Full console experience

[irenicus09]

I've been thinking about this topic for a long time, really didn't know how to approach it but I guess since we have some of the smartest people in the Linux community in this forum there isn't a better place to ask.

I've been using a Window manager (i3) for a quite a while and I was thinking of trying out everything from console without an xorg-server. Basically no form of gui, just pure console. I'm well aware that there are console application(s) that can fulfill pretty much every activity from video playback (using mpv) to email checking (mutt), browsing using (elinks / w3m), command line based torrent client (transmission-cli), irc client (weechat/irssi), file managers (ranger, vi-fm, etc.) and ofcourse tmux for window/session management.

I would like to know your experience / suggestion if you use this kind of setup full time. Also please share how do you optimise your experience using your setup and what works or worked well for you.

I usually tend to get distracted a lot so I'm hoping that such a setup would make me more productive and I'd would be able to spend my time in a more meaningful way.

Thanks.

[cboldt]

I prefer text or console apps, even when in a GUI. My selections are all different from the options you laid out.

For email, alpine (or pine), for browsing, lynx. I open a "console" or terminal with "screen", and load up 4 instances of lynx, each in a separate window. screen is set up to swap windows on Alt-number combinations. I'm pretty sure tmux can do the same thing.

I have my email reader and IRC client (BitchX, a relative of irssi) running in screen sessions on a long-uptime machine that I treat as though it is headless, and ssh in and attach to those sessions.

"mc" is the file manager of choice, rotrrent, ncmpcpp for playing music served up by another network machine.

I pretty much must run a GUI though, for word processing or review of other people's words processing. So, keeping in line with lightweight, I use fvwm. Not so lightweight, OpenOffice for the word processing, and Firefox for the (more and more each day) websites that either won't load are can't be navigated with lynx.

[irenicus09]

Hmm interesting. Guess some stuff like office documents or editing photos using gimp, etc. just can't be done in commandline.

Thanks for mentioning alpine, I'll take a look at it.