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]

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

You should have never left the TTY. That's the trrible stuff that happens when you leave it. You forget.

Best Regards,
Georgi

p.s. learn vim. Once you start, you'll never quit.

[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I used to live in a tty on a horribly outdated laptop (thing 1GB RAM era).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.

[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.

[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]

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

Well, you could start some Wayland compositor from a command line

[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]

I used to live in a tty on a outdated laptop (thing 1GB RAM era).

Do text based browsers count?

My wife wrote her first book in 1992 on a DOS laptop with 5 Mb of RAM . That was not a limiting factor though, that hard drive had 20 MB of space was a reason to upgrade.
I wish I bought the one originally with 40 Mb hard drive . And yes, she had Word 2 running for text processor, but we also had a version of Latex (MikTex) on floppies. Not sure whether the fit on harddrive at the same time, full miktex occupied like 10 floppies

[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]

Thanks everyone for the responses

I'll stay in X :lol:

Joe

You can live in a graphical terminal emulator :)

But yes, you can browse and watch videos on the frambuffer console. Only browsing will be a bit strange. I used to use links and even lynx back in the days. During installation I'd usually resort to links, because the handbook is absolutely readable in text mode. I believe those can still be used with a bit of an effort. And sites like Facebook, Instagram and the likes are generally useless so you don't miss on them. I bet you can even use YouTube with links + mpv/mplayer/yt-dlp and like apps that can stream YouTube videos. It's a funny experiment I can try even in the graphical terminal.

EDIT: no, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to browse such sited. They have dropped text support long ago. Everything now is JavaScript and crap. Whoever invented JS must be put in a text console for the rest of their life!

Best Regards,
Georgi

[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]

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

Well, it's certainly non-standard, though very common.

Similarly, someone who spends a lot of time driving for work might say they "live in their car." It is making a comparison to how much time a person spends doing said activity. Another: "Do you ever hike at xyz? Yeah, I practically live there!"

[logrusx]

Is this level of purity worth it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XLZ4Z8LpEE

People act according to their needs. If it satisfied ones needs then they might find it worthy.

Best Regards,
Georgi

p.s. the link you've posted results in address not found. I've fixed it in the quote.

[spica]

the link you've posted results in address not found. I've fixed it in the quote.

Thanks Georgi. My eyes sometimes do not serve me

[GDH-gentoo]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XLZ4Z8LpEE

Man, that thing is slooooooow.

[miket]

But yes, you can browse and watch videos on the frambuffer console. Only browsing will be a bit strange. I used to use links and even lynx back in the days.

I bet you didn't know about www-client/netsurf with the fbcon USE flag. I was surprised lately when using a minimal Linux distribution (AntivirusLiveCD) to check for viruses on a friend's Windows machine: here's a distro that uses only the framebuffer but has a graphical browser. It does images and CSS but does not do Javascript (which can be a good thing). Yes, the browser is in Portage.

Of note: mplayer also has the fbcon USE flag

[logrusx]

But yes, you can browse and watch videos on the frambuffer console. Only browsing will be a bit strange. I used to use links and even lynx back in the days.

I bet you didn't know about www-client/netsurf with the fbcon USE flag.

Yes, I didn't know.

Yes, the browser is in Portage.

Unfortunately:

Code: Select all

Stack trace of thread 78095:
#0  0x00007fa0bdbd36d4 wl_proxy_get_version (libwayland-client.so.0 + 0x56d4)
#1  0x00007fa0bdc393c8 n/a (libnsfb.so.0 + 0x103c8)
#2  0x000055b86802eff6 n/a (netsurf-fb + 0x191ff6)
#3  0x000055b867ebc8e2 n/a (netsurf-fb + 0x1f8e2)
#4  0x00007fa0bda2c320 n/a (libc.so.6 + 0x26320)
#5  0x00007fa0bda2c3d9 __libc_start_main (libc.so.6 + 0x263d9)
#6  0x000055b867ec5fe5 n/a (netsurf-fb + 0x28fe5)
ELF object binary architecture: AMD x86-64

I don't know why it tries to open a wayland client library...

Of note: mplayer also has the fbcon USE flag

It has always had that capability. I remember watching movies in the framebuffer console 20 years ago.

Best Regards,
Georgi

[dmpogo]

Is your netsurf browse compiled with USE='fbcon' or 'gtk' ? It is either/or

[Zucca]

I bet you didn't know about www-client/netsurf with the fbcon USE flag.

Whoa!
This could be nice on a rescue initramfs.

[logrusx]

Is your netsurf browse compiled with USE='fbcon' or 'gtk' ? It is either/or

I didn't know that, thanks for letting me know. Maybe I should open a bug after I verify it.

EDIT: nope, still segfaults. Plus it doesn't make sense to be either-or. Gtk and fbcon functionality should not conflict each other in any way.
EDIT2: 9999 segfaults the same way.

Best Regards,
Georgi

[dmpogo]

EDIT: nope, still segfaults. Plus it doesn't make sense to be either-or. Gtk and fbcon functionality should not conflict each other in any way.

Best Regards,
Georgi

Indeed, it is not, my bad. It is just that at least one of the two needs to be enabled