LIT CAVE

After deciding not to use many of the available bloated programs, I wrote small and simple programs for most of my needs. I have gathered most of them in this page.

RECENT CHANGES AND COMMENTS

• Apr 2013: Now I spend most of my spare time on neatroff; many interesting features are planned, stay tuned. I am also planning neatpost, my dpost clone. Admittedly however, I do not expect neatroff to boost my academic productivity noticeably!
• Apr 2013: After merging neatcc architectures by the end of 2011, I have been using neatcc daily, and surprisingly, I have not yet encountered a runtime bug in neatcc since then. Note that neatcc is, partly intentionally to keep the parser neater, very lax about compilation errors but for valid C code, I am inclined to think that neatcc is very stable. I am no longer dismayed at the sad route GCC is taking.
• Apr 2013: A command was added to fbpdf to override page numbers; useful especially for documents that start with roman-numbered pages.
• Mar 2013: I included Jörg Reinhard's patch to support mousewheel in fbvnc. I also included a patch to move the viewing screen for large VNC framebuffers.
• Feb 2013: I added fbvis to view images on the framebuffer.
• Feb 2013: When paused, minmad and fbff now close the OSS device to permit other programs to open it.
• Feb 2013: Fullwidth characters are now handled correctly in fbpad; Felix Janda tested the changes and prepared a preliminary patch.
• Jan 2013: Many of my framebuffer programs define a FB_VAL() macro as an alias for fb_val() function. The macro can be redefined for speed (should help especially fbpdf, fbvis and cnoor). On 32-bit RGB framebuffers, for instance, it can be redefined as "(((r) << 16) | ((g) << 8) | (b))".

FRAMEBUFFER

I no longer use X11.

• fbpad, a small linux framebuffer virtual terminal. It manages many terminals through single-letter tags. It uses tinyfont files -a custom simple font file format- to render text. ft2tf can create tinyfont files from truetype fonts. Here's a screenshot. Archwiki contains a nice but a bit out of date introduction.
• fbpdf, a linux framebuffer pdf viewer using mupdf library. It can also use libpoppler and can view djvu files via libdjvulibre.
• fbvis is a framebuffer image viewer; includes stbi and lodepng and does not depend on external image libraries
• fbff, a ffmpeg-based linux framebuffer media player. The libmpeg3 branch uses libmpeg3 instead of ffmpeg.
• fbvnc, a small framebuffer vnc viewer; SliTaz uses this patch which adds some interesting features (like large server screen support via window scrolling)
• cnoor to read the holy Quran on linux framebuffer

PROGRAMMING

Many of the programs in this page can be compiled with neat* (using neatcc.c wrapper for neatcc, neatlibc and neatld) or with neatcc and musllibc/dietlibc.

• neatcc is a small ARM/X86(_64) C compiler; here's a brief introduction and here's its small testsuite
• neatld is a simple ARM/X86(_64) static linker
• neatas is an ARM assembler; note that neatcc doesn't need an assembler, as it generates machine code directly
• neatlibc is a very small ARM/X86(_64) libc written mainly to bootstrap neat*; I wish to find the time to clean it up and implement more of the libc functions
• a simple elf core file backtrace viewer (my gdb replacement)
• elfloc to find elf symbols around a virtual address

MAIL TOOLS

• my mailx clone, a fast and simple mail client
• my pop3 client and MDA (uses polarssl)
• my smtp client (uses polarssl)
• mailpg, my mail pager

TYPESETTING

I prepare almost all of my documents with these programs.

• here's the port of plan9 troff (troff, tr2ps, eqn, tbl, pic, and grap) to linux; it also includes my small refer clone
• its tdir branch holds my right-to-left text support patch; more information is available here
• I wrote mktrfn to create troff font files from AFM files for non-Latin Unicode fonts
• ctxt to write formatted documents (including this page)
• nref manages document references; it can be used as a troff preprocessor
• bib2ref converts bibtex files to refer databases and ref2bib does the reverse
• My (not yet usable) troff clone neatroff

OTHERS

• tdq, a fast dictionary lookup program (xdxf and stardict files can be imported)
• pdftxt uses mupdf to extract text from pdf files; prefixes each line with its page number for searching
• rangi to detect colored graph motifs; more information available here
• minmad to play mp3 files using oss/libmad (the alsa branch uses alsa)
• minmix is a small OSS mixer; here's an older version for alsa
• llx reads commands from standard input and executes them in parallel with an optional maximum concurrent processes limit
• my repeat after me typing exercise
• my small utf-8 unix fmt(1) clone (not completely compatible though)
• ethcat is my tcpdump/tcpreplay replacement
• my simple socks v5 server (no tcp bind)
• dc16, a trivial stack-based calculator supporting 0x1f style hex numbers; handy when doing hex calculations
• my simple hex file viewer

ABOUT ME

I am Ali Gholami Rudi (ali at rudi dot ir).

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