Some people are trying to get a fully functional text based environment...

Some people are trying to get a fully functional text based environment. I've been digging up how and here is my result thus far.

Cont.

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_(windowing_system)
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

GNU Screen can be used as a window manager and hotkey binder, with slmenu (or even pdmenu) as an application launcher and/or window switcher, snippy.sh as a clipboard and text snipper, which combined with slmenu can be better than any clipboard manager. GPM for mouse, jfbterm for CJK font rendering (and even wallpaper setting) and Byobu for system notification

But other things are necessary, for which some tools exists but don't cover all in an easy way

Like an ebook reader, from which exists: fbpdf (pdf, djvu -through djvulibre-, epub, xps, and cbz), fimgs (PostScript, pdf, cbr, rar, cbz, zip, dvi), JFBView (pdf, Table of Contents (TOC) viewer, Interactive text search), CHMLib (can be used to view chm), catdoc (xls2csv, catppt, wordview, to view MS Office documents). All those either cover different formats, have good but not shared features or have no single wrapper program to form an unified ebook reader.

The lack of a document processor is obvious, but could be solved with a text based Texmacs able to edit and create word documents and spreadsheets, and if could also render TeX and images on the framebuffer.

The file manager has his caveats too, again, many good tools exists like qmv (renameutils) for a batch renamer, fzf for fuzzy finding and file search, Fdupes for duplicate files removal, Atool for a compressed files manager, fasd for directory browsing by history, and xd for directory expansion. Ranger is a good tool, of all the thing it offers the quick browsing and the file preview are the best, but I couldn't make the image previews work on the tty. Also the python dependency makes it hard. If all those were solved, there is still one thing missing, that is an image organizer like gThumb. Which something like Ranger could replace if it presented more than one image preview at the time, maybe even a grid of picture previews like sxiv does when you press enter. Can you imagine that!

cont.

Which makes me think, how about image drawing in the framebuffer? We have SHPaint and cadubi, Aewan and textdraw. Still nothing like Krita. ImageMagick is a command line image editor, but is not that easy to make a quick editing like in gThumb, or a fast text-styling for memes. Although for framebuffer screenshots and screencasting, ImageMagick can do it by binding a simple script, and can even do image viewer.

For image viewer, video player, and even music player, we could use one only, which is MPV. But it lacks a good playlist manager and some keybindings for this. Ranger could be used as a file browser if someone add a playlist manager for MPV it would solve a lot of peoples lives.

Last but not least, there is the web browser problem. First of all, you don't have to give up javascript in the framebuffer, NetSurf can work on the framebuffer just fine. But why stop there. Some of us like the idea of browsing with vi-like keybindings, like vimperator, dwb, or even Uzbl does. And with dwb being a fully featured web browser, capable of converting Firefox bookmarks to its own format, a greasemonkey plugin, an ad blocker integrated and a plugin manager, it only needs to change the layout engine for the NetSurf one.

Yes, this seems more like a wishlist, but is a start for those of you looking for something like this.

Curious tip, Kodi (XBMC) apparently can be compiled to work on the framebuffer.

>Some people are trying to get a fully functional text based environment
in what, exactly?

In any GNU/Linux distro should work.

how are you going to spawn a cursor for gui programs?

For what purpose, OP?

I'm not trying to be bully, but in the year 2017 why would anybody do this? Why not gentoo?

Maybe a modified GPM.

what do you even mean by fully functional.
frivolous shortcuts?
text gui?
multiple windows?

it sounds to me like you want to defeat the purpose of a text based interface, which is to be as minimal as possible but still far enough from hardware for people to understand easily.

the gui was built for everything you're trying to add, lol they called it a GUI for a reason.

That is why some people coined the expression TUI for a reason, lol.

It would be useful for things like the Pi, in which case you'd be better to try and get a distro out there.

Also check out the blog K. Mandla and their software blog Inconsolation.

Finally, if you open a file with the suffix *.ses in emacs it will open a spreadsheet program.

This guy know his shit.

Yes, I know the blog, got much from there. Also 100% right about the Pi.

Nice tip on Emacs.

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most desktop environments have way too much bloat

well where's the download link

TUI is like a normal GUI but shitty. It's like regular GUI but pixels are huge and it'd suck. There are good textual interfaces like plan 9's UI, it'd be better than your shit

This.

TUIs are faster and with less cruft.

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Vim
Wget/curl
Elinks
cmus
mc
calcurse
jrnl
remind
tmux
git

this would be cool

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This is highly relevant to me.

Pretty sure this already exists if I understand what you're getting at.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_(windowing_system)

what am I looking at here?