Life on the Command Line

[Hal Burgiss]

On Fri, Dec 28, 2007 at 05:35:53PM +0000, Rosalind Mitchell wrote:
> Driven by a combination of curiosity, nostalgia (old enough to remember
> being shown VisiCalc and thinking it a wonder) and natural
> steampunkishness, I've been investigating ways of running everyday
> applications from the command line in text sessions.  Using
> Mutt/Fetchmail/Exim for email, slrn for Usenet, vim and emacs for
> development, sc for financial work, that sort of thing.
> 
> How far do others manage to get using text-based applications only?  Any
> real hidden gems I should be aware of?

w3m for web. And in case someone has the bad manners to send you html
email, mutt will use w3m (or lynx), etc to convert to text. It has the
added benefit of completely ignoring javascript and flash. The catdoc
package can dump ms doc files to plain text (not docx though), and
this can be handled by mutt as well. It can also take xls excel files to
text/csv, while somewhat hard to read, is still much easier than
trying to wade through native xls. If you do irc, there is a text
based irc client (I forget the name offhand). There is a text
based file manager, mc, or midnight commander (though use of find,
grep and friends is superior on most counts). And command line
versions of the apt* tools. There is a screen saver 'cmatrix' based on
the movie. A geek must-have thing. Probably lots of other good stuff
too.

-- 
Hal