A growing trend in the *nix world of late has been the so-called “day without X” (among other things it’s been called). As the name implies, this is a chance for modern-day users to return to the textmode roots of Unix (and computing in general) by eschewing modern graphical applications in favor of console-based, text-only alternatives.

It’s seen as a sort of “rite of passage” for many, a chance to forcibly cut the umbilical cord to Windows- and Mac-style systems that’s been the norm now for nearly two decades and get in touch with a long-gone time when ANSI characters were about as “graphical” as things got, when 16 colors were all you had, and when those twelve F-keys across the top of your keyboard actually did more than just take up space on your desk. For others, it’s a way to prove or improve their “geek cred,” by showing that they don’t need pretty pictures or hand-holding icons taking them through every step of a system-administration process. And for still others it’s a useful skill to learn that might come in handy in cases where X takes a crap and you need to dust off your keyboard-fu to get any work done.

Since many of us here at WotG are Linux nuts, and since we always love telling you about interesting alternatives to everyday tasks, I thought I’d take it upon myself to recommend a few programs you might be interested in trying out, should you decide to take the “day without X” challenge.

ESSENTIAL TOOLS: screen – This is a must if you’re at all serious about textmode; the good news is, if you’re running a Linux or BSD flavor, chances are you’ve got this one already. screen is a tool that allows you to create multiple sessions within a single console session or terminal window, and switch between them on the fly using keystroke commands. It’s been described as “a virtual desktop for the console,” and its multitasking ability is yet another example of how far textmode has come since the days when DOS ruled the world. A text editor – As many of you undoubtedly know, there are almost as many text editors for *nix as there are religions in the world… and if you know that, you’re probably also aware that my choice of idiom here is hardly accidental. The art of the flamewar was, after all, perfected by proponents of emacs and vi espousing the virtues of their chosen editor while ripping those on the other side of the aisle several new orifices – usually more the latter than the former. To be honest, I personally find both tools usable and attractive – but also way too overwhelming for the novice user. For the one-day crowd, I’d go with a simpler editor that’s easier to grasp, something along the lines of nano or joe (both of which have onscreen menus and extensive help systems).

And now, on to the applications…

WEB BROWSING: elinks – There are several textmode web browsers out there, but this one’s my personal favorite. It renders tables and frames about as perfectly as can be expected given the limitations of text, it’s nicely configurable through a system of pull-down menus, supports tabbed browsing, and lots more. It’s the console equivalent of Firefox, really. Also worth checking out are lynx (the granddaddy of all web browsers, still maintained) and w3m.

E-MAIL: mutt – I won’t lie to you. This is not a novice tool, and you will certainly have to spend some time with the documentation to get the most out of this versatile and powerful mail reader. However, it works well enough “out of the box” on most systems to get basic e-mail functionality out of the way, probably better than most other readily-available mail apps. (If you receive your e-mail from an ISP, which I’ll assume is most of you reading this, you’ll also want fetchmail,which actually downloads the mail from your ISP’s server and transfers it to your system.) For ease-of-use, a more newbie-friendly alternative is pine, but this is an older program (with a debatably “non-Free” license) that’s getting harder to find for modern distributions.

CHAT: centericq (IM), irssi (IRC) – centericq supports just about every major IM protocol out there (MSN, AIM, ICQ, Jabber, Yahoo!, etc.) and a few other formats besides (you can even use it to post to your LiveJournal!). It even has support for sound events. The interface is just a little bit tricky to get used to at first, but once you do you’ll appreciate its elegant simplicity. centericq supports IRC as well, but I don’t recommend it; instead, irssi gets that nod from me. One of the most powerful and versatile IRC clients ever written for any platform, irssi’s features put many GUI-based clients to shame; I know many people for whom it’s their primary IRC client, above and beyond even XChat and mIRC.

BITTORRENT: bittornado – Let me be clear: We here at WotG do not condone or endorse piracy (unless it’s of the cool Jack Sparrow or Captain Harlock variety). There are, however, enough legitimate uses for Bittorrent to make it a useful addition to anyone’s Internet toolbox. Our recommendation for textmode is bittornado; it’s a powerful tool that, unlike many other BT programs out there (*cough*Azureus*cough*) won’t devour your CPU while it’s running. As an added bonus, it even comes with a GUI version for when your one-day sojourn into textmode is complete.

MULTIMEDIA: mplayer (video), orpheus (audio) – Yes, you can even watch your videos in “text mode.” mplayer is the Swiss Army Knife of multimedia; with proper codecs you can watch or listen to just about any kind of media format under the sun – even proprietary ones like QuickTime and Real. It is not, however, particularly user-friendly in its textmode form. If all you want to do is listen to your music or podcasts, orpheus makes a fine alternative, with a simple but attractive menu system making navigating your audio library easy.

IMAGE VIEWER: zgv – Yeah, in strict terms this is not a “textmode” app, but I would be remiss if I didn’t at least mention it. zgv is a full-featured image viewer for the framebuffer console, complete with a file explorer, thumbnail previews, support for many common image formats, and a slideshow mode. (About the only thing it doesn’t do properly is animated GIFs; it shows each frame as a “filmstrip,” one stacked atop the other.) It’s actually better than many X image viewers I’ve seen over the years. You can even configure elinks to pipe image files and links through zgv, so you don’t have to give up browsing 4chan during your day away from the GUI.

PIM: calcurses (calendar), abook (address book) – These tools will obviously help keep you organized, and depsite the lack of graphics are actually easy enough to use that you may want to keep them around even after your experiment is over. abook in particular is intuitive and blazingly fast for what it does.

FILE MANAGEMENT: mc – Back in the DOS days, Norton Commander was one of the top file-management programs available, boasting a near-perfect balance of power and ease-of-use. Midnight Commander (mc) is a FLOSS interpretation of this classic tool, providing a dual-pane display, pull-down menus, an integrated text editor, and file associations. I would recommend mc to anyone, not just those willing to take the one-day plunge, just because it’s a handy fallback for when Nautilus, Thunar, or Konqueror/Dolphin don’t want to work as advertised.

GAMES: bsdgames, nethack – The bsdgames package contains a wide variety of text-based games, including several text adventures (wumpus, battlestar, and a version of the original Colossal Cave), famous Unix terminal games like trek, and textual versions of classic games like Boggle (bog), Mille Bournes (mille), cribbage, backgammon, gomoku, and a popular Solitaire game (canfield). (There’s also a version of Monopoly, but it requires you to have your own board; it doesn’t draw one for you.) There are even a few just-for-fun things, such as a Morse-code converter, a few ASCII screen hacks, a rudimentary banner printer, a rot13 encoder/decoder, and even something called wargames that… well, just try it. You’ll laugh. nethack should need no introduction; it is the ASCII dungeon crawler with a depth that the Diablo series wishes it could have, more Easter Eggs than the Paas factory, and more surprises than you can shake a Stick of +3 Disbelief at.

That should be enough to get you started. There are many other tools you may want to look into, such as sc (a spreadsheet that evokes memories of the VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 era), antiword (converts Microsoft Word .doc files to ASCII text or PostScript), cadubi (create your own ASCII art), and twin (a “window manager” for textmode!).

If you’re at all curious about life beyond X, give any or all of these programs a try and see what you really can do without a “modern” interface. It may just surprise you…

If you liked that, try...

1. Linux As a Language Tool
2. Linux Users: Pimp Your Prompt (Part 1 of 2)
3. Linux Users: Pimp Your Prompt (Part 2 of 2)
4. Linux Genuine Advantage: Linux finally catches up to MS
5. Run Your Mac or Windows Fonts on Linux!

1 Comment »

1. 
   Corvus
   February 6, 2008 at 9:00 am

   Hoo boy. This looks like one of those things I’d want to watch someone else do before trying it myself. Intriguing idea, though!

   [Reply]

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