sysbox VS KeenWrite

Yes, I first learned this and the name "splay" from CFengine, back in the day.

I put together a small busybox-like collection of sysadmin tools, and one of the subcommands is "splay" to sleep for a random amount of time. It's one of those things that is useful surprisingly often, even outside cron.

https://github.com/skx/sysbox

I remember in 1999 there was a project to reimplement a bunch of these tools in perl:

https://perlpowertools.com/

I even contributed a little, back then. I guess writing basic versions of "ls", for example, is trivial. But there's a lot of work getting all the tools done, with all the flags implemented and behaving as expected.

I guess there are tools like busybox, toybox, and similar, which also implement a lot of "stuff" to varying degrees of completion. From my side the biggest takeaway from those projects is the sheer convenience of deploying a single binary and installing symlinks to change functionality.

I replicated something similar with my sysbox project, collecting tools together in one golang binary with various subcommands:

https://github.com/skx/sysbox

I use at least one of those tools on a daily basis, though I suspect they're not so universally useful.

If you've got perl installed you'll might have a "GET" binary present, mine is /usr/bin/GET, which comes with the WWW-module.

Although this is written in portable perl, rather than being compiled, so the static vs. dynamic choice doesn't really mean much it is a simple alternative.

Otherwise I built a simple busybox-inspired collection of tools, written in golang, which includes a simple HTTP client too:

https://github.com/skx/sysbox

Those are just a couple of examples, I'm certain there are multiple other choices out there. But I guess curl is ubiquitous enough that most people just use it directly, and add it when missing!

That's pretty cool.

I wrote something similar in my static collection of sysadmin tools - https://github.com/skx/sysbox - In my simple pre-processor I only allow two special things:

#include "file/goes/here"

I bundled together a small collection of sysadmin/scripting-tools here:

https://github.com/skx/sysbox

Those are probably amongst the things that I use most often which are non-standard.

I used to have very full ~/bin, and ~/$(hostname), directories. In the end I pared them back and started bundling things together in one binary.

The end result is very similar to this approach, I run "sysbox blah", or "sysbox help", and use integrated subcommands.

Very helpful and makes deployment easy by having only a single binary:

https://github.com/skx/sysbox

Not bash/shell, but similar and useful idea to experiment with.

I support that in my sysbox utility-box, via the subcommands processor, and it is very helpful.

KeenWrite is my free, open-source, cross-platform desktop Markdown editor that can produce beautifully typeset PDFs. I started working on it years ago to help write a novel that has a complex timeline and I couldn't find a text editor that would allow me to integrate a character sheet with the story itself.

https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite

Tutorials:

* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9...

Here's what I mean by using variables directly:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFCqe3A5dFg

CommonMark doesn't propose a standard for bibliographic references. Would anyone find the editor more appealing if it had cross-references and citations?

My cross-platform desktop text editor, KeenWrite, allows users to define variables in an external YAML file. The editor calls out to Kroki[1] to convert text-based diagrams to SVG. The diagrams can reference variables and are rendered using EchoSVG[2].

KeenWrite[3] can produce PDF documentation from Markdown documents that has PlantUML diagrams with elements stored in an external, machine-readable file. Here are screenshots showing variables on the left, diagram text in the middle, and a real-time render on the right:

* https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/main/...

* https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/main/...

KeenWrite supports all diagrams offered by Kroki, which includes "diagram-plantuml".

[1]: https://kroki.io/

[2]: https://github.com/css4j/echosvg/

[3]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite

Although not interactive, I've created a video series that shows advanced usage of Markdown. Namely R, external variables, diagrams, math, annotations, and a different approach to metadata:

* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9...

Tutorial 4 shows basic Markdown:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNbGSiRzx-0

The top-right of each video shows keyboard and mouse clicks to help follow along.[1] My desktop text editor, KeenWrite[2], is used in the tutorials.

[1]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/kmcaster

[2]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite

https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite/blob/main/scripts/bu...

My template script provides a way to make user-friendly shell scripts. In a script that uses the template, you define the dependencies and their sources:

    DEPENDENCIES=(

I didn't create the fork, nor am I affiliated with the project. I use it in my text editor, KeenWrite to rasterize SVG.

KeenWrite Themes[1] are instructions that tell ConTeXt how to typeset XHTML documents (content) into PDF files (presentation). I made a tutorial that shows how my FOSS desktop text editor, KeenWrite[3], allows users to write in Markdown to typeset a document against a particular theme.

Before it can be used for scientific papers, it needs cross-references, which, unfortunately, aren't part of the CommonMark specification.

I posit that the vast majority of LaTeX users don't grok how to separate content from presentation. When I asked a question on TeX.SE about how to adjust the line spacing between enumerated items (spanning a couple dozen enumerated lists), the vast majority of people voted for the answer of using `\itemsep0em` to tweak each list ... individually.[4] The correct answer, IMO, is to fix the problem globally, and not waste time tweaking individual lists.

[1]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite-themes

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QpX70O5S30

[3]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite

[4]: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/6081/reduce-space-be...