this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2024
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It started as a stupid project cause I was bored. How much can you actually do without a windowing environment?
After finding out how to post to lemmy from a TTY, I realized that I can do most things I do daily using text.
Browsing the web in links, which opens all sorts of files in the corresponding programs if configured correctly.
Opening images in fbi, PDFs in fbpdf, listening to music in cmus, watching movies in mplayer, using e-mail in alpine, creating documents in vim and latex, ...
The only thing that still requires a GUI is image editing and a few websites I need that don't work without JavaScript.
And it's actually really nice...more focused, without loading times, animations, popups, ads, or other distractions, and everything is scriptable.

Anyway, sorry for the blog post.

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[–] zkfcfbzr 216 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Thatâ™s⠀rea​lly cool. � Ꭰо уо𝗎 𝗍һі𝗇𝗄 уо𝗎'ӏӏ со𝗇𝗍і𝗇𝗎е ᖯ𝗋о𝗐ѕі𝗇𝗀 ӏі𝗄е 𝗍һа𝗍? 

[–] [email protected] 153 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

Fuck you, you really made me check on my phone if all my text looks like this :(
(Your comment showed up "fine", by the way)

Yes, I think I will. Not exclusively, of course. But starting Firefox in Wayland just takes a key combo and 5 seconds if needed.

[–] andrewth09 30 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Starting Firefox takes 5 seconds? I start thinking I need to optimise if it takes more than 2

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 week ago (6 children)

It takes 5 seconds when the PC has to start up a wayland compositor, first.

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Are there any non-JavaScript websites left?

[–] eruchitanda 36 points 1 week ago

Not OP, but some of them have non-JS version, in addition to the regular JS version; but yeah, a lot of sites are broken.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago

Surprisingly, a lot. And usually they're the more informative and less commercial ones.
Most websites that only show a "please enable Javascript" banner I just leave again. Very few I do need, for those I have a key combo that starts a window manager with maximized Firefox on another TTY.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

Neocities.org

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Websites from alternative networks such as Onion, Freenet, I2P and GNUnet, where speed and privacy are a must-have. Onion webchats, for example, uses neverending-loading with iframes/HTML frames (and another frame/iframe with a standard HTML form), so to not depend on JS.

At the surface web (clearnet), however, it's harder to find. Even the remaining old sites, from blogosphere and personal tilde websites (those whose URL contained a tilde "~" followed by an username) have some degree of JS.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Even the remaining old sites, from blogosphere and personal tilde websites (those whose URL contained a tilde "~" followed by an username) have some degree of JS.

Although those websites usually work totally fine without js

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Welcome back to 1985 I guess. Now you're going to need a green phosphor CRT and a dot matrix printer.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I'd prefer a dot matrix printer over whatever the fuck HP makes now.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I doubt it. They make a hell of a noise and print at a rate of characters per second not pages per second. The ribbons suffered from similar issues as cassette tapes (the other ribbons that we had to deal with). The ribbon would dry out if not used for a few days and you'd waste paper and a lot of time.

DM printers were ideal in the guise of "line printers" - the big old IBM jobbies that munched through A3 landscape fan fold at ridiculous speeds. Home printers like the Epson FX80 or RX80 were at least affordable. I still remember the manual of our RX80 congratulating us on buying it and exhorting me to hug the printer on unpacking it. I suspect the Japanese to English translation might not have been the best.

We had to get a Centronics interface board stuffed into our C64 and get it working (sacrifice a chicken on a waxing gibbous moon night, etc)

It worked better on my 80286 box, some years later. I had to set it up in each application - Harvard Graphics, Word Perfect, Super Calc.

In around 1991 I was able to buy a 80486 based beastie, thanks to gift from granddad. In around 1993 I was given a HP LJ 4P so I could print out proofs for a Plymouth (Devon) tourist tat thing.

Nowadays I have a fairly elderly HPE MFP five toner humming away at home. Its on a VLAN that doesn't get to see the internet. It just works. I won't be "upgrading" it for the foreseeable future.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I may get hate for this, but... I do this a fair bit because I prefer TUIs for a lot of stuff, and also end up doing a lot of things in emacs because I usually have it open anyway...

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago (2 children)
[–] TwoBeeSan 7 points 1 week ago

Bookmarked. Thank you!

Been attempting to learn bash again, will make is more appealing.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Thank you for this. aerc is going to save my sanity.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You're following the Unix philosophy.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

And I understand why some people are fonts enthusiasts, now.

On the console, you only have 256 colors and 1 font to customize your "desktop".

[–] hakunawazo 5 points 1 week ago

How about a console with cursive writing font? That's probably the reason why it's named cursive. Because of all the curses of the users.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Sometimes it's nice to put the ADHD away and just have simple fucking interfaces without all the stupid distractions.

This was my exact experience browsing the Social Media on gemini:// -- it was glorious how less can actually be more.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago

I'd love to put the ADHD away sometimes :(

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

What about the Lynx browser...it's TTY isn't it..?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

yes it only shows the filename of an image. But you can set it up to open images in an external image viewer when you click on it.

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[–] NineMileTower 13 points 1 week ago

It's 2008. I'm posting this from the browser on my Nintendo Wii.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

image editing

imagemagick for basic transformations/compression/conversions, CLI (locally hosted) AI for the shops

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Lol so cool. My fav text apps are toot for mastodon and maybe gomuks or iamb for matrix/element. Also what Lemmy app r u using?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Nowt wrong with a tty interface. All you need is a gif->ASCII converter and you can view the images too.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

The default video output device of a Linux TTY is the framebuffer.
I have no issues viewing images and PDF documents, or watching videos.

[–] mesamunefire 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

What did you use to do so?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I tried w3m, lynx, links and elinks, which all failed cause they don't support JavaScript, which is necessary to log in.
Then I tried Browsh and Carbonyl, which failed cause they both don't accept mouse clicks in a TTY and offer no keyboard navigation.

Then I tried Neonmodem Overdrive, a CLI fediverse browser, which I just couldn't get to show any posts.

In the end, @[email protected] gave me the hint that some instances have alternative "old-reddit-like" frontends that allow logging in without JavaScript.
And my home instance with old.feddit.org is one of them. So now I'm using links, cause it's the most user-friendly text browser IMO.

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[–] eruchitanda 16 points 1 week ago (4 children)

OP shared the tools they used, you've probably missed it.

- browser - links

- image viewer - fbi

- PDFs - fbpdf

- music - cmus

- movies -mplayer

- e-mail - alpine

- documents - vim, latex

[–] mesamunefire 5 points 1 week ago

Ah gotcha. I'm on cell so it just looks unformated text.

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[–] grue 6 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Your post made me wonder, so I checked and of course it exists. Behold, a text-mode Lemmy client: Neon Modem Overdrive

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[–] serenissi 6 points 1 week ago

Forget gpus. A framebuffer is all you need :)

[–] JubilantJaguar 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

How much can you actually do without a windowing environment? [...] Opening images in fbi, PDFs in fbpdf, listening to music in cmus, watching movies in mplayer

~~Maybe not an "environment" but it sounds like you're at least using a window manager. The PDFs and videos, not to mention web browser, are gonna be hard to pull off from a raw shell.~~ [Hard but not that hard, apparently!]

But that's a detail. Otherwise I share your enthusiasm, I've been doing things this way for a while. Basically: tiling window manager + TUI file manager + scripts which do precisely what I want, if possible in the terminal, if necessary by launching a GUI app. In practice the GUI apps are Firefox, mapping app, and messaging apps.

The general discovery I made was this: for the small price of foregoing pretty colors and buttons and chrome, you can get a computer to do exactly what you want it to do much quicker. Assuming a willingness to learn a bit of shell scripting, of course.

For example: I have a button which runs a script with getmail that pulls in my email and then deploys ripmime and weasyprint to convert it to datestamped PDF files, which it dumps with any attachments directly into an inbox folder. In other words, I have made ranger into my email client and I never need to "download" anything, it's already there.

And those PDFs I can then manipulate with a bunch of shell scripts that use standard utilities, i.e. to split them, merge them, shrink them, clean them of metadata, even make them look like they come from photocopied paper (dumb bank!). All the stupid shit I once did with 10 manipulations hunting thru menus with a pointer in a fiddly app and always forgetting how it was done. Now I just select the file in the terminal, hit a button and it's done, I don't even see the PDF.

Of course, it's not for everyone, but this is the promise of free computing.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

No, I'm not using a window manager, X nor Wayland.
Images, PDFs and video can be rendered on the framebuffer, which has been the standard output for Linux TTY's for a while now.
For multitasking, I use tmux, which works a lot like a tiling window manager, but for the text console.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

The general discovery I made was this: for the small price of foregoing pretty colors and buttons and chrome, you can get a computer to do exactly what you want it to do much quicker. Assuming a willingness to learn a bit of shell scripting, of course.

I find the emphasis people put on speed interesting, because by far the slowest part of any interaction I have with my computer is caused by me just figuring out what I'm doing next. When I'm functioning at top speed not needing to click around, or say, having the perfect keyboard shortcut, would save me only fractions of a second.

Actually.. to add to this I think the cognitive load of visually navigating is much lower than typing specific things it. I think this is why I find I'd prefer to click around my bookmarks or files to find something than just pull up a "Find" dialog and type something reasonable in.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You get a similar feeling using the console a lot in full screen. It's just a very peaceful, focused experience.

[–] Draghetta 7 points 1 week ago

That’s actually a good point. I’m a TUI guy as much as the next one but I normally use full screen terminal and tmux instead of larping the 90s.

Deeply respect the hustle - I was also X-free in the early 00s - but I wonder what is the advantage of going raw tty instead of full screen terminal in a wm

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