous, is a jealous God.”
   
2. “You shall not make for yourself any gods of cast metal.”
   
3. “You shall keep the Feast of Unleavened Bread.”
   
4. “Six days you shall work, but on the seventh day you shall rest.”
   
5. “You shall observe the Feast of Weeks... and the Feast of
   Ingathering.”
   
6. “Three times in the year shall all your males appear before the
   Lord God, the God of Israel.”
   
7. “You shall not offer the blood of my sacrifice with anything
   leavened.”
   
8. “Or let the sacrifice of the Feast of the Passover remain until the
   morning.”
   
9. “The best of the firstfruits of your ground you shall bring to the
   house of the Lord your God.”
   
10. “You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk.”
    

π (pi)
+
RCL 0
=
yˣ
8
-
Int 
=
STO 0
x (multiply)
6
+
1
=
Int 
R/S (stop and start)
RST (reset back to step 00)

awk 'BEGIN{
   pi = 3.14159265358979323846264338327950 ;
   for (n=0;n<20;n++){
      a=pi+b ; a=a**8 ; b= a-int(a) ; a=b*6+1 ;
      printf int(a) "  "
   }
   print ""
}'

awk 'BEGIN{
   pi = 3.14159265358979323846264338327950 ;
   for (n=0;n<2000;n++){
      a=pi+b ; a=a**8 ; b= a-int(a) ; a=b*6+1 ; c[int(a)]++
   }
   print c[1], c[2], c[3], c[4], c[5], c[6]
}'

354 316 346 327 331 326

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 by adding these two lines to my ~/jwmrc-personal file:

    <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.

#! /bin/awk -f

# ca.awk
#
# Miriam
# Friday 2023-11-03 01:14:30 pm
# updated 2024-11-03
#
# cellular automaton - 1D life
#
# This runs through all 256 rules (0 to 255)
# and writes them out as .pbm images.
#
# One of the most interesting rules is rule 30.
# rule 30 = 01111000
#  7   6   5   4   3   2   1   0
# 111 110 101 100 011 010 001 000
#  0   1   1   1   1   0   0   0
#
# Each bit represents how the next bit should be set or reset
# depending on the state of the bit at that position and its 2 neighbors.
# The generations are drawn under previous generations to produce these 2D patterns.
#

BEGIN {
	for (rule=0; rule<256; rule++){
		# settings
		wide=512
		high=512
		wrap=wide+1
		FS=""

		# turn the rule into an array r[] of binary digits
		b=1
		for (i=0; i<8; ++i) {
			if(and(rule, b)) r[i]=1 ; else r[i]=0
			b = lshift(b,1)
			#printf "%s", r[i]
		} #print  " (the rule in binary)"

		# create the pbm file
		# the header
		print "P1" >rule ".pbm"
		print "# cellular automaton created with awk 2024-11-03" >>rule ".pbm"
		print wide " " high >>rule ".pbm"

		# the body of the image

		# the first line is special
		s=""
		for(x=1;x<wide/2;++x) s=s "0"
		s=s "1"
		for(x=1;x<wrap/2;++x) s=s "0"
		print s >>rule ".pbm"  #" (first line)"

		# ---------- the rest of the body --------------
		for(y=1;y<high;++y) {
			
			split(s,old)  # make old array from string

			s=""  # clear the working string

			# start building the next line
			for(x=1;x<wide+1;++x) {

				# make the edges wrap
				i=x ; m=x-1 ; p=x+1
				if(m<1) m=wide
				if(p>wide) p=1

				# calculate the index into the rule
				t=(old[m] * 4) + (old[i] * 2) + old[p]

				s = s r[t]
			}
			print s >>rule ".pbm"
		}
		print "" >>rule ".pbm"
	}
}