Today is sunday, the challenge starts on tuesday (IIUC). I spent the better part of this sunday in "TTY only". I already wish that there were no web forums and that we were all still using newsgroups/usenet. Or at least mailing lists. I also already miss katriawm. (I put quite some effort in that program and I love using it.)

Anyway, I already spend a great deal of time in terminals, so I feel well prepared. :)

Still, I changed a few things:

• Wrote "getpw-screen" to have a password manager available.
  
• Got "browser-inputline" to work with pmenu and a text mode browser.
  
• Got my favorite bird webcam running using mplayer+fbdev2.
  

I'll be adding a "nixers tty week" to all related commits in my github repos bin-pub and dotfiles-pub.

Tried to create a PSF version of my font qsqs, but I failed. bdf2psf insists on resizing the font to a width of 8 pixels, which looks terrible. I'll stick with Terminus for now.

After I got the bird webcam working with /dev/fb0, I began reading a little bit about how to use that device from a C program. Looks quite simple, I wasn't aware of that. Let's see if I'll make use of it at some point.

Learned quite a few things. This day was already worth it. :)

(This is more of a "no X11" challenge than a "TTY only" challenge, isn't it? Because in a "TTY only" challenge, usage of framebuffer would be a no-go, wouldn't it?)

(19-06-2016, 04:23 PM)vain Wrote: (This is more of a "no X11" challenge than a "TTY only" challenge, isn't it? Because in a "TTY only" challenge, usage of framebuffer would be a no-go, wouldn't it?)

Whichever you feel more comfortable with.
Some will do it without framebuffer, that's what I'm gonna try.

It's on!
I'm posting this from my TTY inside links browser.

Happy TTY week everyone.

gl xero..............

Been playing with the framebuffer yesterday. I was trying to write a C program that displays an image at the cursor position. My proof of concept works. However, I quickly realized that all of this is really "hacky": The Linux VT itself and all other programs fight for the framebuffer and overwrite each other. Even the *cursor* is problematic. And, of course, when you're using a terminal multiplexer and you switch between virtual terminals, the Linux VT wins and all "framebuffer content" (images, videos, ...) is lost.

It would be awesome if all terminals had RGB capabilities. "Display an image at character position (x, y)." I know that there are some prototypes that can do this. XTerm also has its sixel mode. But none of these really took off. :/

As expected, it's not that hard for me to adapt to "TTY only". I discovered GNU screen's "bufferfile" and "readbuf" commands, very handy. Browsing the web with elinks or w3m is totally annoying. What's fun and has a great feeling of nostalgia: Browser gopher space with lynx and reading mailing lists/usenet.

Not sure if it counts, but Ive been using the tty only since thursday (not at work, for personnal use only). Ive been reworking my "pm" code to add features/fix bugs/refactor. all this with just a few connections on the internet, using my phone as an access point to push my job ^^

I can't quote without JS so...

@vain: The framebuffer is genuinely awkward. Sometimes it refreshes the content of the screen sometimes it doesn't, leaving the ghost of an image or video.
I've use mplayer with the fbdev2 video output and for that matter you want to spawn it away from text that refreshes frequently otherwise it'll keep flickering. As a solution/hack I've used the -geometry option, which also works in the tty, you can change the position of the window with this technique.

@z3bra: That's ok, you're still in the spirit of this holy holiday.

I took many breaks, for the web with javascript. I wanted to use roundcube at http://webmail.gandi.net and access my university website.

I was using webmail, because my only MUA (mail client) is s-nail [1], that I did not knew well so this TTY week this made me use it more, with nice side effects:

Thank to a few commands read from the man page, it took me about 20 minutes to organize my whole super-messy var/mail/INBOX (EDITed it for clarity):


And so-on, and so-on... Of course, it is possible to have these commands in a script to automate the process, and then filtering the INBOX.

It feels like I cleaned and tidied my room: with the mind light and free!

PS: I decided to stop thanking z3bra for its blog post about it, as it would be something like the 5th time in two month... ^_^'

[1] mail/mailx have two modern implementation: heirloom-mailx and s-nail. Only the former compiled no my machine, so that is the one I use.

I also really like s-nail. I found gpg quite hard to integrate,
but overall it is really cool (I should read the man-page, but
that won't take that much time).

Finally got around the ugly shit nvidiafb is, and I'm now using vesafb. We'll see how it goes :)

The lack of colors is annoying though... My screen right now: https://p.iotek.org/vd7

(23-06-2016, 04:23 PM)z3bra Wrote: Finally got around the ugly shit nvidiafb is, and I'm now using vesafb. We'll see how it goes :)

The lack of colors is annoying though... My screen right now: https://p.iotek.org/vd7

it's all white for me

(24-06-2016, 07:39 AM)tudurom Wrote:

Quote:Finally got around the ugly shit nvidiafb is, and I'm now using vesafb. We'll see how it goes :)

The lack of colors is annoying though... My screen right now: https://p.iotek.org/vd7

it's all white for me

Yeah, it's an empty pic. I guess he has issues taking the scrot in the TTY.

... or maybe that's the point. He mentioned a lack of colors, you know. ;)

Just for the record, that's what my week looked like:


Yup, certainly not as elaborate as sshbio's setup. :)

Here's mine.

z3bra: Coming back into last year thread: DVTM has been patched so it
can bind CTRL + SPACE as a modifier :) It was done by martanne@github
in like 15 minutes after the issue was opened.

So it is possible to set the modifier to CTRL(' ')
(that is what worked for me).

shiiiiiit! I couldn't display it so I assumed it was ok... will try again. Anyone knows how to display pics? I tried "cat file.png > /dev/fb0", but I guess I'm asking to much...

(25-06-2016, 02:49 AM)z3bra Wrote: shiiiiiit! I couldn't display it so I assumed it was ok... will try again. Anyone knows how to display pics? I tried "cat file.png > /dev/fb0", but I guess I'm asking to much...

does w3mimgdisplay work

I don't have w3mimgdisplay anymore

@zebra: Using "cat" could work, but only if the file already matches the format and size of your framebuffer..

Here's something to play with:

I'm using fbida to display image files like PNG.

Displaying files using ImageMagick:


It works, but getting the endianness right is a little tricky.

Nice ones! thanks for thoses

I picked an easy solution, and installed fbida with the command fbi (framebuffer imageviewer), which also provide fbgs for pdf.
It just works, but vain's solution is more grandiose!

@vain: See? You are better at TTY than me ^_^

As I started a few days early, my week's over. :)

To be honest, I'm glad to be back in X11. Mostly because browsing the web and playing videos is no longer "exhausting". ;)

Still, it was time well spent. Reminded me of my early days, with DOS and BASIC. There isn't so much noise. You tend to focus on doing one thing, instead of doing multitasking all the time. Maybe I should re-think my X11 workflow.

---

@sshbio: Nah. Just different. %)

(26-06-2016, 04:17 AM)vain Wrote: You tend to focus on doing one thing, instead of doing multitasking all the time. Maybe I should re-think my X11 workflow.

This is a big factor in why I decided to ditch my external monitor and am trying living with just my 1366x768 laptop display. I had a bad habit of opening too many windows just to fill my screen, using a tiling wm wasn't really helping either.

Now even harder than the TTY week: the x11-only, no terminal week.

That's impossible.