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.
Are there any non-JavaScript websites left?
Websites from alternative networks such as Onion, Freenet, I2P and GNUnet, where speed and privacy are a must-have. Onion webchats, for example, uses neverending-loading with iframes/HTML frames (and another frame/iframe with a standard HTML form), so to not depend on JS.
At the surface web (clearnet), however, it’s harder to find. Even the remaining old sites, from blogosphere and personal tilde websites (those whose URL contained a tilde “~” followed by an username) have some degree of JS.
Surprisingly, a lot. And usually they’re the more informative and less commercial ones.
Most websites that only show a “please enable Javascript” banner I just leave again. Very few I do need, for those I have a key combo that starts a window manager with maximized Firefox on another TTY.
