[Preston] Goodbye cruel GUI

[Matthew T. Atkinson]

Right, brace yourselves, this may be a long one...

OK.  For various reasons, I am seriously thinking about experimenting
for a good few months with not using a GUI any more (after my exams).
Well, by GUI I mean X, and trying to use as few graphical non-X programs
as possible.  Due to the way that I work (almost every window maximised
and zooming in to 1/4 of the screen area so I can read the thing), I am
not really using the GUI in the way it is meant to be used.  I work much
more as if the GUI was just a terminal (and use GNOME Terminal for most
things anyway).

So I have decided to take the plunge and go textmode (framebuffer I'm
sure).  There are a few things that I am not so sure about and others
that I think I am and I want to list the most important ones here so
that I can get ppl's thoughts on it.  I would like to give it as good a
go as I can and really try to last without a GUI for a few months and
see if I become more productive.

Ok, so the things I'm looking for advice/opinions on are...

Shells - should I learn another shell?  I know bash and csh and the
merits of both for different scripting tasks.  are there any shells that
might make me even more productive (like that perl and that python one,
for example).

VTs - is there any way I can get the VTs to log on automatically for me
- I don't want to type in my password 7 times  on bootup.  I just can't
wait to see the matrix screensaver on them :-).  I'll be using screen a
lot, but do want a decent number of VTs available (I use 5 virtual
desktops in GNOME currently).

Framebuffer font - my desktop box is OK as it runs at 80x25 (in fb mode)
on an 18.1'' screen.  However, the laptop is a different story.  As it's
PPC, the only way to print to the screen is fb.  However, one needs to
be in possession of a scanning tunnelling electron microscope to read
the thing.  I tried compiling the massive 12x22 sun font into the kernel
but it's still too small (and serif, which I can't read easily).  Is
there any way to (a) make the text bigger and (b) make it Bitstream Vera
Sans Mono?

Mail - mutt.  That's what started the whole thing off, well ViM did --
and mutt is like the ViM of mail clients (all keyboardy) so I'm gonna
learn it over summer.  I've also found some PIM/address book stuff too.
No calenders as of yet, though.

Sound - will probably try mpd (Music Player Daemon) and it's
command-line client (hopefully it'll have the J key :-) -- searching for
songs with regexes in the console would suit me down to the ground).
alsamixer rocks and i use that anyway.

Web - ``links2 -g''.  Can it do frames though?

Chat - centericq is nice but I would prefer something with a more
minimal interface.  Looks like the only way to go is IRC (clients; they
tend to be minimal interface-wise) to Jabber and MSN gateways.  (I have
a Jabber to MSN, AOL and ICQ gateway on my server so may search for
console jabber clients).

I think that's about it and this is probably long enough already.  Any
thoughts/suggestions on the above would be much appreciated.

bye just now,


-- 
Matthew T. Atkinson <matthew at agrip.org.uk>