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Can you use the terminal for everything? [video]
- amanzi 8y agoHow can I watch this YouTube video using just my terminal?
- bane 8y agoheh, this is actually covered in the video.
- dilatedmind 8y agoI didn't watch the video but you could use youtubedl and then ffmpeg to display it on the framebuffer
- pvg 8y agoon the framebuffer What manner newfangled luxury is that in a terminal? When I was young, we had to pick lice out of our hair and arrange them in the form of letters for others to read.
- Fnoord 8y agoIf you call something (watching videos/pictures or browsing in a framebuffer) which has been working since the end of '90s "new" then you've grown old. A while ago, if I might add. And the ability to use a CLI on a large say 1280x1024 resolution was nice as well, given the dots per inches on CRTs in late 90s.
- pvg 8y agoSome people would kill the lice first but sophisticated users preferred live ones which enabled advanced effects like 'dynamic text' and 'escape sequences'.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- merraksh 8y agoThis will display the video as ASCII art: vlc -V aa <youtube link> For color ASCII he suggests vlc -v caca <youtube link>
- chewz 8y agohttps://github.com/browsh-org/browsh https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh
- gnulinux 8y agoUse a framebuffer application e.g. mplayer.
- busfahrer 8y agoI 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
- FreeFull 8y agohttp://links.twibright.com/ http://links.twibright.com/ This fork/version of Links has a fully graphical mode, which works in both X and the framebuffer. w3m can also display images using the framebuffer, with the rest of it still in text mode.
- gnulinux 8y agoNot only that but there are tons of image viewer, video viewer, pdf viewer etc application for framebuffer (for linux). But this begs the question whether framebuffer can be considered "terminal". Also, to me it's still perfectly "terminal", if you use X and run a terminal emulator and live inside it unless you need to see a image, video or pdf. To me, the answer to this question is "yes".
- copperx 8y agoThe only problem with the framebuffer is that it adds a perceptible delay vs using a "raw" TTY. It's a small delay, perhaps a few ms, and I guess most people can't notice it, but it can be distracting if you live on the terminal. You can actually see it if you cat a big file to the screen.
- Fnoord 8y agoFramebuffer isn't an issue. Framebuffer and Javascript, however, is. You can opt to skip websites with that, but a lot on the WWW depends on it. There's a solution to that though: running Firefox in the terminal with brow.sh [1] [1] https://www.brow.sh https://www.brow.sh
- digi_owl 8y agoNetsurf 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).
- gumby 8y agoSeems 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"?
- pq0ak2nnd 8y agoIMHO 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 foreign to him. So I find it upsetting that this "article" would even be necessary.
- antoineMoPa 8y agoIt is not a question of age, most of my older colleagues as an intern used desktop apps / GUI git clients and had few UNIX experience.
- tonyarkles 8y ago> most of my older colleagues as an intern used [...] GUI git clients How old are your "older colleagues"? I'm 35 and I remember "the land before Git", let alone the time before GUI Git clients... My first Linux install didn't have a GUI at all, at the start. I didn't have enough floppy disks to download all of the Slackware A, N, and X packages, so I downloaded A and a subset of N onto floppies, which let me bootstrap PPP so that I could start downloading the X packages to get a working GUI going. That was on 33k6, and only when my parents didn't want to use the phone, so it took a while...
- amelius 8y agoBut 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?
- millette 8y ago/me procedes to launch "youtube-dl -f22 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-2Ja7T9YF8" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-2Ja7T9YF8"
- c487bd62 8y agohttps://mpv.io/ https://mpv.io/
- teddyh 8y agoAFAIK, mpv calls youtube-dl internally.
- agumonkey 8y agoyes it does
- c487bd62 8y agoYes but it's easier for when you just want to open a link to watch. You get subtitles, audio channels, can skip to the part you want, without downloading the entire video. I think it's DASH but more options are available, it works for Twitch and many other sites (thanks to youtube-dl I guess). With a browser extension you can click on links and open mpv directly.
- clon 8y agohttps://neomutt.org/ 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 Electron email client] uses. Some ways are outlined here: https://www.mail-archive.com/mutt-users@mutt.org/msg36375.html https://www.mail-archive.com/mutt-users@mutt.org/msg36375.ht...
- Fnoord 8y agoMutt/Neomutt is great once you got over the initial trauma of the keybinds and configuring the config plus theme. Except when it comes to HTML e-mail which is a lot more common that I'd like it to be. For a more up-to-date guide on how to use GPG for your e-mail password [1] [1] https://pthree.org/2012/01/07/encrypted-mutt-imap-smtp-passwords/ https://pthree.org/2012/01/07/encrypted-mutt-imap-smtp-passw...
- Boulth 8y agoNote that the GPG encryption itself is notoriously hard to configure unless one knows to just use gpgme backend (it should be configured by default!). Even then there is a lot of outdated code related to GPG in general (e.g. PKA, no way to locate key by email).
- too-soon-ago 8y agoThat might be okay still with some HTML filtering. Just coerce it to plaintext. Not sure anything of value would be lost.
- rsync 8y ago"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 plaintext, it is a private communication and cannot be intercepted by either an ISP or some global observer. It's nothing but a local file operation between two mailspools... Further, it would be extremely difficult to phish someone who is viewing their email in the terminal. The effort that it takes to view and copy a URL is greater than the discernment required to identify it as suspicious - so you'll catch them every time.
- Snortibartfast 8y agoI used Alpine as my main email client for a while. I really like it, but I had problems with Fastmail's LDAP-addressbook. And if I remember correctly I couldn't use Office365's addressbook either. Another problem was integrating Alpine with calendars (at least O365). khal (with vdirsyncer) is a nice calendar app. I haven't got it working perfectly with Office635 yet though; I use a read-only url to the calendar, so I can at least see it, but cannot edit it. The Fastmail calendar works.
- kxyvr 8y agoMy solution has been to use the Fastmail website to accept calendar invites, but use khal and vdirsyncer to manager the majority of my calendar. As far as contacts, I believe Fastmail can import and export to vCard, which can be managed locally with khard and vdirsyncer as well. I use khard directly with mutt to access email contacts and I've been happy with it.
- rustcharm 8y agoI 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.
- skadamat 8y agoRelated to this, Omar Rizwan did a great talk recently on file system interfaces: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfHpDDXJQVg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfHpDDXJQVg (Four Fake File Systems)
- tomcooks 8y agoHaving wasted my childhood lurking the (unfortunately stale) KMandla's precious blogposts [0] to find new ways to squeeze functionality out of my EeePC701, I did not really find this video particularly interesting. Maybe i'm not the target audience. [0](https://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/howto-switch-to-a-console-lifestyle/ https://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/howto-switch-to-a-c...)
- Keyframe 8y agoSamba gave me flashback to last week where I had an external drive on my Fedora workstation which I wanted to share with my network... external drive was NTFS. Many hours later, and an setenforce 0 it showed up, but no permanent solution. That's the usability of common things in everything not major desktop/user OS, and always has been. OTOH, when I'm programming, I would NEVER give up the comfort of GNU stuff. It's just so convenient. Even the editors. Yes, VS Code is great, but oh man - in vim I have a persistent undo with branching, among many many other things. It's actually amazing how, on the one hand, you have this advanced system for complicated stuff geared towards awesome usability and on the other hand it trips over itself on mundane things which keep it away from the year of Linux (GNU more like it) on desktop.
- digi_owl 8y agoSamba is a "mess" because anything Microsoft is a mess to be compatible with if you are not MS. That said, sharing files across networks is a hell all its own. In particular if you want something to just automagically appear in some GUI across the office/world/whatever. Only "reliable" ones are those that require the user at the other end to know what address to enter to get access.
- _t4xj 8y agoWill 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 absolute terminal user numbers? I would guess they peaked already a decade ago, with people switching to / starting out with smartphones and tablets instead of notebooks/desktops. I can also see a world in which a highly disruptive technology (e.g., brain-computer interfaces) would make the terminal redundant once and forever, assuming that the new technology was more efficient/productive than a terminal.
- pfranz 8y agoMaybe 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.
- __s 8y agoTerminal is vital for reproducibility/automation. It's an interactive config file, where a config file must be portable
- ptman 8y agowe have new terminals all the time, like browser javascript console
- trumped 8y agoyou probably can make a whole virtual OS running on top of terminal
- purplezooey 8y agoYou know, there's even a text mode display manager for X. I forget the name, but it's on GitHub.
- agumonkey 8y agolovely
- vex3d 8y agoI really like using the terminal when it makes my workflow faster, using git etc. But checking email and YouTube? No thanks.
- hjek 8y ago> Spreadsheets in the terminal: Totally doable. I disagree. I find vim, mutt and pandoc superior to LO Writer and Thundrbird for text editing and emailing, but sc is just nowhere near LO Calc or even Gnumeric. I really wish someone would make a text user interface for Gnumeric.
- kqr 8y agoHave you tried Org mode tables? They have some spreadsheet functionality, but I'm not sure how big the overlap is.
- hjek 8y agoOk, that[0] does actually look pretty impressive. It can evaluate elisp formulas! Way more advanced that sc. However, the sad state state of the world is that other people use Word and Excel to edit documents. I wish there was a program that would do to Excel spreadsheets what Pandoc does to Word documents: Letting you edit them in the terminal and allowing you to pass them off to other people in the formats they prefer. Those other people would hate me if I sent them Emacs Org mode spreadsheets to work on. [0]: http://orgmode.org/manual/The-spreadsheet.html#The-spreadsheet http://orgmode.org/manual/The-spreadsheet.html#The-spreadshe...