Living in a tty

[jcb__]

Hello

Is it possible to live in a tty rather then X ?

Just wondering cause sometimes instead of going to X opening a terminal and typing commands. i just switch to a tty and do stuff there.

Can i print browse the internet play music everything i can do in X in a tty ?

Hopefully this can start a conversation

P.S i need to learn emacs all over again.. I forgot it

Joe

[logrusx]

[bstaletic]

I used to live in a tty on a horribly outdated laptop (thing 1GB RAM era).
Musinc,,, there's plenty of players to choose from. My favourite was ncmpcpp.
Movies are possible, with mplayer/mpv and the framebuffer video output. At least used to be possible.
Office tools should be possible with, maybe, LaTeX and converting.
Do text based browsers count?

[szatox]

You can play music, there's mpd for example.
Browsing the internet is more tricky; stuff like lynx and links exist, but they use quite simple engines and "modern internet" loves overengineering things with js and turning everything into a webapp etc.

It is (or at least was) possible to play videos in a tty using mplayer with framebuffer (AFAIR -vo fbdev) output; haven't tried it in a while, so I'm not sure it's still going to work with new kernels, but you might give it a shot. There are also aa and caca outputs for hackerman style.
_________________
Make Computing Fun Again

[Zucca]

If you want to live on tty, you'd better have some multiplexer like tmux or screen.
But there are few that implement floating window manager for tty. Twin is one that comes to my mind right now.

For video, you'd probably need some player which can display graphics via framebuffer. I don't know the current state of such players.
_________________
..: Zucca :..
Gentoo IRC channels reside on Libera.Chat.
--

[flexibeast]

i use MPD, typically controlling it via ncmpcpp, as mentioned by bstaletic, but also using the mpc(1) client to control it (in shell scripts that i've created to control MPD via Waybar).

mpv can certainly play videos in a VT; i just confirmed it.

Emacs could be used in a terminal for Web browsing that doesn't involve JavaScript, via EWW. On my system, i start Emacs as a server, so that i can access the same Emacs session from both a GUI session and from the console. This means that most things i can do in Emacs, i can do via a tty instance of emacsclient; for example, i also use Emacs as my email client (via mu4e), my Telegram client (via Telega) and IRC (via ERC). (i'm also a regular user of Vim, which i like as well, so Emacs vs. Vim editor wars don't really do it for me, unless they're tongue-in-cheek.)

mpv can also display images on the console, but there are standablone framebuffer-based image viewers such as fbida and zgv, not to mention viewers that render images via ASCII, such as aview (although i've not actually experimented with the former two).

There are also things like Frogmouth, a terminal-based Markdown viewer based on the Python `textual` library.

More generally, you might find the awesome-tuis list helpful.

[Goverp]

[lars_the_bear]

Most of what I use a computer for, can't be done in a console. Sure, it's no problem to play media, read and send emails, edit (some) documents, and even look at (some) websites. Most of the coding I do is for headless applications, so all I need is command-line tools and an editor.

But most websites are not very accessible this way, and much of what I use a computer for is graphical -- editing images, designing electronics, 3D drawing. I suspect that many Linux users have forgotten, or never knew, how much can be done in a console, if you really want to. But it's not enough for everyday use; not for me, anyway.

BR, Lars.

[dmpogo]

[dmpogo]

I do much of my work in konsole, I sometimes don't even launch vim in a separate window as gvim, but I do have several consoles open. And I prefer console based tools to GUI versions almost always when there is an option. Of course, web browsing and visualization is an issue. But that is almost by definition - to have graphics you want a graphical environment.

With tty there is a problem that I have a checkered success to control the size, and when I do have success of switching to something more than 80x24 , refresh is often unbearably slow.

[lars_the_bear]

To be fair, I think there's a world of difference between a traditional 80x25 ASCII terminal, and a modern Linux console with unicode support and a graphical framebuffer behind it. You can do an awful lot with the framebuffer console including, for example, viewing formatted documents and watching video. I kind-of take 'living in a tty' to be more like the traditional text terminal, which is a whole lot more restrictive.

BR Lars.

[jcb__]

Thanks everyone for the responses

I'll stay in X

Joe

[logrusx]

[GDH-gentoo]

Maybe it's because English is not my native language, but I find the wording of the thread's title quite funny. I prefer houses
_________________

[spica]

That's can be a philosophical question of purity. Some adepts of purism may live in a true mechanical tty, but does this level of purity worth it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XLZ4Z8LpEE

[Administrator edit: Per hint from logrusx, fixed the domain name for the link. YouTube without a b leads nowhere, but might one day be a spam site, so better to fix it now. -Hu]

[pjp]

[logrusx]

[spica]

[GDH-gentoo]