I told myself a few weeks ago that if I came up with a dozen inaccessible titles, I’d list them here in their own post. Honestly, I didn’t think I’d come up with 12, but as it turns out, there are quite a few.
- arecordmidi: I found arecordmidi while I was researching midirecord, and I dropped it on my list as a potential title. As you might have expected, it wouldn’t compile on my Arch system, and to be honest, even if it had, I doubt I would have known how to put it to use.
- cliweather: I drew the line at cliweather because it did very little aside from pull weather information from Google, and had no big configuration outside a README.md file. It’s functional as a quick script that displays weather — and it’s even smart enough to try and echolocate your machine on the globe — but I got the feeling it was really just a personal script that wasn’t intended for wider distribution.
- clusterssh: By its own admission, clusterssh relays ssh commands to a range of servers through multiple xterm sessions. This, to me, says it’s not only graphical, but it would require a lot of servers to playtest. If it’s okay with you, I’ll claim inadequacy on that point.
- docopt: If I understand this — and this time I really might not — it adds documentation to software by way of python. It’s not really an application as I understand it.
- dugroup: I put dugroup back on the list after I mentioned tdu a few months ago. After a quick review of that post and what dugroup can do, I realized I said most everything there was to say in May.
- elm: elm is a truly ancient newsreader whose source is still available online, but as you might imagine, wouldn’t compile for me. Here again, even if it would build, I’m not sure I could get it to work, modern e-mail services being what they are.
- listlast: Before you go traipsing off through the Internet, looking for an application called “listlast,” I’ll tell you it’s just the alias used by an e-mailer for
ls -lrt. This should give you the last edited file at the top of the list, making it a quick glance to find the most recently modified file. A clever trick. 😉 - minex: minex made it on my list as a web explorer distributed in minino, but I’m fairly confident it’s graphical. The dependencies suggest it, even if I can’t find them in either Arch or Debian. If you can get it working, please send us a screenshot.
- nedmail: nedmail is Plan 9‘s e-mail tool. The source code is available at the link, but it wouldn’t build for me, of course. Between this and elm, I’ll be sticking with alpine.
- rc: The Plan 9 shell. And of course, shells are verboten.
- rdup: CorkyAgain mentioned rdup in response to rsnapshot, but I’m afraid looking over it suggests it’s for more complicated setups than I can concoct. 😦
- rn: I promised I would take another look at rn, but I can’t find a source. And after swinging wildly at elm and nedmail, I don’t hold out much hope of getting it built, let alone configured and working.
That’s good enough for now. If I can collect another dirty dozen, I’ll bring them to your attention. … 🙂
Inconsolation 
Hey, I have installed p9p but didn’t know of nedmail! Too bad you have to mount upas and I don’t give a damn about it, because it addresses every part of emails in a way much, really much, saner than mailx. I’ll remain to mutt.
Docopt is pretty cool. Not an end user application, but it’s more of a library for script writers.
The point is that writing code with command line args plus help messages sucks, especially when you change the code and forget to update the help message that goes with it. It’s really easy to decide that -n makes more sense than -k, so you make that change in one place and now your documentation lies to your users.
Anyway, what it does is let you write usage documentation at the top of your script. It parses that documentation to give you your variables from the command line. So basically you would write a comment that says something to the effect of “-n, –number Number of times to foo your bar” and you’d magically end up with a $number variable.
I watched through about five minutes of a demonstration video, and I had a feeling that it would be really useful for people who wrote programs regularly. Thanks for explaining it; I’m sorry I don’t ever have the opportunity to learn more about it. 😉
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