[chameco]

I lived without X11/Wayland for several years. (These days, I live in GUI Emacs with EXWM instead, which has a similar feeling.)

Some tools I had luck with:

- mpv is your friend - it can play audio, video, and display images directly to the framebuffer without X11. It also makes a pretty decent PDF reader combined with ghostscript to render each page to a PNG.

- The Emacs ecosystem is very useful - there are many packages for interacting with common services, and they typically work in both terminal and GUI modes.

- For web stuff, the best solution I found was to push as much as possible into RSS feeds and/or IRC, which have good terminal clients. Things like rss-bridge and bitlbee are great here. When I needed a browser, I typically used Elinks but was never really satisfied with it. I believe if you need decent JS support you're out of luck.

[analyte123]

w3m is a better alternative to elinks in my experience.

[valeyard]

Which IRC client did you use in these years?

[chameco]

First irssi, then WeeChat, then cerce in Emacs.