Text-only user interface environment

It is probably not an uncommon thing, nor am I the first. However, I might surprise myself that I am working this way now. My environment for spending free time in Geminispace and Gophersphere is text-only environment. Which I've set up from nothing, and without any special experience.

The current state and twenty tools

• I'm using for it SSH connection to my remote shell account, where I had set up tmux (1). I'm using about 10 windows. For those unfamiliar with tmux, it allows you to freely juggle multiple windows just like in a graphical interface. I saved tmux configuration file with tmuxp freeze (2), and I can restore it after restart of my server. With tmux it's possible to copy&paste text between any window or pane.

• The first window is divided into two panes, the first pane for editor; set up on tinylog.gmi in vi (3) and the second pane is for gtl (4; "A TUI for the tinylogs format on the gemini space").

• The second window is git (5) directories for publishing Gemini and Gopher content. I'm sharing them for vi, emacs (6) and gitui (7; "Blazing fast terminal-ui for git written in rust").

• The third one is working directory for all binaries, tools and scripts. There are several scripts, for eg. for refreshing comitium (8; "comitium is a Gemini, Gopher, and HTTP feed aggregator") or feed2toot (9; "Feed2toot parses a RSS feed, extracts the last entries and sends them to Mastodon").

• The next one is for toot tui (10; "Toot is a CLI and TUI tool for interacting with Mastodon instances from the command line."). With special script set up with $BROWSER environment variable I can launch from it: w3m (11), emacs with elpher (12; "a gopher and gemini client for GNU Emacs") and browse WWW, Gopher and Gemini links spotted in toot. I'm not using amfora (13) from toot for Gemini because it has some problem with screen refresh.

• The next one is for mcabber (14; "mcabber is a small XMPP (Jabber) console client.").

• The next one is for amfora (13; "Amfora aims to be the best looking Gemini client with the most features... all in the terminal."). I'm using it mainly to view my bookmarked Gemini capsules.

• The next one is for sdf.org, inside that there are panes: mutt (15; "Mutt is a small but very powerful text-based mail client for Unix operating systems.") with gpg (16; "GnuPG allows you to encrypt and sign your data and communications"), bboard (17; "threaded multi discussion bulletin board. It goes back when the original SDF was just a BBS") and slrn (18; "slrn is a Usenet client, a newsreader that can read and respond to posts on newsgroups."); in such configuration is need to have full screen mode of each tool so I'm using tmux's CTRL-A Z for zoom pane while using one of them.

• The last window is for system's interactions, for eg. apt (19; "apt-get is the command-line tool for handling packages") things or pass (20; "the standard unix password manager")

Future possibilities

And it isn't the last word in the text-ony user interface environment. There are still many possibilities for improvement.

• Include some image to text mechanism, like for eg. chafa ("With chafa, you can now view very, very reasonable approximations of pictures and animations in the comfort of your favorite terminal emulator.").

• Do things faster by fzf ("fzf is a general-purpose command-line fuzzy finder").

• Explore emacs and org-mode ("major mode for keeping notes, authoring documents, computational notebooks, literate programming, maintaining to-do lists, planning projects, and more — in a fast and effective plain text system").

And probably more.

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szczezuja.space CC BY-SA

@ Thu 07 Apr 2022 08:54:08 PM CEST

tags: #cli, #howto