Life in a Terminal Window notes

Paul Nijjar

2019-07-08

Kitchener-Waterloo Linux User Group

What??

Why bother with terminal programs in 2019?

• Maybe your computer is too slow for the modern internet

• Maybe you have a tiling window manager

• Maybe you want to get work done in an SSH window (with no X-forwarding)

• Maybe you hate notifications

• Maybe you are a dinosaur

• (Mikalai) Maybe you are working inside containers

Goals

• New users: get a sense of what is available from the terminal

• Give you nouns to search for, as opposed to keystrokes

• Experienced users: maybe get a tip or two you did not know before

• What are the quirks?

• Me: maybe get suggestions for other useful tools

Caveats

• I run old old Debian

• I am not a computer genius

• I am not a life hacker/optimizer

• These are the programs I actually use, not always the ones I ought to use

• Muscle memory is a walled garden

Oops

I did not bother preparing more slides!

What now?

Let's improvise!

Basics

• tiling window manager: spectrwm
• multiplexer: screen
  • See <https://kwlug.org/node/687
• x-terminal-emulator: xterm
• editor: vim

Internets

• join a network: wicd-curses
• surf the internets: w3m
  • no javascript
  • cookies are sketch
  • set a browser with o
  • use another browser with m
  • great interface for forms (opens an editor for text fields)
• search: duckduckgo with a shortcut
• read news: newsbeuter/newsboat
  • o to open a news item in a screen
  • supports different profiles via environment variables
  • gets slow on huge archives, but is overall good
• google calendars: gcalcli
  • Use this with a script to populate Watcamp
• passwords: yapet
  • uses blowfish encryption
• mail: mutt
  • configurable
  • supports different profiles
  • forwarding attachments is hard
  • html mails are okay (uses w3m)

Multimedia

• audio mixing: alsamixer
• music and videos: vlc
  • no displays: vlc --intf rc
    • bad for seeking
    • great for playing music in the background
  • terminal interface: vlc --intf ncurses
• get videos and such: youtube-dl
  • install dependencies with apt, but not the script
  • there are flags for smaller videos
  • It works on more than youtube
• MP3 info: eyeD3
• view images: sxiv
  • there are many others, but this is smooth and effective

Audience suggestions

• Painting program: krita
• Art program: photopea
  • works in a browser but can be containerized
• avconv: audio editing via a script
  • ncurses interface: nobody knows
  • Look for Raul's presentation for video editing https://kwlug.org/node/854

Other utilities (not in presentation)

• look up synonyms/spellings/translations: dict
• spel wurds: wurdspel script
• convert PDF to text: pdftotext
• calculator: bc
• interactive file explorer: mc
• look at calendars: cal
• remember important dates: calendar

Things I wish I had, but don't (yet)

• XLSX spreadsheet viewer
• Maybe a DOCX reader/extractor
• Generic iCal client
• Twitter client
• Slack client
• Maybe a better podcatcher
  • I use gpodder and it is okay but slow
  • newsbeuter/newsboat has support for podcasts
• web browser for javascript