Cli-only laptop

Hey /tech/, I'm moving away from X for good and I'm hunting for cli alternatives of softwares. > tmux/screen for multiplexing > mpv works just fine. > mutt for email I'm using void linux and it has been good so far. Suggest me some cli softwares that you use.

cmus for music wordgrinder or vim and latex for documents w3m for web browsing

1 Shell - ksh,csh,sh,bash,dosbox depending on the current project. 2 Editor - vim,nano,em depending on the doc. 3 WM - tmux 4 Email - alpine 5 Chat - hangups, for my school group chats. 6 IRC - Weechat 7 Web - links 8 Pictures - fbi 9 Multimedia - vlc -I ncurses, cmus, Cplay, mpv 10 Podcasts - gpodder (gpo) 11 Ebooks - epub 12 PDF - fbgs 13 Word Docs - antiword 14 Spreadsheets - sp

>>6782 I recommend Lynx for web browsing because it has nice Vim bindings. I also saw an emacs option if you are that kind of person Consider changing your user agent through because many websites have some default nginx config which bans any user agent with Lynx in. Seriously User-Agent: "Lynx/2.8.7dev.9 libwww-FM/2.14" = 403 Forbidden, User-Agent: "fuarrrkoff you daft cunt" = 200 OK. It's pretty annoying.

>IRC irssi (https://irssi.org/download/) irssi-otr (https://github.com/cryptodotis/irssi-otr) >XMPP xmpp-client (https://github.com/agl/xmpp-client) >RSS feeds newsbeuter (https://newsbeuter.org) >Youtube mps-youtube (https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube) >Proxy proxychains-ng (https://github.com/rofl0r/proxychains-ng) I hope you enjoy.

Wow, thanks. I'm currently using Void Linux. The repo is pretty small, but I kind of like void for its quirks like runit instead of systemd.

OP why are you doing you Linux aVoid X server?

Cryptocurrency: "curl rate.sx" Weather: "curl wttr.in/Your_City" Anyway, here is some lists : 1) https://github.com/chubin/awesome-console-services 2) https://github.com/therebelrobot/awesome-workshopper 3) https://github.com/alebcay/awesome-shell 4) https://github.com/awesome-lists/awesome-bash 5)

https://kmandla.wordpress.com/ https://inconsolation.wordpress.com/ Both dead blogs by one person who consolidated a lot useful and fun CLI programs. To be honest I'm doing something similar with an old T60 because I can feel myself becoming more distracted and less focussed. The biggest signal for me is that the paragraphs and sentences on my blog are becoming much shorter, just to get it out and move on rather than deliberate over how to express myself thoroughly and clearly.

>>6793 Exactly my state. Once I went CLI-only, I only opened my laptop for things that I absolutely needed to do. Amazing transformation it was.

>>6782 midnight commander should be on any self-respecting clinx box

>>6796 It really is something that is really starting to concern me about modern computers, is how little they do in comparison to their power. Same thing with the web and its intrusion into lives and the benefit it grants. Maybe I'm turning into a neo-Luddite, but I really think computers were better when they had a limited set of capabilities and possibility to take over people's lives. Something about text interfaces and command-lines seem increasingly "right" to me, like this is how computers are "meant" to be used.

>>6782 you could always just use emacs for everything emacs can do irc, email, web, pictures, music, ebooks, multiple buffers/instances etc.

>>6798 OP here. You spoke my mind. Command line, for me, seems to maintain the raw protocol as to how computers are merely machines which execute certain commands. Point and Click is definitely faster to carry out some work, I admit. But terminal environment gives you that unmatched focus and efficiency.

>>6800 Are you sticking to the default built-in console, or just running X with fullscreen terminals? If just the console, any tips?

>>6801 I did a barebones install of void. Just the tty on screen. No X libs. Fetched a void iso without a DE and installed the core. As for tips, I'll suggest some packages which were really helpful. > acpi for checking battery status > bluez for bluetooth connectivity; bluetoothctl will work the magic to connect any bluetooth speakers. > alsamixer for audio control > adjust the value in /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness to change brightness. ( There must be an easier way like keybinding but I used to do this from long back and an alias kinda stuck) > wpa_supplicant and dhcpcd for internet access (Check void wiki. It's a clear documentation) > lynx for browser > fbv for image-viewing with framebuffer > mplayer -vo fbdev2 <filename> for videos > vim for all my text editing These were all the possibilities from just the void repo, which is relatively small. I could have done this with Arch or debian-netinstall but I thought I'll move from systemd. Void uses runit which is so fast that the login prompt appears in three seconds.

>>6802 Is the frame buffer support in Void working out of the box? BSDs don't seem to have great support, so I'm thinking of going with whatever distro handles it the best.

>>6805 Just a package install and it just works. Surprised me because even Arch and Debian gave me a tough time with that.

>>6808 What was the package? v86d?

>>6809 I don't quite remember exactly. But a xbps-query search of 'buffer' yielded some package results. Among them, some package that went like 'fbb' or something. After installing that, I installed fbv (image viewer) which worked perfectly.

reminder that TUI is cripple GUI for lamers, and that if you want a visual interface, you should use an X program. One should also find, even though theyre better off keeping X around for the programs that do benefit from a visual interface, that many programs don't all that much actually. Maybe OP Has a good reason to abstain from X, so some ncurses is good for the programs that really benefit from it, but many dont. Use command line tools. Not GUIs made of text that run in the terminal, command line. For example: >file manager the Ｕ Ｎ Ｉ Ｘ © "cd", "ls", "mv", "cp", "du", "df", and "rm" tools solve this problem. >multimedia see file manager + multimedia player of choice >rss feeds rsstail (I reccomend setting the -1 flag as the default). >text editing while ``VI''sual interface is preferable a lot of the time, ed is good for making small quick changes. >irc ii. use lchat or background tail -f and cat > in. or, however else you wanna use it. >youtube each youtube channel has a rss feed for released videos, so see rss feeds for subscriptions. as for searching it, I know of one way thats as fast as mpsyt, but occasionally doesnt report the video title and cant be made to report description, uploader, duration, etc. then another way thats a few times slower, if not so slow as to be unnacceptable, but always reports video title, and can easily be made to report duration, uploader, etc. mpsyt being a screen oriented ncurses soykaf is stupid and pointless, but you'll probably use it anyways, so I wont bother posting those scripts unless someone asks. >>6792 >wttr.in this doesnt report for mcmurdo station wtf.

>>6811 I have actually been bashing my head against figuring out a simple yt search that I can use like so: ytsearch "pokemon opening titles" and it'll return an array or dict like [[title,url],[title,url]] {title1: url, title2:url} I just want to get like the top 5 results to pass to another script. Which is a long way of saying pls post scripts senpai.

shell: fish - it's like someone made a shell for the 21st century! editor: micro - it's like someone made a nano for the 21st century! Although nano can be pretty nice too if you use GPM and tweak your nanorc just a little. chan: EinChan - it's like someone made an imageboard for the 20th century! music: cmus - nice and simple. browser - mainly elinks for its configurability, lynx for gopher. multiplexing: tmux - much nicer if you HEAVILY change the config imo, but now I just have to remember all my nice keybinds as well as all the defaults for when I'm in someone else's machine.

>>6814 #!/usr/local/bin/rc SEARCH=https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=^`{echo $*|sed 's/ /+/g'} URLS=`{ {for (i in ``(' ' $nl '"' '<' '>' ';'){curl -s $SEARCH}){ echo $i} }|grep 'watch?v='.\+ | sed 's|https://www.youtube.com||;s|&amp||' | uniq } {for(i in $URLS){ youtube-dl -q --get-title --get-id https://www.youtube.com^$i&} }|awk '!(NR%2){print "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v="$0}; NR%2{print $0}' #eat soykaf, mpsyt! #!/usr/local/bin/rc #newer, faster, soykaftier: SEARCH=https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=^`{echo $*|sed 's/ /+/g'} youtube-dl --flat-playlist -j $SEARCH|jq '.title,.url' -rM|awk '!(NR%2){print "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v="$0}; NR%2{print $0}' #Crystal edition, because it uses the /J/avascript /O/bject notation. These would be the scripts. I hope you can adapt them to whatever you wanna do anon. >>6815 >For the 21st century flashy and grossly overcomplicated?

>>6817 it finally works! all thanks to you >search yt from the command line >pick videos from the command line >stream them as ascii directly to the current terminal session >can even forward video over SSH this way. rough as hell- part of a CLI conversion package I'm working on- but damn cool.

>>6824 demonstration running on the deck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpPmGR_p9ng

>>6798 Luddites were good guys, they didn't want to destroy all tech, only the ones that dehumanized them in the industry. The ones that made them work like machinery.

how on earth can you browse the internet and/or watch videos without some kind of GUI? ASCII videos??

>>6858 Literally >>6825

Have you tried netsurf-fb for browsing the web? It runs on the framebuffer but it does relie on some xorg stuff.

>>6802 btw I suggest you put all valuable information into $PS1, like battery percentage, current time, etc. Here is the guide: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prompt-HOWTO/

>>6858 mpv for watching videos. That reauires X, though

>>6858 hmm, it seems like w3m can render quality photos inside a terminal, I wonder if someone could use it's code to render videos. Here is a screenshot from ranger file manager.

>>6858 >how on earth can you browse the internet and/or watch videos without some kind of GUI? ASCII videos?? On almost all machines, x86 or non-x86, the Linux kernel initializes your GPU to work in 2D GRAPHICS mode, even if you are using the text-only interface. Nobody uses VGA text-mode since 10 years ago. The device driver of the GPU implements the actual 2D-rendering on GPU, and exposes a series of standard image-drawing APIs to the Linux "framebuffer" abstract layer. The "framebuffer" models your screen as a linear 2D array of pixels (24-bit color depth), you can put whatever pixels on the framebuffer, and it just shows on the screen: images, videos, webpages, whatever. SDL and Qt uses a library called DirectFB to draw GUI on your framebuffer, so a desktop environment is not impossible in this way, and surely you can play your visual novel games without using any window systems (ONScripter uses SDL). So you can do all those tricks if you are on a local machine with a framebuffer-based console, but not a SSH console. Because the images are drawn to the framebuffer, not the console. What you use to interact with the text-mode system is a console, not framebuffer itself. Linux has a simple kernel-mode console emulator program ("fbcon"), itself emulates a VT102-like console, with additional features like font selection. It uses the framebuffer as its display backend, so it basically translates text to pixels. In recent years, like 2D, the 3D graphics also became accessible from the userspace over standard kernel interface, known as Direct Rendering Infrastructure & Direct Rendering Manager (DRI/DRM), It means you can now launch 3D apps without using any window system. It also means, the default kernel-mode terminal emulator "fbcon" is more-or-less obsolete (limited VT102-like functionality, no Unicode), and bloat (Sometimes, the framebuffer itself is implemented by the DRI/DRM infrastructure). Years ago there's a project called "kmscon", which is a console implementation using 3D graphics based on DRI/DRM in userspace, with full vt220 to vt510 emulation, full internationalization, supports Unicode and all international keyboard layouts provided by X. The goal is to make it possible to use a CLI terminal emulator based on 3D graphics stack without simulating any ttys, consoles and framebuffers. But the project is dead, probably due to the lack of interest. So it's hard to say where is the borderline between graphics and text, it's pretty blurred nowadays considering how many layers of simulations and emulations involved. I would say, you are still a CLI user if you open X server and make your favorite terminal emulation full-screen and work with the shell, and watch videos via mpv in full-screen. >>6864 >I wonder if someone could use it's code to render videos You don't have to. Just use fbdev to watch videos.

Some lainons are so confused between a "terminal", "console", a "text-mode" and a "CLI-interface", without understanding the background. It's impossible to understand how can you watch a video in 24-bit true color under the Linux text-mode. Here's my brief history: In the beginning there are teletypes. Teletypes are typewriters with a built-in printer and communication connections. You type on your typewriter and your words are printed on my typewriter automatically. These devices were widely-used as an enhanced telegraph system in military, business and postal since 1940s. Then there was Unix. Unix uses the widely-available teletypes as the man-machine interface. This is the origin of /dev/tty, printf() and the first generations of line-based editors, ed and ex. At this time, a "tty", "terminal", "console", "text-mode" and "CLI-interface" is the same thing. The ASCII control-characters were used to control the printers (CR, LF, etc). ASCII '\a' is a bell, because there was a bell on the typewriters. Later people found the line-based output was a huge waste of papers and difficult for real-time interactions. So people invented a CRT screen with keyboard ("the console") and serial ports to replace the teletypes. This is the first layer of simulation (or emulation?), a CRT-console simulates a teletype (TTY), as it can understand all ASCII control-characters designed for printers. User-interface was improved. "vi" was implemented as a frontend of the "ex" editor for full-screen text-editing, "curses" was written for full-screen text-drawing, etc. In order to control the console, a series of special sequences are used, something like "\033[37m". Because different models use different sequences, terminfo/termcap was estibalished as a database. Long after the personal computer evolution settled in the early 90s, personal computers came with VGA graphics. Linux kernel implemented its virtual console ("vgacon") via the VGA textmode. At that point, we uses an simulated VT102-like console, which itself uses VGA text-mode to emulate a real console like VT, which itself simulates a printer on the teletype. After 2000s, people found painful to implement a virtual console for different non-x86 hardware. This time 2D graphics were universal on all machines and the Linux kernel devs decided to implement an abstract 2D-rendering layer in the kernel called the "framebuffer". All graphics drivers should implement the APIs necessary for the "framebuffer" to operate so people can use a single set of APIs to draw any 2D-things (with 24-bit color!) on the screen. When framebuffer is used, the device drivers initialize the graphics under 2D, not text-mode. And then we only need to implement a virtual text-console on top of the framebuffer, turns texts to pixels, so one virtual console ("fbcon") can rule them all. Later people found it was probably also a good idea to use it for x86 boxes since VESA 2D was universal. Since then, On almost all machines, x86 or non-x86, the Linux kernel initializes your GPU to work in 2D GRAPHICS mode, even if you are using the text-only interface, and VGA text-mode + vgacon is dead. Recently the prevalent 3D graphics forced the kernel to build an foundation for 3D graphics, like framebuffer but more complicated, this is DRI/DRM, basically we have a ring buffer inside the kernel and applications put render commands to the buffer and the 3D driver manages to send these commands to the GPU over a series of APIs in form of IOCTLs. We also need KMS to set proper resolution, depth, and refresh rate in the kernel space (instead of a rooted X driver). So it turned to something like this: >The Linux console you use is a software simulation of a VT102-like console, which itself is a hardware console is a simulation of a printer, and all these things are simulated by the software console by drawing 2D pixels on framebuffer, which itself is an abstraction of the actual 2D graphics rendering, which itself is an abstraction layer provided by the DRI/DRM + KMS driver, which itself is an abstraction of the actual 3D graphics rendering.

>>6868 Much gratitude anon.

>>6868 >The Linux console you use is a software simulation of a VT102-like console, which itself is a hardware console is a simulation of a printer, and all these things are simulated by the software console by drawing 2D pixels on framebuffer, which itself is an abstraction of the actual 2D graphics rendering, which itself is an abstraction layer provided by the DRI/DRM + KMS driver, which itself is an abstraction of the actual 3D graphics rendering.

>>6863 >>6864 >>6858 mplayer -vo fbdev2 <filename> will display the actual video as >>6802 pointed out. This will display the video in the framebuffer that >>6867 >>6868 described (thank you for that description, btw. Quality post) so you don't need X. Just make sure your console has framebuffer mode enabled (it probably does) and your user is in the video group.

>>6814 Not a script but with a friend we are developping a framework of small web parsers in C for a bunch of websites like youtube, wikipedia and so on. Our build system produces either .so files that you can use to integrate into higher level programs or executable stubs that you can use in shell scripts. https://github.com/fx-carton/netb1

>>6931 You can use mpv to watch vidoes in console using mpv --vo=drm

>>6931 also if you want mplayer to take only a portion of the screen (which might be useful if you're using tmux or screen), you can use the `mplayer -vo fbdev2 -geometry <xpos>:<ypo> -x <width> -y <height> -vf scale -zoom <your file>`

>>6789 >that choker holy soykaf muh dick

A fully interactive X Linux desktop rendered in TTY and streamable over SSH https://github.com/tombh/texttop

I like DWM from ye suckless team as a window manager, it looks great!

>>7073 Does it run without X? The webpage for it says "dwm is a dynamic window manager for X."

>>7074 It depends on X. It is like kicking dead whales down the beach in that regard.

When I learned emacs I realized that it can do almost everything you need. It is also a pretty nice text editor on the side.

>>7126 just call it with -nw so it doesn't bring up their ugly as fuarrrk gui

I used to have an old Pentium that I would keep a CLI slackware installation on. Those boxes have since died, and I'm not sure what I'm going to do now for a headless server and a coding sandbox machine. Any ideas?

>>7234 Man, constantly kicking myself for throwing away highschool pc, it's a perfect candidate for a barebones install. I couldn't even into networking a little and tossed it. Now I would use it as a render farm, or musl/ARM emulation/interfacing or Something. also > /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness I hate this step lol. Actually nothing duckduckgoable has worked on my one slackware pc, and have just been running a full redshift command (in this case better to consider rather than automate imho..)

>>7237 I have my first college pc with a 754 slot amd64 that finally died(well, all of the ide ports are gone, so it might as well be dead), but I can't bring myself to throw it away. > redshift I don't use that as much as I should. especially since most of my work is done at night. I legit think I just turned the brightness down on my slackware box via monitor. It wasn't the best set up.

Do what I do and use Emacs for everything, in one way or another. Use the basic window commands for multiplexing. Eshell is a decent shell, depending on what you want; you can easily launch a different shell from this. I use emms for playing music; having mplayer as the underlying player. There are several mail systems for email; I use mail and rmail for this. Eww is a passable browser, again depending on what you're actually doing with it; you can make TUI programs work in eshell if you need to. ERC is an excellent IRC client and it's so nice to be able to jump into IRC or anything else with Emacs; the first time I used it, I knew nothing about IRC, but was able to learn gradually since most everything uses basic Emacs commands for preparing lines. I also use Emacs as a PDF viewer, but this works by rendering to images, which you'll probably need X for. Again, I can easily get accustomed to anything I'm not familiar with, by simply learning which Emacs mode to use and gradually learning functionality as I need it, as most every mode will borrow heavily from normal Emacs and so require almost no initial familiarity to use. It would be easy to run Emacs as the sole X program, if that's not extremely inconvenient.

>>7240 Have you tried exwm?

>>6799 I've considered running a minimal Arch setup using only Emacs in order to try and focus.

>>6787 Alternatives to image and PDF viewer? And, is possible to see videos (not ASCII)?

>>6787 What's wrong with zsh?

>>7280 Why bother with any of these when fish is the future? There's fish and then there's all the other shells.

>>7283 command line shells are regressive

>>7283 I had fish for a while and I was in accord with you, but then I realized that I wanted something in between bash and fish itself. Zsh filled that void, fish is to verbose, and the fact that is not fully bash compatible was a pain

void linux, man it's hard to fine someone who is using it

>>7289 what does distro have to do with anything here? You can throw whatever software you please on a minimal install of anything that has one.

>>7255 I've not. I use StumpWM, but many of my program windows are Emacs. They mix together nicely.

>>6788 Why do they block Lynx? Does it open them to potential vulnerabilities or do they just not have support for cli viewing of their page

>>6788 It's not the default nginx config, it's the default ruleset for ModSecurity. An update was released last month to help with the false positives, so should anyone actually bother to update, this won't be a problem anymore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ModSecurity#Former_Lynx_browser_blocking It says here it was responding with 406 error codes, but the documentation from nginx to setup ModSecurity configures it to respond with 403s. https://www.nginx.com/resources/admin-guide/nginx-plus-modsecurity-waf-installation-logging/ >>7516 https://github.com/SpiderLabs/owasp-modsecurity-crs/issues/318#issuecomment-230122325 is a pretty interesting read. It's an attempt to prevent remote command execution.

>>7516 >Why do they block Lynx? Does it open them to potential vulnerabilities or do they just not have support for cli viewing of their page All they do is filter the user agent string. It's as if someone rings your doorbell. You open the door and the dude has a nametag that says "Vlad" and you say sorry man no Russians allowed and close the door. Literally 5 seconds later the doorbell rings again. You open the door and it's the same guy but his nametag has "Vlad" crossed out and says "Bob" under it and you say "come on inside fellow American!" It serves literally no security purpose at all. Anyone who enables this crap on their site is a fuarrrking retard playing security theater. >instead of writing secure code lets just block out all the bad guys hurr fuarrrking durr

>>6782 https://srs.gnu.moe/list/categories.html one of the best list of ncurses clients out there

>>7580 Op here. Thanks for this man.

Ncurses is the worst of both worlds, it doesn't have the composability of regular text-only shell programs and it doesn't have the abily to do per-pixel rendering either.

>>6797 Hey, I remember that. Ranger killed it and raped it's corpse though. To each their own. Enjoy your raped corpse!

>>7596 But I guess it's the closest they've got now to using a GUI. So..

Weird how ncmpcpp is not being mentioned for music. Also Check out the alsa sound equalizer for a better sound. I'd recommend you use colemak or something like that so you don't damage your hands too much from all the typing. Enlightenment project has terminology, an amazing console replacement. The only reason why I don't use it is that it can't use any other keyboard layout than qwerty. If they implement that, or I find a way to hack colemak in (and find a way to read ebooks in a not-painful way) I'll go full console as well. https://www.enlightenment.org/about-terminology For torrents rtorrent is fine, deluge-console good, if you install github's bleeding edge deluge you'll get deluge-consol version 2 (I think), which is great but it's been giving me errors that rendered it unusable, for some weeks now. For wifi there's wicd-curses.

>>6817 Thanks for posting these. I made a nice little tool using smenu and mpv.

>>7659 Neato. Though, you can get just as effective a "select the video you want and it plays" interface by just selecting the link and sending it to some kinda plumbing. Though, that will probably scroll off the screen which suddenly makes auto-scrolling annoying. I'm glad it was helpful though.

Are there any options for browsers that can still handle some CSS? I've wanted to experiment with going full CLI on a machine for a while now, but am prevented from doing so because I semi-regularly find myself wanting to read posts on websites that feature tree style post/reply organizing that just gets displayed in a linear forum/image board style in the event that you have a browser that doesn't support CSS, which makes it incredibly difficult to figure out who is replying to who as posters generally don't use quotes/names/post numbers/other identifiers on those sites.

>>6788 I wonder if one could use their user agent for code injections, that'd be pretty funny