Linux Desktop

Linux users "in the know" recognize that an easy-to-use graphical interface is ideal only for some users and some tasks. Other tasks, however, demand the power of the command line and/or text command scripts. In addition, some of us simply li...

screen is a window manager for your terminals. It provides the following nice features: Multiple screensA scrollback bufferCopy and paste buffers Although this sounds like a fairly boring listafter all, you can do this with multiple X terminals...

Here's a way to deal with the fact that each window manager starts up X terminals differently. GNOME and KDE are terrific in terms of ease of use, and their terminals (gnome-terminal, konsole) make it easy to save your preferences. But when yo...

You can set a number of terminal programs to have their own graphics backgrounds or to be "transparent," so that your wallpaper shows through, which really makes the terminal look good. Transparency seems to be the trendy look these days. The ...

org and view Microsoft Word documents in a terminal. The simplest way to view a Microsoft Word document in a terminal is to use the catdoc command. But catdoc turns a Word document to plain text, which does little or nothing to preserve the f...

This hack is similar to the previous one, which converts Word documents into HTML. But this hack shows you how to convert PDF documents into HTML. Then you view the HTML version with a text-based browser or pager called elinks. (The previous hac...

No graphical email client can come close to the configurability of Mutt. That's why a lot of hard-core Linux users still use Mutt in spite of the myriad GUI-based email clients. It is certainly possible to launch a GUI application such as Open...