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.
No, I’m not using a window manager, X nor Wayland.
Images, PDFs and video can be rendered on the framebuffer, which has been the standard output for Linux TTY’s for a while now.
For multitasking, I use tmux, which works a lot like a tiling window manager, but for the text console.
Great! I guessed that going full framebuffer would be trickier than that. You’ve laid me down a new challenge.