[linguaz]

On my Debian Sid ThinkPad I've been primarily using the framebuffer console for years now. Setting up custom colors and fonts makes a big difference. Ctheme [1] is handy for making up color themes and changing them on the fly, but this [2] approach makes the colors more persistent. For fonts, I tweaked the SGI Screen fonts to my liking [3]. For viewing PDF files I found fbpdf [4] to be vastly superior to fbgs. The author of fbpdf also created fbpad [5], an alternative to fbterm. I've not tried yet fbpad yet, but the last time I gave fbterm a try I found it sort of took over every VT or something like that...hoping fbpad improves on that. Haven't heard of Terminology, will have to give that a try too. I'd be curious to see comparisons around scrolling speed and power consumption for the fbcon terminal, fbterm, fbpad, Terminology, and an XTerm/UXTerm running in X11.

In addition to tmux, Vim, Mutt and zsh, two other must-haves for me in this sort of environment are ncmpcpp [6] for music and Vifm [7] for file browsing. Note that vifm is quite actively developed (I believe there'll be a new version out in the next month or so), and the older version in the Debian repositories is much less feature-rich.

When I need something more I'll switch over to i3 running in X, but depending on the needs at hand, I've found it's possible to do quite a bit without turning on X11.

Something I've been wondering about...would it be possible to run an fbcon environment like this alongside Mozilla's B2G? I'm thinking of small, inexpensive, low-powered ARM devices where you could toggle between a full-featured modern graphical web-browser and a fast, powerful text-mode development environment.

[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/ctheme/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4413794

The colors I use:

echo 0,152,96,144,72,128,88,168,48,192,112,184,96,192,120,160 > /sys/module/vt/parameters/default_red echo 0,32,112,104,92,104,104,160,48,96,164,144,128,96,164,180 > /sys/module/vt/parameters/default_grn echo 0,32,48,80,144,176,104,144,48,96,96,80,192,176,144,176 > /sys/module/vt/parameters/default_blu

[3] http://b79.net/fields/comp#mono-bitmap

[4] http://repo.or.cz/w/fbpdf.git

[5] http://repo.or.cz/w/fbpad.git

[6] http://ncmpcpp.rybczak.net/

[7] http://vifm.sourceforge.net/