GUIs: Who Needs Them?

In early 2007 I began playing around with the idea of doing everything from the command-line. Not command-line in GNOME mind you, but command-line without X running at all. I switched my computer into init 3 for at least a week, and I was able to do tasks like coding, chatting on MSN messenger, IRC, browsing Wikipedia, watch videos and play audio files all from the terminal without having a graphical session at all. You might be wondering how you can do all of these in a world of only text, but I did it.

Web browsing was the biggest priority for me, and as a result I found a few basic web browsers you could use. They do not load graphical images in themselves so all you do is read text, and page layout is significantly different on some sites. The main program I used is called elinks. It is very simple to use, and pretty straight forward.

For chatting with friends I was able to use a program called centerim. It supports multiple chat protocols such as ICQ, Yahoo!, MSN, AIM, IRC, Gadu-Gadu, and Jabber (which means Google Talk is supported with a little work). At the time I only used MSN and IRC, and for IRC I used another program called irssi instead.

The coolest part was being able to watch videos. The program you use for this is good old mplayer. These days it takes tweaking to get it working in proper order, and I am still trying to figure out how to get audio working on videos under root. When I did it, I was using Fedora Core 6, and all I needed to do was become root, and I had color videos rendered just as well as if not better than on the graphical desktop. I think the reason it doesn't work now is I need to tweak a few things to have root interact with pulseaudio. Mplayer worked much the same way for playing mp3s and other audio files that you would use.

You might wonder what are the advantages to doing things this way. Number one you will save tons on memory and CPU cycles if those are important to you. I could probably slim my memory profile down to less than 256 MB on boot in init 3. The other thing is how cool it looks when all you have is black and white text which only you know how to operate with all the commands unknown to most everyone else. If you have questions about how to get other tasks done on the command-line feel free to leave a question in the comments area.