My lately blog posts have been written in the built-in editor of WordPress (earlier, it was WordGrinder). More than I should, I care about autosave being reliable, and that of WordPress has a somehow bad reputation (no idea why so far), although what I know is it autosaves only every minute.
I like to write in variable-width fonts, seeing the formatting directly, and don’t like to write with the thing underneath being serialized into Markdown and back. That very much narrows my options. I have recently discovered GNUstep TextEdit to be the closest thing to what I want — but like some of the apps from the GNUstep ecosystem, it nears unusable. Especially when you have something tweaked in your X11 setup, like for example your preferred Control key is the keyboard’s Caps Lock.
I use a netbook — a classic Intel Atom one that has something like 1GB of RAM. Perfect for running Links (graphical mode), almost enough to use Emacs, screen kind-of-almost too short (600px tall) to use the XCoral (xcoral.free.fr) funny IDE for C/C++. WordGrinder in a terminal is fine — but Abiword isn’t, and not a good idea to try waiting for LibreOffice Writer. Of course I don’t visit WordPress admin authoring Web UI on that handy thing.
I discovered the existence of wp-cli for WordPress, and might thus write HTML files soon for the blog posts no longer hassled by having to paste them in. But on a netbook, a machine once perfectly capable of running Mozilla Suite or whatever, it is no longer all that easy to write rich formatted text in WYSIWYG. Of course, speaking of Mozilla Suite, Spidermonkey Composer of the Spidermonkey suite kind of remains an option.
I am writing this in LibreOffice Writer on a needlessly beefier machine (that I never get up from my desk with). I write in page mode because it is comforting. I hope my later HTML export from this will not be too cluttered with class names and inline CSS and divs, that I won’t want in there. I maybe will have to use external tools to convert this OpenDocument into HTML. Maybe will use AbiWord, maybe some Pandoc or whatever. Maybe Pandoc back and forth from an unrelated format.
When I first took to the desire to write a blog post of this kind today, I grabbed my netbook. It was discharged because it can only handle two days in suspend on its battery. Not better than anything newer I own, with modern Intels now staying in “S1x idle” (S0x? I can’t even rember without looking it up!) aka “s2idle” even when told to “deep” in S3. So I took to switching it to suspend-then-hibernate in systemd.
In the course of that, I tried disabling the behavior of systemd-backlight udev hook in order to not have the netbook resume with the backlight confusingly switched off every time both when waking up from a suspend and even once done bringing back a hibernation image from disk after asking for disk encryption password and everything. To one of my messy backlogs I wrote down to later add an udev rule to ENV{ID_BACKLIGHT_CLAMP} for SUBSYSTEM==”backlight” (whether I will bother to specify it just for the EeePC WMI appropriate KERNEL — remains undetermined).
And to add a suspend resume hook to xrandr –output LVDS-1 –gamma 1:1:1. Because my graphics mess up on wakeup. Which I did then add to PostLogin of my lxdm config — for the rare case of not having logged in before a suspend happened —, while also enabling autologin (having disk encryption anyway) so I will never see it happen.
And then I started searching for what rich text editor I can install today.
Maybe I should run some old WordPad, in Wine. Or not in Wine, perhaps.