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.

  • flashgnash@lemm.ee
    31·
    17 minutes ago

    I’d love to be able to ditch the gui entirely, I’ve found working from a TTY really helps me focus on the actual work I’m supposed to be doing

    Unfortunately the one impossible hurdle is the web browser. Have kinda got around the need for it mostly with an llm cli for basic questions but will always find myself needing to fire up a window manager just to get a browser eventually

    Also doesn’t help that I’m primarily a web developer

  • zkfcfbzr@lemmy.worldEnglish
    47·
    2 hours ago

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

    • superkretOP
      37·
      2 hours ago

      Fuck you, you really made me check on my phone if all my text looks like this :(

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

      • flashgnash@lemm.ee
        1·
        20 minutes ago

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

        • superkretOP
          2·
          12 minutes ago

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

          • flashgnash@lemm.ee
            2·
            10 minutes ago

            Ahhh my bad I didn’t read your comment properly, assumed you meant with a desktop running already

    • chi-chan~@lemmy.world
      21·
      3 hours 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.

    • Daemon Silverstein@thelemmy.clubEnglish
      5·
      2 hours ago

      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.

      • Blisterexe@lemmy.zip
        2·
        2 hours 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

    • superkretOP
      5·
      3 hours 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.

  • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
    6·
    1 hour ago

    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.

    • superkretOP
      3·
      2 hours ago

      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.

  • 1984@lemmy.today
    5·
    2 hours ago

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

    • Draghetta@lemmy.world
      4·
      2 hours 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

    • superkretOP
      16·
      3 hours ago

      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, @pmjv@lemmy.sdf.org 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.

    • chi-chan~@lemmy.world
      14·
      3 hours ago

      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

  • Draghetta@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 hours ago

    Why alpine instead of mutt? It must be some 20 years since I least heard about pine or any of its forks

  • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
    4·
    3 hours ago

    I remember using Reddit years ago on Links. New Reddit was borderline unusable, old Reddit worked… okayish. How is Default web UI Lemmy on Links? Is there a nice TUI client that I guess you would use more regularly?

    • superkretOP
      5·
      2 hours ago

      The default Lemmy UI doesn’t work on Links, it won’t let you log in without JavaScript.
      I use the alternative UI old.feddit.org (old.lemmy.world, old.sdf.org and probably others also exist).
      And that works really well.

      • superkretOP
        2·
        3 hours ago

        Tried it. Didn’t show any posts or comments no matter what I tried. I sent my logs to the dev, they released a new version, still didn’t work. So I gave up.

        • superkretOP
          2·
          2 hours ago

          Try it if you’re interested. It worked for enough other people that the dev closed my issue.
          I couldn’t get it to show any content, on 3 different distros and 4 different home instances.
          Maybe I’m just really dumb, though.

    • superkretOP
      3·
      2 hours ago

      I did. It doesn’t accept mouse clicks from gpm, and it doesn’t offer keyboard navigation. Both issues are long-standing bugs that also affect the Chrome version, Carbonyl.

  • Vitaly@feddit.uk
    2·
    3 hours ago

    Pretty cool, this is how people used computers before, but back then computers couldn’t do as many things as they can now