A day without X (server)

I recently went for a couple of weeks without X, after my laptop was stolen and I was forced to use my formerly-headless home server as my primary machine.

Some useful tools the blog post misses include:

Links2 is a hack of the original links that adds framebuffer image support, so you can view webpages with graphics directly. It's pretty limited in every other respect, though.

libcaca, the Colour AsCii Art library, comes with "cacaview" for viewing images on the console. Not terribly useful on 80x25, but if you can boost your console resolution it's pretty good.

vlc include a libcaca output mode, so you can watch movies.

gpm is a must, so you can still select text and middle-click-paste it (also, for mouse support in other console apps).

Of course, if you're going to be using any console tools with any regularity, especially on a remote machine, you probably want to be running them inside a multiplexer like screen or tmux (preferably tmux, since it's (a) actively maintained and (b) actually supports Unicode properly).

I lived without X for 4 years, between 2005 and 2009, my main box was a 500Mhz Coppermine Pentium 3 with 128mb of ram and an integrated SiS 630 video card, a crappy setup that taught me much about computers and unixes. The applications that I used included vim for text and coding, midnight commander and some ol' school unix tools to manage my files, mutt for e-mail, links2 for browsing, mplayer with frame buffer or vesa output for video, mocp for audio, a combination of pdftohtml and fbgs (included in fbida) to see pdfs, fbida for images and irssi to hang around in freenode. I also learned to play angband (a roguelike that's far better than nethack) and began to use zsh. gpm was a must to some copy and paste. I now have a Macbook, but still use some of these applications everyday.

I don't think the author has actually spent real time without X. Some of his choices aren't very good compared to the alternatives.

Mutt is great, Alpine is also good for those that don't want to spend time tweaking mutt.

As well as elinks there's also w3m. I've used both interchangeably.

Centerim is probably the best general console chat client (although finch - Pidgin's console brother is also good). IRSSI is a good IRC client, but BitchX is undoubtably more popular.

Raggle is ok but has been slow for some time (at least for me) compared to Snownews.

For Music use MOC (Music-On-Console) or MPD. I'd go with MPD if you want to remotely control the music.

FWIW my main personal laptop is a P3-850 with 256mb of RAM. I do use X, but mainly as a placeholder for terminal sessions in Awesome.

I would live like this by choice, but it has become difficult to get the combination of the screen sized for the monitor and a nice font. I've got a widescreen monitor and I've been unable to get recent ubuntu installs to size right for it. Thinking of trying out BSD to see if their resources are better.

I like how his screenshots plainly include an X-server window, because you can't easily take screenshots without X. (unless you're in a VM I suppose)

I've been using Finch (http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/Using%20Finch) - libpurple client instead of Freetalk that the author mentions. Finch has really good keyboard shortcuts.