
A day without X (server) - dangoldin
http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2007/05/21/a-day-without-x
======
thristian
I recently went for a couple of weeks without X, after my laptop was stolen
and I was forced to use my formerly-headless home server as my primary
machine.

Some useful tools the blog post misses include:

Links2 is a hack of the original links that adds framebuffer image support, so
you can view webpages with graphics directly. It's pretty limited in every
other respect, though.

libcaca, the Colour AsCii Art library, comes with "cacaview" for viewing
images on the console. Not terribly useful on 80x25, but if you can boost your
console resolution it's pretty good.

vlc include a libcaca output mode, so you can watch movies.

gpm is a must, so you can still select text and middle-click-paste it (also,
for mouse support in other console apps).

Of course, if you're going to be using any console tools with any regularity,
especially on a remote machine, you probably want to be running them inside a
multiplexer like screen or tmux (preferably tmux, since it's (a) actively
maintained and (b) actually supports Unicode properly).

~~~
gnosis
I've been able to display UTF-8 in screen without problems. It's stable,
feature rich, bug-free (in my personal experience), and standard.

I'm not sure what tmux could offer that would make me switch. But I might
check it out some time.

~~~
thristian
screen only supports 16-bit Unicode, the Basic Multilingual Plane. Unicode is
actually a 21-bit character set and although there's not many characters in
the higher ("astral") planes yet, there's more added with each new revision.

I believe the major feature of tmux over screen is that it allows arbitrary
layout of panes per window, rather than just horizontal divisions, although
personally I switched because I'm just that nerdy about Unicode.

tmux was written by a guy who was very familiar with screen (in fact, it was
written inside screen) and while there's no incredibly major differences, I
think there's a number of small annoyances that have been filed off.

------
zppx
I lived without X for 4 years, between 2005 and 2009, my main box was a 500Mhz
Coppermine Pentium 3 with 128mb of ram and an integrated SiS 630 video card, a
crappy setup that taught me much about computers and unixes. The applications
that I used included vim for text and coding, midnight commander and some ol'
school unix tools to manage my files, mutt for e-mail, links2 for browsing,
mplayer with frame buffer or vesa output for video, mocp for audio, a
combination of pdftohtml and fbgs (included in fbida) to see pdfs, fbida for
images and irssi to hang around in freenode. I also learned to play angband (a
roguelike that's far better than nethack) and began to use zsh. gpm was a must
to some copy and paste. I now have a Macbook, but still use some of these
applications everyday.

------
iuguy
I don't think the author has actually spent real time without X. Some of his
choices aren't very good compared to the alternatives.

Mutt is great, Alpine is also good for those that don't want to spend time
tweaking mutt.

As well as elinks there's also w3m. I've used both interchangeably.

Centerim is probably the best general console chat client (although finch -
Pidgin's console brother is also good). IRSSI is a good IRC client, but BitchX
is undoubtably more popular.

Raggle is ok but has been slow for some time (at least for me) compared to
Snownews.

For Music use MOC (Music-On-Console) or MPD. I'd go with MPD if you want to
remotely control the music.

FWIW my main personal laptop is a P3-850 with 256mb of RAM. I do use X, but
mainly as a placeholder for terminal sessions in Awesome.

~~~
cturner
If you have strong opinions, the web is calling out for a topic-website
focussed on people who want to live entirely in the console: it could compare
console utils, give tips to people on how to set it up just right, that sort
of thing.

------
cturner
I would live like this by choice, but it has become difficult to get the
combination of the screen sized for the monitor and a nice font. I've got a
widescreen monitor and I've been unable to get recent ubuntu installs to size
right for it. Thinking of trying out BSD to see if their resources are better.

------
windsurfer
I like how his screenshots plainly include an X-server window, because you
can't easily take screenshots without X. (unless you're in a VM I suppose)

~~~
pogos
I don't understand why he didn't take proper console screenshots.

IIRC mplayer is capable of taking snapshots of console. fbgrab can do this,
too.

~~~
chronomex
I would think that there's a utility to screenshot a terminal window straight
to HTML, colors and all.

------
alagu
I've been using Finch (<http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/Using%20Finch>) -
libpurple client instead of Freetalk that the author mentions. Finch has
really good keyboard shortcuts.

~~~
olefoo
If it supports OTR I'm sold.

