Ask HN: Is it still possible to live in a terminal?

I don't know about "living" in a terminal, but CLI/terminal tools are quite far from being out of the picture; if anything, I'd say they're thriving. It's not about one or the other; they're complementary, and I use both every day.

Personally, I use Firefox for browsing, PyCharm for coding, mpv/qimgv for media, and do pretty much everything else in the terminal. Terminal tools are incredibly versatile and composable in a way GUIs really can't match - for instance, I built a script that gets all the RAW files from my camera, converts them to jpg with darktable-cli, and optimizes them for filesize maintaining the same visual quality with jpeg-recompress, great for when I don't particularly care about editing each picture of a long hike. Next step will be to also push them to Google Drive, but I haven't gotten around to that yet. Similarly, the gopro-like camera I use for recording racing footage produces files with some weird filenames and terrible encoding which makes them enormous, so another script pulls the files, renames them to the date/time taken, and uses ffmpeg to transcode them to hevc, which saves several GB. Could I do this all from GUIs? Probably, but it'd involve a lot of hunting for files, dragging/dropping, and context switching between different programs. It's a lot more convenient to do it all in one short command.

There's also some amazing tools which just don't make much sense or would be quite contrived in GUI form. fd and fclones come to mind. AI is starting to be packaged as CLI tools, and it'll open up even more possibilities. Separate hiking pictures into their own directory? Sure! Find lecture videos mentioning a specific subject? No problem, this one doesn't mention the specific keyword you were looking for but it's also relevant at X timestamp!

I keep a 'perfect terminal' in the office, basically a system with an nvidia 7600 in it because that's the fastest 2D text thing I've found to date (yes, modern cards are so slow in text mode it's not even funny). Configured for 24 VT's, a bunch of them autoconnect to remote systems/run specific applications etc at boot - so if I want the calculator, for example, it's Alt-F12.

For local graphics programs, that also provides a memory-mapped framebuffer which makes basic graphics a doddle. Beyond that, text-mode browsing has been too hard work for years (and so by extension email too). While it's very possible to 'cheat' by setting X to render to a framebuffer (either directly or in the background) the whole reason to use the text-only console is to focus on code without computer-borne interruptions.

Even on my graphical computer, it's basically terminals windows and a browser. Any piece of software that interrupts the flow is either configured to not do so, or discarded PDQ.

Terminals FTW.

yes except for the browser, you can use weechat it's a cli irc client but you can link a lot of accunts (slack, fb messenger, etc.)

I lived without X11/Wayland for several years. (These days, I live in GUI Emacs with EXWM instead, which has a similar feeling.)

Some tools I had luck with:

- mpv is your friend - it can play audio, video, and display images directly to the framebuffer without X11. It also makes a pretty decent PDF reader combined with ghostscript to render each page to a PNG.

- The Emacs ecosystem is very useful - there are many packages for interacting with common services, and they typically work in both terminal and GUI modes.

- For web stuff, the best solution I found was to push as much as possible into RSS feeds and/or IRC, which have good terminal clients. Things like rss-bridge and bitlbee are great here. When I needed a browser, I typically used Elinks but was never really satisfied with it. I believe if you need decent JS support you're out of luck.

If companies choose to use proprietary software for needs that FOSS can and has served well for years, it would seem that those companies are cutting their own legs.

I speak primarily of Slack and Zoom and other “low hanging fruit” of already solved problems that feature VC-funded wheel reinvention made popular by their VC-brethren dogfooding said products, when threaded messaging and webRTC don’t necessitate proprietary solutions. https://meet.jit.si for example…

I don’t think mindless cargo culture is a trend to follow, nor will tech savvy devs disappear nor will the need to remotely administer servers via command lines tools disappear.

Remote Desktop solutions are not realistic tools for server administration in any sort of serious way, so I’m pretty sure that’s a niche that will always exist…

Seeking to browse the web exclusively through a cli browser, however, is probably not something one can do while working in the field of web development. The web is primarily graphic lauout based