I used to use a terminal for everything! And it was a big step forward over punch cards. I remember using my first VT-100 in college, after having taken CS-101 to learn IBM 370 (BAL) assembly language on punched cards. And up until 1988 or so, we were using text terminals for everything, until I got a job at Adobe and started using a Sun workstation. Even then, the windowing environment was used mainly to open terminal windows.
Can you use the terminal for everything? [video]
31–40 of 95 posts
Re: Can you use the terminal for everything? [video]
#32Related to this, Omar Rizwan did a great talk recently on file system interfaces:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfHpDDXJQVg (Four Fake File Systems)
Re: Can you use the terminal for everything? [video]
#33Seems like the kinds of people who'd make/watch a video rather than read/write about the topic are not likely to be able to answer "yes". Is there a transcript? Or is the summary "no"?
IMHO The 20+ years spent trying to make a desktop version of linux has SEVERELY reduced overall knowledge of unix practices and patterns. I'm not just talking about things like automake or the contents in /bin that younger programmers never learn, but the CLI in general. A while back I was working with an intern who as struggling with using distributed linux boxes because all he knew was Gnome: the CLI was utterly fo…
But if you had to do something now on some alien OS that you didn't know the internals of, wouldn't you prefer a GUI?
Re: Can you use the terminal for everything? [video]
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMHO The 20+ years spent trying to make a desktop version of linux has SEVERELY reduced overall knowledge of unix practices and patterns. I'm not just talking about things like automake or the contents in /bin that younger programmers never learn, but the CLI in general. A while back I was working with an intern who as struggling with using distributed linux boxes because all he knew was Gnome: the CLI was utterly fo…
But if you had to do something now on some alien OS that you didn't know the internals of, wouldn't you prefer a GUI?
It's my responsibility to organize things such that what I need to do matches up with what I know how to do. If I need to do something urgently on an alien OS and I don't immediately know how to do it, the failure doesn't lie with the OS. Why am I not using an OS that I know better? Why don't I have time to read the documentation and understand this alien OS?
Re: Can you use the terminal for everything? [video]
#35https://neomutt.org/ The guy is absolutely right. Mutt is not a gimmick like ascii video on terminal. It actually makes a lot of sense as an email client and is surprisingly ergonomic. I also enjoy the fact that my config is a normal dotfile that I can version control etc. Also, your passwords can be encrypted using the tools that you choose, as opposed to whatever home grown crypto (if any) the [insert random Electr…
Oh, man, I still miss mutt. I should see about getting it set up again. I bet someone has a good config online somewhere for using it as an IMAP client with Gmail...
The only thing that might throw people off is that it uses nano for creating your email... (from the video)
Actually, IIRC it uses the EDITOR environment variable, with some sane fallbacks. I happily wrote emails in vim for years. That said, defaulting to nano with a quick and well known way to swap your buffer to vim (and possibly back) might be a better solution overall. I love vim and use it as my IDE, but the cost/benefit ratio isn't in it's favor when your average time spent on a reply might be very short or when you're writing freeform. Especially if your default config is for wordwrap off because you use it as an IDE...
The other thing to make sure you get nailed down in Mutt is to set up links or elinks as your html view handler, so HTML-only emails can actually be read without extreme difficulty for those cases where a client sent an HTML email without a plain-text companion.
The thing to remember for any program that allows complex configuration like mutt is that you can often search for other people's configs[1] and copy them as your own, and once you get better, you can copy portions of them and tweak as needed to get your own specific customized behavior. I ran FVWM2 as my window manager for over a decade, and I remember every 5-6 months I would do some searching to find interesting new behavior people had implemented that I could tweak and steal (like here[2]). Every time some interesting new UI feature would come out somewhere someone would implement it in FVWM within a couple months.
Re: Can you use the terminal for everything? [video]
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The guy is absolutely right. Mutt is not a gimmick like ascii video on terminal." I personally use (al)pine and I could not agree more. But here is a different, and I hope very provocative, reason that you should consider a terminal email client: Local mail delivery does not traverse the Internet, or any network. So, for instance, when I send an email to one of my engineers at rsync.net, even though it is sent in pl…
> But here is a different, and I hope very provocative, reason that you should consider a terminal email client: > Local mail delivery does not traverse the Internet, or any network. The implication here being that you are running the clients on the email server. Wouldn't you effectively get the same security by tunneling IMAP over SSH?
> The implication here being that you are running the clients on the email server.
That's a common scenario, but most linux/BSD distros ship with some mail server software installed and configured to run out of the box, even if also set to not allow external connections, as that's how the system delivers messages to users (e.g. cron output, etc). So almost every linux/BSD is a mail server, even if it may not be the mail server. If there's a main box that people in your company connect to as a terminal, email to local accounts on that box is essentially a internal messaging system. Hell, you could throw an IRC server on there with no outside access and use terminal IRC clients to have your own private chat channel as well. Who needs slack?
Re: Can you use the terminal for everything? [video]
#37I think there's a version of elinks (or one of the other text based browsers) that can display images if you are running on a framebuffer console
Netsurf can be compiled for framebuffer, and that variant can also be used in X (and imo is much easier to get compiling than the GTK UI).
Re: Can you use the terminal for everything? [video]
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
But if you had to do something now on some alien OS that you didn't know the internals of, wouldn't you prefer a GUI?
It's my responsibility to organize things such that what I need to do matches up with what I know how to do. If I need to do something urgently on an alien OS and I don't immediately know how to do it, the failure doesn't lie with the OS. Why am I not using an OS that I know better? Why don't I have time to read the documentation and understand this alien OS?
Because, unless you are an IT person, your job is to do work now, which is unrelated to the OS.
Re: Can you use the terminal for everything? [video]
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMHO The 20+ years spent trying to make a desktop version of linux has SEVERELY reduced overall knowledge of unix practices and patterns. I'm not just talking about things like automake or the contents in /bin that younger programmers never learn, but the CLI in general. A while back I was working with an intern who as struggling with using distributed linux boxes because all he knew was Gnome: the CLI was utterly fo…
But if you had to do something now on some alien OS that you didn't know the internals of, wouldn't you prefer a GUI?
That depends on the built in help mechanism. If I was unfamiliar with linux and it was linux, maybe. It it was OpenBSD and I was unfamiliar with it, I could probably get everything I needed (for core OS stuff at least) purely from the man system, as long as I had some very basic idea of how to use the shell. OpenBSD has exceptional man pages, to the degree you probably can't understand until you've spent a few hours reading through some of them.
Re: Can you use the terminal for everything? [video]
#40https://neomutt.org/ The guy is absolutely right. Mutt is not a gimmick like ascii video on terminal. It actually makes a lot of sense as an email client and is surprisingly ergonomic. I also enjoy the fact that my config is a normal dotfile that I can version control etc. Also, your passwords can be encrypted using the tools that you choose, as opposed to whatever home grown crypto (if any) the [insert random Electr…
What companies would let me use Mutt for email? I have a long list of ideal characteristics for an employer but have decided that a simple test might be that they let me use Mutt.