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’ve found
cageto be really convenient when you want to run a single app from a tty. 5s to start gnome + ff is pretty good, though. Not sure how cage would compare.https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage
See, that’s another great thing about this experiment: I get to discover all kinds of cool new tools.
Thanks for that, looks exactly like what I need.
Make sure to check out the params on it. I noticed by default it disables the ability to switch tty via the keyboard shortcuts. Seems the main use for it is in “kiosk mode”, so they don’t want users to be able to escape the app easily. There’s a param to disable that so you can still pop over to another tty (I forget what it is off the top of my head).