A couple graphical applications for this text-mode guy

I tend to favour text-mode applications (I’m sure vim, irssi, zsh and mutt account for most of my keystrokes, in that order), but there are times when a graphical application is called for, for example the browser. Or when I just find it more convenient, for example the music player.

Lately, though, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by a couple graphical applications, for which I had text-mode versions which worked more or less acceptably: a random-note taker (I was using vim), and a dictionary (/usr/bin/dict).

I’ve replaced these two with Lars’ Notetak, and StarDict. I’ve found that having them constantly running in desktop #2 (which is one keystroke away) beats having to start up vim or dict each time. Curiously enough, in both cases the main interface of the application is a text input line which offers some kind of “incremental search” functionality.

StarDict is packaged in Debian (package name stardict-gtk or stardict-gnome), and Notetak, being Python, is easy enough to run from source (the page claims there is a Debian repository there, though I can’t access it).