some bees nest stirring, was just how much can you do with?

[Tim Chase]

On March  4, 2013, Karen Lewellen wrote:
 Still if elinks and mplayer exist ported for DOS, why go through
> the extreme mayhem of finding someone local enough to learn speakup
> and ora and so forth to teach me in the first place?

Well, to be able to use Linux which excels at multi-tasking.  So
even on the console (without a GUI or Orca), you can run yasr/speakup
to read the screen, but then use either GNU "screen" or "tmux" to run
multiple virtual terminals within that one yasr/speakup session.  Thus
you can be browsing with lynx in one process (or more), reading email
in another, playing music in another, have your audio-mixer up all the
time in another (allowing you to adjust the audio on the fly while
other stuff is running), managing files in yet another, etc.  I
remember using DOS and having various TSR
(terminate-and-stay-resident) programs to fake multi-tasking but they
never worked very well for me.

The virtual terminals are cheaply created, usually with the
tmux/screen prefix key followed by "c" (for "create").  You can then
switch between the virtual terminals by using the tmux/screen prefix
key followed either by "n" (next) or "p" (previous) or by directly
jumping to the numbered window with the corresponding number key.  In
both tmux and screen, the key mappings are also configurable.

An added benefit of using tmux/screen is that the sessions can be
detached and then reconnected-to, even from another computer.  So you
might be downstairs working on the Linux box, then go upstairs to
your workhorse machine and telnet/ssh into your Linux box and
instruct it to reattach to the session and you can pick up right
where you left off.  All without losing any of your work or running
programs.

-tim