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.
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
always find myself needing to fire up a window manager just to get a browser eventually
A chromeless tiling WM is basically invisible and AFAIK has almost zero performance impact. That’s roughly what I do.
cage is a minimalist Wayland compositor that only shows a single application in fullscreen. When you close the app, it drops you back to your console.
It’s compatible with programs that need X11 through XWayland, and it has practically no loading times.
cage -ds firefox would open Firefox in fullscreen.
Option -d hides client-side decorations and -s allows you to switch from Wayland to another TTY using Ctrl+Alt+F[1-6]
I put aliases for the programs I use in my .bashrc so I can just type FF[Enter] and a second later I have Firefox open.
Thatâ™s⠀really cool. � Ꭰо уо𝗎 𝗍һі𝗇𝗄 уо𝗎’ӏӏ со𝗇𝗍і𝗇𝗎е ᖯ𝗋о𝗐ѕі𝗇𝗀 ӏі𝗄е 𝗍һа𝗍?
Fuck you, you really made me check on my phone if all my text looks like this :(
(Your comment showed up “fine”, by the way)
Yes, I think I will. Not exclusively, of course. But starting Firefox in Wayland just takes a key combo and 5 seconds if needed.
Starting Firefox takes 5 seconds? I start thinking I need to optimise if it takes more than 2
It takes 5 seconds when the PC has to start up a wayland compositor, first.
Launching it using the raw framebuffer means it blocks the screen until you close it, and there’s no means to do anything else except switching to another TTY, is that it?
Forget gpus. A framebuffer is all you need :)
Pretty cool, this is how people used computers before, but back they computers couldn’t do as many things as they can now
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?
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.
