Sven Guckes’ occupation :

Freelance work, writing articles and giving talks on free software. If you have a job opening involving free software then please contact me !

Sven Guckes’ involvement in communities :

Much of my time goes into supporting the community of people using and developing free software. Since 1999 I have been to quite a few events where I try to meet the people I am conversing with in email and bring together people so that they hopefully can work together on some projects. I have taken part in organizing some Key Signing Parties, and organized bus trips to events (Chemnitz and Karlsruhe). I usually prepare a talk so as to give info on my favourite tools (texttools) and related issues. Mostly I *show* programs and their effects rather than talking using some slides. And I definitely enjoy listening to lively talks where the speaker only needs his talks as keywords for what he has to say. I also enjoy taking photos with a digital camera. So if you don’t want your photo online - beware ! ;-)

Wetting your appetite for the talk

= Definition =

What are texttools ?

Texttools are programs dealing with text.

Texttools can work either with interaction by the user or automatic (without human interaction).

= Interative Texttools =

which show their data in a matrix of characters within a terminal. Most interactive texttools are used to deal with text, too (eg editors, mailers, and newsreaders.

= Dependencies =

Texttools are mostly based on ncurses or s-lang (libncurses or libslang). But they may have support for the mouse, too (via libgpm).

= Stability =

Some texttools have been around for some time ; they have been tested often and are thus stable and very well documented.

Examples : The editor "vi" has existed since 1976.

= Non-Interative Texttools =

Some texttools are mostly for non-interactive use, the stream editor (sed), some spell checkers, and a lot of converters.

Converters change the format of a file to another format.

Converters are texttools which are mostly used for a non-interactive use. Converters might give off error messages through the error channel. They might have a switch to request interactive use from the user, though (example : spell checkers).

.... you may visit Sven’s website.