3 ms·

I recently went for a couple of weeks without X, after my laptop was stolen and I was forced to use my formerly-headless home server as my primary machine. Som

I recently went for a couple of weeks without X, after my laptop was stolen and I was forced to use my formerly-headless home server as my primary machine. Some useful tools the blog post misses include: Links2 is a hack of the original links that adds framebuffer image support, so you can view webpages with graphics directly. It's pretty limited in every other respect, though. libcaca, the Colour AsCii Art library, comes with "cacaview" for viewing images on the console. Not terribly useful on 80x25, but if you can boost your console resolution it's pretty good. vlc include a libcaca output mode, so you can watch movies. gpm is a must, so you can still select text and middle-click-paste it (also, for mouse support in other console apps). Of course, if you're going to be using any console tools with any regularity, especially on a remote machine, you probably want to be running them inside a multiplexer like screen or tmux (preferably tmux, since it's (a) actively maintained and (b) actually supports Unicode properly).

gnosis 17y ago
I've been able to display UTF-8 in screen without problems. It's stable, feature rich, bug-free (in my personal experience), and standard. I'm not sure what tmux could offer that would make me switch. But I might check it out some time.
- thristian 17y ago
  screen only supports 16-bit Unicode, the Basic Multilingual Plane. Unicode is actually a 21-bit character set and although there's not many characters in the higher ("astral") planes yet, there's more added with each new revision. I believe the major feature of tmux over screen is that it allows arbitrary layout of panes per window, rather than just horizontal divisions, although personally I switched because I'm just that nerdy about Unicode. tmux was written by a guy who was very familiar with screen (in fact, it was written inside screen) and while there's no incredibly major differences, I think there's a number of small annoyances that have been filed off.
- cturner 17y ago
  Tmux has promise, but I've found it less practical. For example, if you have a large feed happening (example: cat a large file) then the tmux build I used became unresponsive.

gnosis 17y ago

I've been able to display UTF-8 in screen without problems. It's stable, feature rich, bug-free (in my personal experience), and standard. I'm not sure what tmux could offer that would make me switch. But I might check it out some time.

thristian 17y ago
screen only supports 16-bit Unicode, the Basic Multilingual Plane. Unicode is actually a 21-bit character set and although there's not many characters in the higher ("astral") planes yet, there's more added with each new revision. I believe the major feature of tmux over screen is that it allows arbitrary layout of panes per window, rather than just horizontal divisions, although personally I switched because I'm just that nerdy about Unicode. tmux was written by a guy who was very familiar with screen (in fact, it was written inside screen) and while there's no incredibly major differences, I think there's a number of small annoyances that have been filed off.
cturner 17y ago
Tmux has promise, but I've found it less practical. For example, if you have a large feed happening (example: cat a large file) then the tmux build I used became unresponsive.