Text-mode in a GUI world?

SabreWolfy · 2012-05-15 10:23:07

Introduction
In principle, I'm a text-mode/command-line/console/terminal junkie. If I could practically work on a machine without X, I would. Having said that, how practical is it to stick to text-mode applications? I'm beginning to realize that text-mode maybe isn't compatible with the way "the Internet" works in 2012.

Email
I love mutt, but stopped using it a while ago because the GMail interface is awesome. What about HTML emails or emails with image or document attachments? Yes, you can launch an external viewer, but GMail "just works" because it shows all of this inline in the email or it's one click away. Using mutt with GMail is best on a server so that you can connect through wherever you are, or else you're synicng all of your IMAP mail across multiple machines (maybe this is fine?) Viewing an image locally from an email on a remote machine seems like the wrong way to go about it.

RSS
What about RSS readers? newsbeuter is awesome, but Google Reader is more awesome. It shows xkcd images directly in the feed. It lets you scroll back further than the actual RSS feed provides. It shows the content of the RSS feed directly, including images and the text if that is provided by the feed -- no need to launch an external anything. And if you mark an article read on PC1, it's also read when you login on PC2.

WWW
What about elinks/lynx/elinks2/w3m/whatever? Is it really a better expereince? JavaScript, Java, Flash? Yeah, those last two are a pain, but some sites need them. No cool avatars or icons to help you navigate through the forums. No nice images of the author of an article on a blog site so you can easily search for the one you want. 99.9% of sites are designed to be navigated in a GUI browser and are automatically optimized for this.

Other
How do you view an image or a PDF in text-mode? You can't, obviously.

Conclusion
Is it really better/nicer/cooler/awesome to live in text-mode in a GUI world in 2012?

Last edited by SabreWolfy (2012-05-15 10:26:37)

corenominal · 2012-05-15 10:31:51

It does not have to be a binary choice, relax and go with the flow smile

SabreWolfy · 2012-05-15 10:38:35

^ Fair enough, that's true. I often take the approach of 0% or 100% on things. Shades of grey, shades of grey smile

cool "corenominal speaks the truth!" cool

CBizgreat! · 2012-05-15 11:14:08

+1 Corenominal ... ( Well make that +2, since ya just seconded him yourself.) wink

Just a babbling opinion and it's already been said. You obviously already know, doesn't have to be either/or. Esp for a #!'er or nixer. With a ridiculous amount of software to choose from. Goes w/o saying choose what works best for you. Trying to cuddle up way more with cli too. Cuz it's facinating stuff and empowering. But would rather rip my own tongue out with a pair of pliers than surf the web w elink2 in 2012. tongue

Well not really ... but almost. Doing so, unless you only happen to have access to a pc w 64mbs, is kinda sadomasochistic me thinks. Why not just put aligator clips on your nipples and tap dance on broken glass barefoot ? If this is up for a vote, I'd say why not do both ? wink

Last edited by CBizgreat! (2012-05-15 11:16:43)

mahatman2 · 2012-05-15 11:26:01

^ you know, I've often thought there are around Fifty Shades of Grey ... tongue

In all honesty, I know exactly how you mean. I'm still hanging onto mutt as it's faster to load for me, and I have mostly text email (or I don't want to see the images), but no text feedreader is par with GReader (mostly bc of the images issue).

In the end, I agree with corenominal - some apps are better textmode and some (mostly web stuff) are better graphical.

(As a slight PS, mplayer plays movies on a frambuffer, and there's fbi for images, with a script included for pdfs, afaik. Plus I think one of those web browsers is supposed to have some framebuffer support.)

EDIT: check this out: https://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/04/1 … lications/

Last edited by mahatman2 (2012-05-15 11:28:15)

machinebacon · 2012-05-15 12:26:07

corenominal wrote:

It does not have to be a binary choice, relax and go with the flow

Bring the "Console Apps" section back to #!, Dear Leader! big_smile

SabreWolfy · 2012-05-15 12:30:24

^ What was that?

gutterslob · 2012-05-15 12:39:13

^ I think MB's referring to the old #! 9.04 (the Lite version), which came with some console apps; mutt, newsbeuter, htop, moc, some AOL thingy that nobody used, etc ...... all given their own exclusive section in the OB menu.

As for me, I just use whatever fits me best, whether they be CLI or GUI. I do practice some self-control with regards to dependencies, though (you'll never see me install an application that requires QT on anything other than my smartphone) and I must admit I tend to go with the "less is more" approach more often. Gmail might be full-featured, but I feel kind of dirty when it causes my main desktop's Core i7's average load to 5% for a couple of seconds. C'mon, it's friggin email!! Also don't like seeing my netbook's core temps spike, hence I use mutt.

As for browsing, I'm pretty sure anyone (except RMS and Emacs fanatics) would agree that cli doesn't quite cut it for web content. Opening every single image link with feh can get tiresome after a while. I do still use elinks for some forums, however (not this one), especially those forums that allow members to have retarded animated gifs in their signatures. Plus, checking mailing lists is better on elinks, imho. Other than that, I use Jumanji, Uzbl or Firefox.

Last edited by gutterslob (2012-05-15 12:56:16)

Awebb · 2012-05-15 12:43:04

A section dedicated to console applications.

gutterslob · 2012-05-15 12:52:56

SabreWolfy wrote:

Other
How do you view an image or a PDF in text-mode? You can't, obviously.

http://www.kraxel.org/blog/linux/fbida/

SabreWolfy · 2012-05-15 12:53:05

@gutterslob: What do you use for email? I thought Firefox depended on QT. No VirtualBox then?

SabreWolfy · 2012-05-15 12:56:03

gutterslob wrote:

SabreWolfy wrote:
Other
How do you view an image or a PDF in text-mode? You can't, obviously.
http://www.kraxel.org/blog/linux/fbida/

You can, obviously smile

CBizgreat! · 2012-05-15 12:56:52

A section dedicated to retarded animated gifs ! Heel yeah ! smile

anticapitalista · 2012-05-15 12:57:53

You can open pdf files out of X using Fim.
For a similar thread, but on antiX.

http://antix.freeforums.org/further-adv … t2778.html

SabreWolfy · 2012-05-15 12:58:54

As many of us probably already know, RMS said the following:

For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have no net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a daemon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.

Anyone here doing the same? wink

Last edited by SabreWolfy (2012-05-15 12:59:35)

gutterslob · 2012-05-15 13:01:22

SabreWolfy wrote:

@gutterslob: What do you use for email? I thought Firefox depended on QT. No VirtualBox then?

No QT required for FF, as far as I know. I use the other lightweight browsers I mentioned more often though. FF is mainly a fallback. Email via mutt, like I stated above (you might not have seen it before my edit). No Vbox, adobe-flash or prop drivers (with the exception of the Broadcom one on my netbook) either at the moment.

SabreWolfy wrote:

Anyone here doing the same?

No. Like most peasants, I need to keep up with the news and economy, put food on my plate, and petrol in my car/bike, so I don't quite have as much free* time as RMS.

* free as in the William Wallace type of freedom ... not that "libre" or "gratis" crap. =P

Last edited by gutterslob (2012-05-15 13:13:58)

SabreWolfy · 2012-05-15 13:20:16

gutterslob wrote:

http://www.kraxel.org/blog/linux/fbida/

Wow. Hit Ctrl-Alt-F2 and logged in. Installed "fbi" and ran it (with sudo for some reason; needed access to /dev/fb0) and viewed an image. I thought those virutal terminals were the same as pure text terminals; I didn't realize they could "do" graphics smile

Eren · 2012-05-15 13:31:59

I love ncurses applications and prefer them all time. When I remember the good old gnome, and my best kde 3 times, they're great that time but I used ncurses-based in some applications too. Then I find Fluxbuntu, tried to use some *boxes, then I realized that I didn't need lots of gtk and qt applications. Personal choice of course. And in Gentoo, mostly compile time, which the reason why I prefered them. lol

It's like addiction to me. The list of my current application list based on ncurses;
ncmpcpp
mplayer2
irssi
wicd-curses
vim
rtorrent
freetalk
fbv
midnight
and some X applications like fontsel etc.

Only browser, office and some gtk applications isomaster, evince, tuxguitar qt applications like hydroxygen and audacity.

el_koraco · 2012-05-15 13:36:33

huh, thanks for newsbeuter. I can't stand in-browser feed readers, which is why I never used them, and slrn is just plain annoying to set up.now, what feeds do you people subscribe to? big_smile

Last edited by el_koraco (2012-05-15 13:37:01)

CBizgreat! · 2012-05-15 13:38:34

What !?!?! Are you insane !??!? I'm usually trying to keep the fbi outta my computer and ya intentionally installed it ?!?!?!? Ok ... way past my lame attempts at humor quota for the dy. Sighs ... better get summin done I guess. Laters 2 the kewl #!'ers and nixers. wink

Last edited by CBizgreat! (2012-05-15 13:39:34)

gutterslob · 2012-05-15 13:50:37

el_koraco wrote:

huh, thanks for newsbeuter. I can't stand in-browser feed readers, which is why I never used them, and slrn is just plain annoying to set up.now,

There's also snownews, which some people rave about. I personally prefer newsbeuter. Works well for quick checking news articles and forum posts with the; html-renderer "elinks -dump -T text/html" inserted in its config file.

el_joraco wrote:

what feeds do you people subscribe to?

http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/feed/rss/ tongue

rhowaldt · 2012-05-16 07:52:19

@el_koraco: boingboing, so i can feel hip and happening big_smile

greyproc · 2012-05-16 08:48:42

el_koraco wrote:

huh, thanks for newsbeuter. I can't stand in-browser feed readers, which is why I never used them, and slrn is just plain annoying to set up.now, what feeds do you people subscribe to?

I've become dependent on Google Reader, despite it being a browser reader. I'd like to find something 'else', but everything seems to suck... from recently reviewing what's out there, everything seems to want to do a lot of fancy stuff... I just want my rss. tongue (And a +1 for xkcd in Google Reader) My feeds are just blogs I follow... cracked.com, cybercrime, krebs, yieldpig... but what I've yet to find is anything that'll do youtube. As a crappy musician, I'm addicted to some pretty wonderful channels: however, I've yet to find a reader that'll let me just browse a list of new vids and check off what I want to snag. I can't be the only one on the planet that does this(?). (Current procedure: theyoke --- commandline rss reader (grin) to generate a list which I split into high and low quality to download with youtube-dl).

Speaking of the console, it seems the majority of my time is spent in vim... in xterms (evilvte, at the moment). You'd almost think it'd be optimal to stay out of X altogether, but having a gui browser seems to be almost mandatory for me these days.

Also, conky's neat. tongue

SabreWolfy · 2012-05-16 08:53:02

+1 for conky smile

I used slrn previously for usenet (nntp) groups. Does it also do rss/atom feeds?

dkeg · 2012-05-16 11:18:39

i tend to try to use CLI for a good portion of my stuff. mocp, mplayer, newsbeuter, centerim. but I also will just go back and forth. Sometimes mutt, or thru iceweasel, sometimes thunar or ranger, sometimes vi or *fav editor here*. I wouldn't even say I'm more efficient with one of the other, but it definitely keeps things interesting to use either of for various tasks. Plus I think its good to take all of your typical programs and have its counterpart. I mean I kind of think that using Linux as a gui only really wouldn't be that much different than using mac or windows, it seems that we like linux b/c of the ease at which we can do our daily tasks in all CLI based programs, and it also fulfills the desire for us to more so know our machine and what is going on in there. So i guess its cool that we have the choices, we have the desire and knowledge to use them,

I have always tended to do things the hard way. When I raced mountain bikes, i raced a single speed bike fully rigid, no suspension in front or back. I raced these marathon 50 -75 mile races, or 6 hour races on a 10 or so mile loop. I feel like, for me my machine with my distro of choice, along with my high proportion of CLI programs is my singlespeed steed. So its a good correlation b/c others wonder why would I use something like that, how do I go what I do on it, and they themselves couldn't use it.

Like I said in another forum, one of the wm related ones, if anyone turns on my machine to use, they wouild even know where to begin. I just think that is pretty funny. lol

*edit, sorry, didn't mean to rant, blame it on the coffee. Am I even on topic anymore... roll

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#1 2012-05-15 10:23:07

Text-mode in a GUI world?

#2 2012-05-15 10:31:51

Re: Text-mode in a GUI world?

#3 2012-05-15 10:38:35

Re: Text-mode in a GUI world?

#4 2012-05-15 11:14:08

Re: Text-mode in a GUI world?

#5 2012-05-15 11:26:01

Re: Text-mode in a GUI world?

#6 2012-05-15 12:26:07

Re: Text-mode in a GUI world?

#7 2012-05-15 12:30:24

Re: Text-mode in a GUI world?

#8 2012-05-15 12:39:13

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#9 2012-05-15 12:43:04

Re: Text-mode in a GUI world?

#10 2012-05-15 12:52:56

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#11 2012-05-15 12:53:05

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#12 2012-05-15 12:56:03

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#13 2012-05-15 12:56:52

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#14 2012-05-15 12:57:53

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#15 2012-05-15 12:58:54

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#16 2012-05-15 13:01:22

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#17 2012-05-15 13:20:16

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#18 2012-05-15 13:31:59

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#19 2012-05-15 13:36:33

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#20 2012-05-15 13:38:34

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#21 2012-05-15 13:50:37

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#22 2012-05-16 07:52:19

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#23 2012-05-16 08:48:42

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#24 2012-05-16 08:53:02

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#25 2012-05-16 11:18:39

Re: Text-mode in a GUI world?

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