A review of Diakonos came to my attention today. It was written by Damian Gawęda on his blog. Some excerpts:

I used Vim for several years before realising that all this complexity and a user interface from the 70s were not for me anymore. I needed simplicity. I needed something with Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V for clipboard and Ctrl-F for find. I decided to look for another editor.

Well, I tried at least a dozen various editors and couldn’t find any that would meet these requirements. Not until I stumbled upon Diakonos. Diakonos is a simple programmer’s editor for the Linux console that I find almost ideal. It’s open-source, it has all I need and it works out of the box.

To summarise. If you’re frustrated with complexity of Vim and Emacs, try Diakonos.

And my reply:

Hi, Damian. Thank you for the positive review of Diakonos! I’m glad you were pleased by my “it just works” approach to designing and developing Diakonos. Indeed, my experiences with emacs and vi were frustrating, so I decided to take a stab at rolling my own editor.

I’ll be the first to confess that Diakonos is not fast [yet]. I will take 95% of the blame for that, and leave 5% for Ruby and other things. There are various algorithms and internal process approaches which could stand for refactoring. See this wiki page for tips on how to speed Diakonos up, though.

The multi-lingual syntax highlighting is a known issue. As a workaround, you can temporarily change the highlight language of the whole file with Alt-Shift-T. Change to ‘php’ or ‘java’ (for Javascript) when those are your embedded languages. Also, try playing with larger values for the view.lookback setting. This will make more demands on your hardware, but it may solve the highlighting problem in more cases than not.

If you have any feature requests or anything, feel free to drop me a line, either in IRC (chat.freenode.net #mathetes; or http://chat.purepistos.net ) or by e-mail at the e-mail address I used here on your blog. User interest and feedback always motivates me, and I value user feedback.

Thanks again for trying and using Diakonos!

During casual conversation in #ramaze on Freenode, manveru told me about htop. This is a great program; far superior to normal top. You can sort; scroll (sideways, even!); easily renice or SIG processes; easily configure various meters and the displayed columns; view processes in a tree layout; and more. It’s in colour, too! Anyone serious about their top usage should check this out.

Know of similar programs? Leave a comment. (I already know KDE has its System Guard.)

I was searching for getElementsByClass today, and came across “with Imagination“, “a JavaScript, CSS, XHTML web log focusing on usability and accessibility by Dustin Diaz”. Clicking along through the blog, I encountered several cool Javascript and CSS visual effects. I draw your attention to two:

Click on any article, then try out the five screen buttons in the upper right of the article, labelled “Change Layout for your reading convenience”. Three of them dynamically change the article width, the other two dynamically fade between two colour schemes. Cool stuff.

After that, click on the “Take a Tour” link underneath the search box in the upper right.

I can’t speak to the content of the site, since I didn’t do any in depth reading. His last post was a couple months ago, but he does seem to have quite a large readership.

The kind folks at pseudodictionary.com accepted my newly-coined word: thumbstream.

thumbstream - The series of web pages which have been positively rated by someone on a social bookmarking website. On stumbleupon.com, users show that they like or dislike sites recommended to them by the StumbleUpon service by giving a thumb up or thumb down. Hence, “thumbstream.”

ex. Pistos’ thumbstream contains an extremely high percentage of top quality links.

pseudodictionary.com is “a site dedicated to made-up slang words, a site where everyone would be able to add and get credit for their own words too”.

I’ve been mentioned on the Weewar blog for making some basic Weewar tutorials. These are nifty little screencasts which show you how to do the basic operations during game play. Thanks for posting about this, Alex!