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.
What did you use to do so?
OP shared the tools they used, you’ve probably missed it.
- browser - links
- image viewer - fbi
- PDFs - fbpdf
- music - cmus
- movies -mplayer
- e-mail - alpine
- documents - vim, latex
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.
Are there any non-JavaScript websites left?
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.
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.
Welcome back to 1985 I guess. Now you’re going to need a green phosphor CRT and a dot matrix printer.
I doubt it. They make a hell of a noise and print at a rate of characters per second not pages per second. The ribbons suffered from similar issues as cassette tapes (the other ribbons that we had to deal with). The ribbon would dry out if not used for a few days and you’d waste paper and a lot of time.
DM printers were ideal in the guise of “line printers” - the big old IBM jobbies that munched through A3 landscape fan fold at ridiculous speeds. Home printers like the Epson FX80 or RX80 were at least affordable. I still remember the manual of our RX80 congratulating us on buying it and exhorting me to hug the printer on unpacking it. I suspect the Japanese to English translation might not have been the best.
We had to get a Centronics interface board stuffed into our C64 and get it working (sacrifice a chicken on a waxing gibbous moon night, etc)
It worked better on my 80286 box, some years later. I had to set it up in each application - Harvard Graphics, Word Perfect, Super Calc.
In around 1991 I was able to buy a 80486 based beastie, thanks to gift from granddad. In around 1993 I was given a HP LJ 4P so I could print out proofs for a Plymouth (Devon) tourist tat thing.
Nowadays I have a fairly elderly HPE MFP five toner humming away at home. Its on a VLAN that doesn’t get to see the internet. It just works. I won’t be “upgrading” it for the foreseeable future.
My Epson RX80’s ribbon is somewhere in landfill. The Commodore 64 however is all good and now sports a USB interface with more storage than the poor thing can possibly ever use. The Quickshot II joystick still works too.
1984ish was when the C64 was bought by my dad, from the NAAFI in Rheindahlen (West Germany, as was).
Picture the scene:
Me and brother fly home from UK to probably Dusseldorf at the end of the winter term. Its December in the mid '80s. Every now and then, Russia sends a Tupolev Bear or Badger to chug along overhead. The US sends a YR-71 over the USSR at multiples of the speed of sound. The Cold War was quite unpleasant to live through. Its quite chilly, snow tyres on the car, chains in the boot. The autobahn has the usual psychotic bunch of lane two and three drivers. Lane one generally runs at around 90mph (yes, even back in the '80s)
We get to home at the time (we move every two years or so - it is the way of things). Dad shows off the new gadget. He plugs the power lead into the video port.
Some weeks after we have gone back to school for the spring term, the C64 is returned from the menders. We get to use it in the Easter hols. It travelled to the UK and back to DE several times and also to Cyprus (WSBA). The QS II took a serious battering thanks to Daley Thompson’s decathalon.
I got it re-capped in 2019, which was all that needed doing. They were rather well made …
Pretty cool, this is how people used computers before, but back then computers couldn’t do as many things as they can now
I remember using Reddit years ago on Links. New Reddit was borderline unusable, old Reddit worked… okayish. How is Default web UI Lemmy on Links? Is there a nice TUI client that I guess you would use more regularly?
The default Lemmy UI doesn’t work on Links, it won’t let you log in without JavaScript.
I use the alternative UI old.feddit.org (old.lemmy.world, old.sdf.org and probably others also exist).
And that works really well.
