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I am thinking more and more about moving back to a text-only interface - previously I was very happy with mutt, tin, lynx (and links and w3m), centericq, etc, b

by guylhem 13y ago

I am thinking more and more about moving back to a text-only interface - previously I was very happy with mutt, tin, lynx (and links and w3m), centericq, etc, but only bash and vim stuck with me. Yet with the advent of unicode, there are fewer needs for a graphical interface - stay for a weather app. A clutter-free desktop consisting of mostly bash, along with gnu screen (or the likes) and ssh (or the likes) to remotely connect to home, now that would be efficient! Even better - a few weeks ago, I found out that for math stuff, stata on OSX can be used with a command-line. [PS: As usual Frederic, totally awesome :-)]

dubcanada 13y ago
Alfred is amazing, if you are on Mac. I would strongly suggest it.
zokier 13y ago
>Yet with the advent of unicode, there are fewer needs for a graphical interface - stay for a weather app Of course the line between graphical and text-only is blurry. I'd argue that even small inline graphics are still graphics and thus not text-only, no matter how they are technically implemented (unicode or some "real" graphics). Personally I don't think we have to resort for using the unholy mixture of 70s and todays tech that console apps represent to get clutter-free desktop experience. More importantly I think we could get even more clean interfaces using full graphical capabilities if we'd get a good design ideology/guidelines to build upon. Just because mainstream GUI apps are stuck on WIMP idea doesn't mean that it would be the only way to approach GUI.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  As far as I can tell, only modern equivalent of the terminal (a generic input/output device/program that can be used as the standard front end to an endless array of applications) that has gained any appreciable traction is the web browser. Any "modern terminal, but not actually a terminal" experience, using current tech, is going to be built on top of a web browser. The browser is just the terminal though (which to be fair is a large piece of the puzzle); we still don't have the shell analog. The inadequacy of ChromeOS does not make me hopeful. ChromeOS is to the browser what midnight commander is to the terminal.
  - siddboots 13y ago
    > Any "modern terminal, but not actually a terminal" experience, using current tech, is going to be built on top of a web browser. You're describing Steven Wittens' TermKit proof-of-concept: http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/ http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/
yogo 13y ago
Yep for something like this I'm definitely for a text interface, and I had to do the same with a quick php cli script using yahoo's api. For some reason weather.com just keeps getting slower and slower. I switched to accuweather for a bit but got tired of it too.

by guylhem 13y ago

dubcanada 13y ago

Alfred is amazing, if you are on Mac. I would strongly suggest it.

zokier 13y ago

>Yet with the advent of unicode, there are fewer needs for a graphical interface - stay for a weather app Of course the line between graphical and text-only is blurry. I'd argue that even small inline graphics are still graphics and thus not text-only, no matter how they are technically implemented (unicode or some "real" graphics). Personally I don't think we have to resort for using the unholy mixture of 70s and todays tech that console apps represent to get clutter-free desktop experience. More importantly I think we could get even more clean interfaces using full graphical capabilities if we'd get a good design ideology/guidelines to build upon. Just because mainstream GUI apps are stuck on WIMP idea doesn't mean that it would be the only way to approach GUI.

jlgreco 13y ago
As far as I can tell, only modern equivalent of the terminal (a generic input/output device/program that can be used as the standard front end to an endless array of applications) that has gained any appreciable traction is the web browser. Any "modern terminal, but not actually a terminal" experience, using current tech, is going to be built on top of a web browser. The browser is just the terminal though (which to be fair is a large piece of the puzzle); we still don't have the shell analog. The inadequacy of ChromeOS does not make me hopeful. ChromeOS is to the browser what midnight commander is to the terminal.
- siddboots 13y ago
  > Any "modern terminal, but not actually a terminal" experience, using current tech, is going to be built on top of a web browser. You're describing Steven Wittens' TermKit proof-of-concept: http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/ http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/

yogo 13y ago

Yep for something like this I'm definitely for a text interface, and I had to do the same with a quick php cli script using yahoo's api. For some reason weather.com just keeps getting slower and slower. I switched to accuweather for a bit but got tired of it too.