Life in Text Mode

[SageRaven]

Nice to see like-minded folks out there. Like him, I run X mostly for having multiple full-height rxvt+screen sessions (three per virtual desktop).

I only use three graphical apps: Firefox, pidgin (grudgingly), and the Qt interface for VirtualBox. The rest are text apps and custom shell scripts for accomplishing tasks in tandem with those apps (such a "find | random | mpg123" for shuffling music directories).

I highly recommend "evilwm" for managing such a setup. Its single-pixel window borders with no window decorations is desktop minimalism as its finest. It's also got the lightest memory footprint of all the minimal WMs out there. Windows can be moved, re-sized, and snapped to locations with keystrokes. For fine-tuned placement of regularly-used apps, a simple shell script can be crafted to launch them with the precise geometry you require (or ALT+MOUSE_LEFT to lift the window). I have hot-keys defined (using "xbindkeys") that will populate virtual desktops to exact specifications.

My only gripe with this setup is the competition for key chords amongst emacs, screen, and evilwm itself. That, and every once in a while, some web page will throw a Firefox window that I simply cannot close without the "x" screen decoration (at least not without closing Firefox itself -- grrr...).

[Adaptive]

Haven't tried evilwm, but the reasons you list for liking it apply also to XMonad, which I use and love.

I've tried awesome, wmii, dwm and a couple other tiling window managers and XMonad is by far my favorite.

Bit of a learning curve if you aren't into Haskell already, but it's very sensible and intuitive syntax that you can easily grasp from the many examples in the XMonad config archive.

Highly recommended. Active community, easy to extend. Lot's of reference configs. Changed my entire computing life...

It's tiles, all the way down.

[JoachimSchipper]

Just a nit, but what version of random works like that? BSD random(6) "reads lines from the standard input and copies them to the standard output with a probability of 1/denominator. The default value for denominator is 2."

I ended up writing my own (overengineered) program, but I'd be interested in knowing what you use.

[ent]

For the overlaping keychords problem, I've found that it helps if I bind my window manager actions to the Super_L (the windows button). I've also mapped that to the capslock key for easy access. As practically no programs use the windows key, I can be sure I won't accidentally send commands to unintended programs and mess things up while trying to move windows around.

[asciiphil]

I need to update the page...

I actually use stumpwm now, which seems to fit all the things you like about evilwm. (Plus you can connect to the Common Lisp instance running it and poke around in the environment any way you want.)

[khafra]

You can throw away pidgin if you really want to, and just use an IRC gateway to the IM networks: http://www.bitlbee.org/main.php/news.r.html

[junkbit]

You can also control virtualbox from the command line such as:

VBoxManage startvm "Your Machine Name"

http://andunix.net/info/virtualbox/cli

[james2vegas]

You can't use finch instead of pidgin?

[njn]

I have a similar setup, and love evilwm as well. I haven't run into too many key conflicts, though I do mainly use vi instead of emacs, and tmux instead of screen. I start evilwm with "-mask1 mod4 -mask2 mod4" to bind the meta key to the Windows button.

You can do meta-Esc to close those Firefox windows.

[wyclif]

I've replaced screen with tmux.

[asciiphil]

If you like tmux and it works for you, great! The last time I played with tmux, it couldn't do all the things that I use in screen. In addition to the usual multiple-pty-management, I also like the fact that screen gives digraphs for extended UTF-8 character input, can connect directly to serial ports (i.e. act as a serial terminal), and remap codepages on the fly (I've still got that CP 437 serial terminal).

[wglb]

What are the advantages of tmux? (I have been using screen for persistent sessions on production servers.)

[crazydiamond]

Does anyone still use "mc" ?

I like vifm (vi-like file manager), although i can't say i fire it up too often.

microemacs (jasspa's) has a nice inbuilt file manager (F10).

[Teckla]

> Does anyone still use "mc" ?

Midnight Commander is great!

I use it for file management on my wife's iMac (I'm usually ssh'd in, while she uses the console). I also use it to keep her small business web site updated (it supports ftp, which is what my wife's web host uses).

[warp]

Yes, "mc -a" is deeply ingrained into my muscle memory for the specific situation where I need to copy/move a few files out of a directory with lots of other files.

[brian6]

I was just about to badmouth his tool choices when I noticed that the post is from 2006.

[crazydiamond]

what are your updated/better choices ? Thanks.

I use links (i/o lynx). And vim.

[thristian]

Last year my laptop got stolen, and while I shopped for a replacement at work, I had to use my (previously headless) server machine for other tasks at home. Beyond what the linked article discusses, I'll also mention:

elinks (http://elinks.or.cz/) is far more featureful than links, w3m or lynx, to the point where it even supports CSS and a little JS.

libcaca (http://caca.zoy.org/) comes with an image-viewing tool, "cacaview", which is handy when somebody sends you a picture and you don't have a graphical framebuffer handy.

[asciiphil]

The page is a little dated now. I use elinks instead of w3m these days. cacaview is pretty neat-looking, though!

[wnoise]

Ugh. procmail is disgusting. Consider maildrop instead (part of the courier mail server suite: http://www.courier-mta.org/maildrop/ )

[SageRaven]

Procmail exemplifies the leanness, speed, and precision that all Unix utilities should strive for.

That said, I've never used maildrop, being quite smitten with procmail myself. But since the size of maildrop's source distribution is ten times that of procmail, I'll stick with the latter out of principle.

[RoyG]

Good list, but where's ffmpeg?

Though I come from the design world, I realized how much speed and power advantage there is in the command line, and spent the time – over several years – learning how to use it. The speed advantage is so apparent in comparison to GUIs, and now Web Apps, but I guess that's the geek appeal;)

[crazydiamond]

I use ffmpeg a lot to extract the audio from video's I've downloaded from youtube. Does anyone use any command-line youtube downloaders that still work? I use one written in awk (pete krumins). The others stopped working a while back.

[vog]

The title is ambiguous. I expected to see a text mode implementation of Conway's Game of Life. ;-)

[geoka9]

Here's what I'd add to this nice list:

- emacs-jabber: the best IM client in the world and you can use various "jabber2any" gateways to stay in touch with your "legacy" contacts. emacs-jabber allowed me to get off using pidgin grudgingly :)

- ratpoison for managing shell windows under X (and I've heard stumpwm is great, for all you lisp lovers :))

- conkeror (or vimperator) for keyboard-driven web browsing: not character mode, but surely helps a lot when most of your software is.

- urxvt (rxvt-unicode).

- gnus for mailer: probably. I've heard it's even better than mutt, but I don't use email often enough to warrant the switch yet.

[pyre]

  > and I've heard stumpwm is great, for all you lisp lovers :)

IIRC, the creator of ratpoison is also the creator of stumpwm (though I could be mis-informed).

  > gnus for mailer: probably. I've heard it's even better than
  > mutt, but I don't use email often enough to warrant the
  > switch yet.

A couple of years back I tried to get Gnus working, but I ran into: (i) confusing documentation, (ii) not much help through blogs/Google, and (iii) Gnus users on IRC telling me "not to bother" trying to learn Gnus because there were better solutions out there. I've also heard complaints on a number of occasions that Gnus is a dog when trying to load up large mailboxes (and that mutt is better at this).

[sigil]

"These screenshots are specifically designed to trigger a feverish commitment to stumpwm." http://www.nongnu.org/stumpwm/screenshot.html

[cmykgrayscale]

Another simple yet efficient cli todo is todo.txt http://ginatrapani.github.com/todo.txt-cli/

and for all vim users out there, I would highly recommend http://code.google.com/p/vimwiki/ which is a portable wiki right inside vim.

[helmut_hed]

Love to see posts like this. I've the feeling I'll be happier in keyboard+text land but haven't had the courage to take the leap yet. My favorite use of screen space is a ginormous editor window.

If anyone is interested, the October issue of Linux Journal has a pretty good roundup of command-line tools. It should be online soon (first of December?)

[BoppreH]

Why would you do that?

I can understand using only the keyboard, because it's faster and easier to automate and whatnot, but giving up on a normal browser just to be "in text mode"? Why not Firefox + Vimperator, for example?

[Nick_C]

Typically in a tiling window manager you will have a main window open with, say, an editor, and other windows open with man pages or documentation.

Sometimes you just want to browse through something that is text, online documentation for example. In a tiling window manager, your browser might be in a window that is, say, only a quarter of the screen's real estate, so you definitely don't want the browser to be filled with cruft like scroll bars or menus. Since the viewport is so small, you want all of it to be "content" and none of it to be "browser". So a text browser makes a lot of sense.

I do this all the time, usually with elinks. Mind you, I still have chrome open in a different group (or tab).

[1tw]

He does use Firefox, for sites that don't work in w3m.

My setup on Linux is pretty similar, and I use w3m a fair bit, especially for reading documentation--it's fast, and for text-heavy sites suits me better than a graphical browser.

That said, doing without a 'normal' browser entirely seems a bit masochistic/text-obsessive to me too.

[hogu]

if anyone's curious, well, I was, So I just started up 30 terminals under awesome wm.

I did 30 gnome-terminals, and then 30 xterms, and then 30 urxvts

I start out at 150 mb of ram, and then with 30 gnome-terminals I go up to 250. With 30 xterms, I end up at 230. With 30 urxvts, I ended up at around 210

I used htop to measure memory.

I've always wondered how much lighter the lighter terminals are, they aren't enough to make me switch, but there you go, there's definitely a difference, since I'm usually at least running 1 graphical we browser(like chrome) that always dominates my memory usage

[SageRaven]

Now, try that with different shells and report back to us. ;-)

I'm pretty sure that "pdksh" is the smallest (or very close), but I think it's static, so in the context of opening up 30 instances of that shell at once, one of the others (most of which are dynamically linked) might beat it.

[RexRollman]

One of my favorite bloggers is K. Mandla, who runs command line only systems on older hardware:

http://kmandla.wordpress.com/

[entropie]

He surely misses mpd. http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Music_Player_Daemon_Wiki

[WSBOBO]

I agree with you . ttp://www.braceletpandora.uk.co ttp://www.pandorajewellerymall.uk.co That’s very interting.

[hogu]

If you're an emacs user, why don't you just use org-mode for todo lists?