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~3700 words : ~28 minutes read
TL;DR: I challenged myself not to use a graphical environment for one month, and I talk about my setup.
So in early 2020 the country I live in was locked down and I found myself unemployed. A great occasion to focus on hobbies. I am a passionnate linux user I've been using it for more than a decade now, and I'm always amazed by the endless depth of its subculture.
In the last years I have been and more attracted by console-based programs. I found them more reliable, faster and simpler. No surprise for thoses already familiar with the UNIX philosophy and RTC members.
I challenged myself not to start a graphical environment for one month. No Xorg, no Wayland : plain TTY and nothing else. How hard could it be ? I was using CLI tools in terminals already !
Well the hardest part was the lack of documentation online. Most article assume you're using a terminal emulator, not a TTY. So I decided to share my journey to fix the lack of info online.
By TTY, you should understand the linux-console. The ArchWiki page on the topic is informative, as usual. So that's the console you see when your linux box boots. Linux distributions usually have several such consoles, accessible by pressing 'CTRL-ALT-FX', where X is a number between 1 and 9. I'll use the words 'console' and 'tty' interchangably in this series.
There are several differences with a terminal emulator such as alacritty, gnome-terminal or xterm. First it's running in the kernel, and not in userspace. If feels faster, but I suspect it has more to do with input latency. At any rate, it has no overhead, and is lighter than using a desktop environment. Second, there is nothing outside of it. There are no taskbar, no notifications popups, no launching menu. There is nothing else than ASCII characters on your screen. You can work around most of this limitations, and that's the topic of this series.
Your time is precious, so I'll start with the conclusion so you can decide if you want to read the detailed entries.
Less procrastination and distraction. Sometimes I sit at the computer looking for a cooking recipe and the next thing I know, it's 5p.m. and I have spent my day browsing stuff so boring I didn't even remember them. How infuriating! Going 'full-tty' didn't completly solve the problem, but helped.
I can use my computer for day*s* without charging it. Granted, I put it to sleep or shut it down when I don't use it. But the battery gain is tremendous. I managed to lower the energy consumption to about 2W. 'powertop' reported a suspicious 15hrs of battery life. It might be optimistic, but I don't feel anxious about my battery draining fast.
There are things I still miss from the 'graphical' world. Better color handling, nicer font rendering. I like not having a pointer. Especially when using a laptop. Now I can rest my hands in a normal position without fear of touching the touchpad with my palms.
I keep using my computer in a TTY for my personnal use. Yet, I start my graphical environment (sway) on several occasions.
To do paid work: I'm in the video-game industry and have to see the game at some point. I also need to do video calls sometimes. To play games: Because most games I play can't run in a terminal. To procrastinate on purpose: sometimes I tired but not sleepy. I want to waste a few hours, and internet always have my back for that.
This part was actually the easiest to deal with. I was already using a majority text-based tools for programming. I was programming in Python & Rust at that time, which was convenient. My usual day to day job involves C# and Unity3d, that would've made the whole adventure impossible.
While I wasn't programming with the (un)famous 'vi', as my main IDE, I fell in love with the keymap and the modal system long ago. I was already using it for small editings and note taking though. It's, actually 'nvim' but you get my point.
Making it my main IDE was a matter of installing the right plugins. By order of preference, I added : * 'fzf.vim' to find files, text, code buffers * 'neoformat.vim' to take care of the formatting * 'deoplete' for code autocompletion. I also tried 'syntastic' and 'YouCompleteMe' but preferred 'deoplete' because it was easier to configure
I should mention I already had the following extensions : * 'vimwiki' to keep a journal/diary and personnal knowledge base * 'vim-table-mode' to create ascii tables * 'vim-surround' to deal with quotes and parenthesis
Tools like 'git' and 'python' or 'rustc' were already first-class tty citizens, so I just went along. And carried on my usual business.
And that covers the programming part of computer usage.
Or so I though !
Not 5 minutes after my setup was finished I found myself wanting to read the documentation on an obscure Rust function, which is conveniently shipped in an HTML page. So I rapidly had to install a browser that could do a bit more than a simple 'curl'.
After trying 'lynx', 'elinks' and 'w3m' I settled for the latter. Not only it has an option for 'vim-keybinding', but I found it managed pages layout better, overall. Also, it has the ability to display images in your tty. It feels kinda hacky but it can be really helpful sometimes.
For quick searches online, I really appreciate 'ddgr'. It's basically a version of DuckDuckGo in a terminal. It allows me to enter a query, and see what I would've seen on DuckDuckGo itself : site address, title and a short extract. All of this without starting a browser, so it's even faster and better suited for my usage.
I like to read stuff online as much as anyone, but I don't like all the fancyness of 2020's web. Reading in a TTY removes all the bells and whistles I don't like, but also breaks quite a few websites.
For websites that have an RSS feed, I check on them with 'newsboat', a local and offline RSS reader. Of course, I found a way to configure some vim-keys binding as soon as I could ! As a bonus, the RSS feeds are stored locally, so I can read while commuting. When the author is kind enough to publish the whole article in the feed, that is. Otherwise, I use 'w3m' to open the website and read.
I have two main issues with text-mode browser. They completly mess the layout, and they don't support javascript. I don't blame the browsers, given the mess that the web is today. But using them feels bad. I prefer to use a dedicated tool when I can.
I discovered the 'gemini' protocol, and it's clearly a perfect fit for me. It's the web, but text-only. I have a routine of checking 'hackernews' and/or 'lobste.rs' in the morning. I added gemini's 'capcom' to it. As I write this, there is a gemini proxy for 'lobste.rs' and ddevault is working on one for 'hackernews'. Maybe I'll be able to stick to gemini all the time sooner that I expected ! To connect to gemini I use 'av-98.py' as my main 'browser'. It was the simplest and most intuitive I tried.
To read posts on reddit, I tried 'rtv'. It's really good, but useless for image-based subreddits.
I also found 'wttr.in' : a really nice way to check the weather. I type 'curl wttr.in' or 'curl wttr.in/SomePlace' and it prints a nicely formatted 3-days weather prediction.
I'm really fond of these little 'curl' tools/sites. I whish there were more of them ! In the same vein, there is 'curl cht.sh/any_command' that gives examples of a command. I use it all the time because I keep fogetting 'tar' options and I'm too lazy to browse through the manpage.
I also used 'covid19cli.sh' quite extensively too. I don't read 'news' and tend to focus on technical articles. So I prefer to access live numbers and forge my own opinion rather than reading alarming articles.
I discovered the 'epr' program to read ebooks. Default 80 characters width and automatically open the last book where I left it are nice defaults. I still prefer to read them on my hardware e-ink reader though.
Now since my terminal supports a framebuffer, I can do stuff that I didn't expect. Display more than text-characters. For instance, 'fbgs' can open pdf files in the tty. It's a bit aliased but I don't do that often anyway.
There is 'fbi' to open images and I discovered that 'mpv' can read videos in the 'tty' too ! It's not hardware-accelerated, so it can have troubles when the definition is high. Since I have 'youtube-dl' installed, typing 'mpv --vo=drm profile=sw-fast <my_youtube_url>' allowed me to watch the occasional video.
I wrote about reading stuff in the last entry. Now, on to writing !
I always have a IRC program running somewhere, at anytime. So far, I've been using 'weechat' for that, so, no need to change it. I also added 'weecord' and 'weeslack' plugins to handle slack (for work) and discord (for friends) channels. Works great, and now I have the luxury of having all my instant messaging platforms in the same place without all the emojis, gifs, and link preview that distract me !
A limitation of the 'weecord' plugin is that it doesn't handle audio. No surprise since weechat is an IRC client, but I would've loved a way to join an audio conversation from my TTY...
On the plus side, weechat running for hours (sometimes days), with 4 IRC servers, 1 slack workspace and 2 discord servers, averages about 80Mb of ram.
With weechat in a TTY, a few issues arised. English is not my main language, so reducing my character table to 'ASCII-only' was fine for programming, but out of question for discussion. The problem is two-fold :
The display part is unfortunately limited. There is no way to have full UTF-8 support in a TTY as far as I know. Some extended charactersets are available though, such as Latin, which is enough for me at the moment. So it's mostly a matter of setting a font that supports it using 'setfont'. The 'terminus' font has a variety of options in size and charactersets, so I settled on : 'setfont ter-p22n.psf.gz', but I'll talk about it in more detail in another post.
The input part has been a bit trickier, because of my setup. I like to have my keyboard in international QWERTY with 'CAPSLOCK' as my compose key. I had to create a new keymap and then load it with 'loadkeys my_keymap'. Again, it'll be discussed in a later post too.
I expected it to block me sooner, but I stumbled on the 'background task management' issue at that point. If I have weechat running all the time, how do I do anything else ? Up to that point I was using 'CTRL-z' and the 'jobs' command to pause and resume several applications, but given the nature of 'weechat' I can't really 'pause' the application. I need it to run in the background.
I tried several 'multiplexers' : gnu 'screen' and 'tmux'. They offer a set of similar features, and I finally settled for 'tmux'. It's better, and it's easier to search info about it. Naming programs with very generic names is not usually a good idea for SEO. (I'm looking at you Rust!)
So using 'tmux' has the following advantages : several program running at the same time in 'windows'. They work like I'd expect a workspace to work in a regular desktop environment. It also supports splitting the screen horizontally or vertically *and* I get a copy/pasting mechanism for free. So now I can open links that are sent to me. It's still more cumbersome than 'just clicking it', but I can copy the url and open it with my browser and that's already better than typing the URL myself !
For classical mailing, I tried the venerable 'mutt' and the new and shiny 'aerc'. I preferred the later : it felt easier to use and configure. Ok, Vim-keys as a default was a huge selling point too. There is still room for improving my setup there : GPG management and calendar integration are not seamless. But I know GPG support is a work-in-progress in 'aerc' so I don't want to spend time making a bunch of scripts to deal with it if I can wait for it to appear thanks to the devteam.
To manage my calendar, I use 'calcurse'. Not much to say about it. It does its job well and can import 'ical' files for meeting invitations I receive by mail. Running 'calcurse -a' gives me a list of appointments for the day. Calcurse can also manage a todolist, but I prefer to keep that in my 'vimwiki'.
To complete the mail setup, I use 'abook' as my contact management app. Again, a simple one. I admit I didn't take the time to test any other alternative for that though, and kept the first I found. 'aerc' can read from it to autocomplete mail addresses, but I didn't find an easy way to add new contacts to it from 'aerc'.
I also use 'translate.sh' extensively to check spelling and find words I know in a language but not in another.
Last part finished with the most boring corporate stuff. Let's discuss funnier topics.
Music was a surprising and refreshing topic. Most programs I use in a TTY feel different than using them in a graphical environment. The colors, the shortcuts, the reactiveness contribute to a different feeling. Well not music. It's exactly the same. For the actual playing I use 'mpd'. It stands for music player daemon. It works with your preffered soundsystem, either 'pulseaudio' or 'alsa', and takes care of the 'playing' part of music playing. Then you're free to choose a 'client' to control it. Meaning starting the music, pausing it etc... I think of it as 'mpd' being the hi-fi system and the client being the remote control. So far, it played any file format I thrown at it, with so little ram I don't even notice it. It was about 30Mb at its top. It even works for streaming radios & podcasts.
To control it I use a combination of 'mpc' and 'ncmpcpp'. I use 'mpc' for small commands such as 'mpc stop' and 'mpc pause'. If I want to create a playlist, add a bunch of songs or search something in my music library, I open 'ncmpcpp'. Apart from the name I can never remember right, it's a great piece of software. It does everything you'd expect from a music player, tagging, searching, playlisting, fetching lyrics. There even is a music visualizer.
Since I use pulseaudio, I can change the volume using 'pactl' but I always forget the syntax somehow. I tend to use 'pulsemixer' instead, it's an ncurse version of the kind of volume control application you find on every computer nowadays.
No games I played during my TTY month had sound. A good opportunity to use programs from the above paragraph. It was a good opportunity to try 'real' roguelikes. Or 'Berlin definition' roguelikes. I already liked Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, or dcss for short. But I had only played it with graphics. It's a great game and one of the easiest roguelikes to start with.
It has the basic heroic-fantasy roguelike universe : you, the hero has to go deep down the dungeon to get a McGuffin. The deeper the harder.
Gameplay-wise, it's a grid-based turn-by-turn game. Every action you take makes the game play an equal amount of time. So if I do a quick action, like drawing a sword, the monster might not even move. If I do a long action, like reading a scroll, monsters have enough time to travel from the other side of the room and gnaw at me. But from my player perspective, both outcomes are shown instantly.
It's a bit surprising at first, but it allows you to "play at the speed of thought".
dcss has lots of 'quality of life' features. Meaning it's one of the most accessible roguelikes for a beinner. Sure, you'll have to get used to ASCII characters representing the game and remember lots and lots of keys for different actions. But at least dcss provides easy and rememberable shortcuts consistent menus and functions such as 'autoexplore'. That's accessibility.
On the other end of the spectrum there is the other great game I spent hours on : 'Cataclysm : Dark Days Ahead'. Or 'cdda' for short. It's the deepest game I ever played. It's a roguelike because you play your single character on a grid-based map and the time management is the same. That's where the similarities end. In cdda you play as a zombie apocalypse survivor, and it's really hard to convey how deep the game is. It goes to an insane level of simulation and customization. The learning curve is steep, but the possibilities endless. The game is open source and development has been very active for years.
I also tried a few interactive fiction games, but that isn't my type.
Previous entries where about finding tty-applications to replace what I was doing in a graphical environment. But there are things to be done in the TTY too. Things that made me more confortable.
First changing the font. I don't like the default one, and it was too small anyway.
There aren't many fonts available in the 'psf' format a TTY expects. 'Terminus' was one of them. I like it and it's available in 16 and 20 pixels, which is way more confortable to read. The fonts are changed using the 'setfont' command. You can find available fonts in '/usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/'. Changes are persisted by editing '/etc/vconsole.conf'. You can set your keymap using 'loadkeys', and it's persisted the same way. Existing keymaps can be found in '/usr/share/kbd/keymaps/'.
I mentionned editing my keymap in a previous entry, that's how. The way the keymap system works is not obvious. Each time you load a keymap, it doesn't replace the existing one. It adds the new mappings and if it already exists, it's replaced. As a consequence, a good way to start a keymap is using the output of 'dumpkeys' as a starting point.
With bigger and cleaner fonts, it starts to look like home again, but that can be right without some color theming. You can actually tweak the TTY's default colors with escape codes. My favorite color scheme being the classic 'solarized', it was just a call to 'ddg' away. I added it to my '.rc' file and here ! That's home now !
I had an unexpected issue with resolution. My laptop is 1920x1200, while my external monitor has the more classic 1920x1080. I discovered 'fbset -yres 1080' allows me to change the resolution of the screen. I always use a single monitor at any time, but I'm confident 'fbset' could do some trickery with its 'virtual terminal' settings to extend it on several monitor. Didn't test it though.
Now here is a random list of programs I could fit in no particular category, but were used at some point. To mount USB keys automatically, I used 'udiskie'. I connected to new wifi networks using 'nmtui', and my password manager was already 'pass' or (zx2c4 pass), which works in command-line. When I focused on power consumption 'powertop' was an essential benchmark. Its '--auto-tune' paramater gets my baseline power consumption from ~20W to ~4W instantly.
Finally, I added some programs just to 'show off'. To nobody since I was still locked down, but I like silly programs.
I can see the matrix using 'cmatrix', and it can work as some sort of screensaver. No more secrets, or 'nms' displays criptic symbols, and 'decrypts' them hollywood style at the press of a key. You can pipe anything to it. And 'genact' simulates busy loading stuff : gcc compilation, php update, bitcoin mining. Looks like the real, but its all fake. So I can pretend I do important stuff and take endless coffee breaks.
I can't records gif of glitches on my desktop anymore, but I can record my terminal with 'asciinema'. The program handles the recording, the uploading and the replaying. Handy !
Finally, my two favorite tools and best productivity improvers. Fish shell, and 'fzf'. Fish shell is everything you find good in 'zsh' plus 'oh-my-zsh' only faster, with saner defaults. And 'fzf' boosts it to insane level of usability. Autocompletion, syntaxic colorations, file search in arguments etc. The two combined feels like I unlocked the 'easy mode' for using a terminal.
And that concludes this series.
If you think I forgot to mention something or you have an improvement to share ; Feel free to reach me.
Even if you have nothing to say in particular, I'd love to hear from you. Fellow gemini capsuleer and so on...
Send a mail at ahub@rawtext.club or ahub@riseup.net !