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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Thatâ™s⠀really cool. � Ꭰо уо𝗎 𝗍һі𝗇𝗄 уо𝗎’ӏӏ со𝗇𝗍і𝗇𝗎е ᖯ𝗋о𝗐ѕі𝗇𝗀 ӏі𝗄е 𝗍һа𝗍?
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.

Starting Firefox takes 5 seconds? I start thinking I need to optimise if it takes more than 2
It takes 5 seconds when the PC has to start up a wayland compositor, first.
Launching it using the raw framebuffer means it blocks the screen until you close it, and there’s no means to do anything else except switching to another TTY, is that it?
Firefox doesn’t run in the framebuffer. It opens under Wayland in another tty.
Why alpine instead of mutt? It must be some 20 years since I least heard about pine or any of its forks
Alpine is an email client.
Mutt is a maildir reader which you can use as a part of your DIY email client.
… what? mutt can talk imap and smtp natively, I don’t know what else you need to qualify as an “email client”
Welcome back to 1985 I guess. Now you’re going to need a green phosphor CRT and a dot matrix printer.
I’d prefer a dot matrix printer over whatever the fuck HP makes now.
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.
My mom used to have an epson lx-300+ printer for her small shop, and it was awesome. We printed a lot of stuff and the ribbon lasted for ages. This was my only experience with dot matrix printers, and it was a nice one.
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
getmailthat pulls in my email and then deploysripmimeandweasyprintto convert it to datestamped PDF files, which it dumps with any attachments directly into an inbox folder. In other words, I have maderangerinto 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.
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.
That is exactly the reason why I like the text interface so much. It makes you think about what you want to do next.
In a graphical environment, there are lots of hints right in front of you what you could do next (made even worse in other OSs that use pop-ups).
In a text environment, unless you actively do something, all you get is a blinking cursor.
It increases my productivity and reduces time wasted on the computer, not because it is a bit faster, but because I don’t get distracted.
For the same reason, I suppose you would love text adventure games like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where you have to come up with your action, as opposed to getting visual aids which come like a loaded question, steering you and somewhat robbing you of control.
Your post made me wonder, so I checked and of course it exists. Behold, a text-mode Lemmy client: Neon Modem Overdrive
Tried it. Didn’t work.
indeed… #NeonModemOverdrive failed for me too.
So, how did you do post to lemmy.ml? Did you use cURL? If so, I would love to see the sample code.
I logged into old.feddit.org with links.
Thanks for the tip. It seems to work but I have to say it’s a rough UX because the UI is really meant for a graphical browser. I could not even paste my UID and PW in to login.
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…
Are there any non-JavaScript websites left?
Wikipedia
