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Can you use the terminal for everything? [video]

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Re: Can you use the terminal for everything? [video]

#61

Post by rsync »

sitkack wrote: post #49
rsync wrote: post #26

Earlier 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…

Is Alpine still getting security updates? UW doesn't maintain it anymore, like at all. It exists as git repo out in the ether [1] I'd probably run it in a non-privileged container. Infact, I should be doing that for Mutt ... [1] http://repo.or.cz/alpine.git

"I'd probably run it in a non-privileged container."

Does mutt talk to the network or have a daemon or run as a service ? I don't know the answer to that but I know that for my own use-case, pine is basically a text editor. It executes no programs or code and does not talk to anything but the local SMTP daemon.

How much sanity checking and bounds checking does sendmail (or postfix or whatever) do on email ? That's the question, I think, because again, in my case, the threat vector is very limited - basically an arbitrary (weird) email or piece of an email that somehow breaks pine.

So no, I don't run it in a container - in fact, I run it as the user whose mail spool is the highest sensitivity asset that user owns ... so a container wouldn't help. If you get the mail spool, you get everything - at least or that user...

Re: Can you use the terminal for everything? [video]

#62

Post by pfranz »

_t4xj wrote: post #59

Will the terminal ever disappear? I would assume that the percentage of computer users who do significant work in a terminal (email, IRC, coding, etc.) is still decreasing steadily today. What I'm not sure about, how does this decline in penetration compare to the (still real) growth in the worldwide computer user base? Seems that at least the Internet user base is still growing ~10% p.a. What does this mean for abso…

Maybe I'm a bit biased by my love for the terminal for most of my work responsibilities--I just can't imagine doing my job without it. Maybe I'm old and things from 10-20 years ago seem recent. Apple deciding to stick a terminal in OSX 20 years ago (a lot of people didn't expect them to include one) helped with the boom of Silicon Valley engineers choosing Apple laptops. PowerShell, first released only 10 years ago by Microsoft with major versions being released every couple years, shows they feel there's a need for investing in Terminals. Windows Subsystem for Linux was first released 2 years ago. While it's technically just compatibility with Linux binaries, I've only seen it being used via a terminal.

You're right, with more and more computer users added every day, as a percentage command line users have probably been shrinking for a long time. But I would also expect in raw numbers they're probably still growing.

Re: Can you use the terminal for everything? [video]

#63

Post by sitkack »

rsync wrote: post #61
sitkack wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Alpine still getting security updates? UW doesn't maintain it anymore, like at all. It exists as git repo out in the ether [1] I'd probably run it in a non-privileged container. Infact, I should be doing that for Mutt ... [1] http://repo.or.cz/alpine.git

"I'd probably run it in a non-privileged container." Does mutt talk to the network or have a daemon or run as a service ? I don't know the answer to that but I know that for my own use-case, pine is basically a text editor. It executes no programs or code and does not talk to anything but the local SMTP daemon. How much sanity checking and bounds checking does sendmail (or postfix or whatever) do on email ? That's th…

When I used Alpine, it was talking to IMAP and definitely segfaulted a couple times. But an RCE in Alpine != RCE in Postfix (great architecture). I dunno MUAs are so personal, they feel like a perfect place to target and handle more edge cases than upstream processes.

Re: Can you use the terminal for everything? [video]

#65

Post by Biqh1 »

kbenson wrote: post #35
clon wrote: post #17

https://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 t…

When I set up my personal gmail with Mutt, I used the following guides, if you're interested. None of them are perfect, so I did what most people do and took bits and bobs from all of them:

1. [https://smalldata.tech/blog/2016/09/10/gmail-with-mutt]

2. [http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/]

3. [https://baptiste-wicht.com/posts/2014/07/a-mutt-journey-my-m...]

Re: Can you use the terminal for everything? [video]

#66

Post by curiousgal »

gumby wrote: post #9

Seems 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"?

The answer is yes for all, as ASCII encoding for videos is a thing.

Re: Can you use the terminal for everything? [video]

#67

Post by stonewhite »

pq0ak2nnd wrote: post #58
amelius wrote: post #33

Earlier 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?

That's an interesting question. My first response is: hell no. But I think what's behind your question is the fact that part of UX/UI is to abstract experience and interface. So maybe if I first had to poke at an alien OS I would try its UI as part of familiarity in getting to know it, but ultimately as a system architect, hardware developer, and former O/S dev with 4 decades experience, I want to see how it really w…

I think the closest you can get right now is TempleOS. How do you feel about it?

Re: Can you use the terminal for everything? [video]

#69

Post by kbenson »

canhascodez wrote: post #57
digi_owl wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unix have all kinds of funny things if all happens within a single box. If you want to send someone a message, there is write (if the person have mesg set to yes). There is also talk, but it requires its own daemon. Seriously, _nix started out in the mainframe era. Meaning that the basic assumption was multiple terminals hooked up to a single computer, with a different user on each terminal. Sadly we have a generatio…

Multiseat is a bit complex under X11, but certainly possible today. What do you see as the advantages of thin clients, though?

I think the point wasn't to specifically lament the lack of thin clients, but the lack of knowledge about how the systems are really designed be multi-user, and actually multi-concurrent-user, as opposed to systems like windows which eventually gained multi-user capabilities, and even then concurrent use isn't exactly the common case (and I'm not sure how well it works in practice, but I imagine with RDP it works well enough on the server products).

Re: Can you use the terminal for everything? [video]

#70

Post by nothrabannosir »

amelius wrote: post #33
pq0ak2nnd wrote: post #16

Earlier 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?

Contrary to everyone else here: hell yes, every single time.

GUIs are discoverable, and have lower friction for first time users. Example : a video codec GUI will always be easier to use than ffmpeg. I still Google how to use ffmpeg after 10years , and I have to read the entire man page because I don’t know what I don’t know! Is there a newer, better option to this flag available? Like lame for mp3s (another great example), a man page which (used to?) start off with bitrate options, but at the end says; forget all that, just use --preset. Or imagemagick, which decides to go for undiscoverability gold and split their entire program up over multiple binaries so you now get to read multiple man pages! After you guess what the names of those programs are, of course.

Hell. Give me a gui for any unfamiliar task, any time.

Of course, were I encodig movies every day, I’d be singing a very different tune.

Edit: another example: I resize images about once a week and I still have to google imagemagick’s convert. I keep forgetting how to resize to known width, keeping height ratio. It’s so frustrating that I’ve just given up and sort of guess with % instead, until it’s close enough. Not to mention resizing to a desired file size (is that even possible? With a gui, at least I’d know if it were at all. Now I’m just tired of reading the man page. I give up. Imagemagick wins.)

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