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 tried w3m, lynx, links and elinks, which all failed cause they don’t support JavaScript, which is necessary to log in.
Then I tried Browsh and Carbonyl, which failed cause they both don’t accept mouse clicks in a TTY and offer no keyboard navigation.
Then I tried Neonmodem Overdrive, a CLI fediverse browser, which I just couldn’t get to show any posts.
In the end, @pmjv@lemmy.sdf.org gave me the hint that some instances have alternative “old-reddit-like” frontends that allow logging in without JavaScript.
And my home instance with old.feddit.org is one of them. So now I’m using links, cause it’s the most user-friendly text browser IMO.
Not sure if you know, but you can setup links to pipe images (and whatever other media you want) to external programs through the Associations menu.
Afterwards pressing Enter or I when an image is selected, a new option “open” will appear.
