It's 2024 and I'm posting this from a text console.

Thatâ™s⠀rea​lly cool. � Ꭰо уо𝗎 𝗍һі𝗇𝗄 уо𝗎'ӏӏ со𝗇𝗍і𝗇𝗎е ᖯ𝗋о𝗐ѕі𝗇𝗀 ӏі𝗄е 𝗍һа𝗍?

Are there any non-JavaScript websites left?

Welcome back to 1985 I guess. Now you're going to need a green phosphor CRT and a dot matrix printer.

I may get hate for this, but... I do this a fair bit because I prefer TUIs for a lot of stuff, and also end up doing a lot of things in emacs because I usually have it open anyway...

Btw:

• https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis
• https://github.com/Kikobeats/awesome-cli
• https://github.com/agarrharr/awesome-cli-apps

You're following the Unix philosophy.

Sometimes it's nice to put the ADHD away and just have simple fucking interfaces without all the stupid distractions.

This was my exact experience browsing the Social Media on gemini:// -- it was glorious how less can actually be more.

image editing

imagemagick for basic transformations/compression/conversions, CLI (locally hosted) AI for the shops

What about the Lynx browser...it's TTY isn't it..?

It's 2008. I'm posting this from the browser on my Nintendo Wii.

Lol so cool. My fav text apps are toot for mastodon and maybe gomuks or iamb for matrix/element. Also what Lemmy app r u using?

Nowt wrong with a tty interface. All you need is a gif->ASCII converter and you can view the images too.

What did you use to do so?

How much can you actually do without a windowing environment? [...] Opening images in fbi, PDFs in fbpdf, listening to music in cmus, watching movies in mplayer

Maybe not an "environment" but it sounds like you're at least using a window manager. The PDFs and videos, not to mention web browser, are gonna be hard to pull off from a raw shell. [Hard but not that hard, apparently!]

But that's a detail. Otherwise I share your enthusiasm, I've been doing things this way for a while. Basically: tiling window manager + TUI file manager + scripts which do precisely what I want, if possible in the terminal, if necessary by launching a GUI app. In practice the GUI apps are Firefox, mapping app, and messaging apps.

The general discovery I made was this: for the small price of foregoing pretty colors and buttons and chrome, you can get a computer to do exactly what you want it to do much quicker. Assuming a willingness to learn a bit of shell scripting, of course.

For example: I have a button which runs a script with getmail that pulls in my email and then deploys ripmime and weasyprint to convert it to datestamped PDF files, which it dumps with any attachments directly into an inbox folder. In other words, I have made ranger into my email client and I never need to "download" anything, it's already there.

And those PDFs I can then manipulate with a bunch of shell scripts that use standard utilities, i.e. to split them, merge them, shrink them, clean them of metadata, even make them look like they come from photocopied paper (dumb bank!). All the stupid shit I once did with 10 manipulations hunting thru menus with a pointer in a fiddly app and always forgetting how it was done. Now I just select the file in the terminal, hit a button and it's done, I don't even see the PDF.

Of course, it's not for everyone, but this is the promise of free computing.

You get a similar feeling using the console a lot in full screen. It's just a very peaceful, focused experience.

Your post made me wonder, so I checked and of course it exists. Behold, a text-mode Lemmy client: Neon Modem Overdrive

Forget gpus. A framebuffer is all you need :)

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

Reject pixel-graphics, install aalib

;^)

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?

Okay, I've wanted to do the same thing for ages. Time to follow up my words with action!

it's all just curling some jsons and slapping some paint and shit on top of that.

I would not recommend web links opening in other programs.

Pretty cool, this is how people used computers before, but back then computers couldn't do as many things as they can now

Give browsh a try

Why alpine instead of mutt? It must be some 20 years since I least heard about pine or any of its forks

I'm surprised you didn't get the bsdgames package for your distro for a standard set of timewasters like Tetris and classics like "Hunt the Wumpus".