Today is the last day of my TTY week.

It was very smooth this time. (My last TTY week was in 2016.) The big difference compared to last time was my usage of GPM, the mouse server. elinks is a GPM client and elinks even has friggin' tabs. This makes for a surprisingly comfortable browsing experience, at least for web sites like this one, which work well (enough) without JS.

GPM also allows you to copy-and-paste text. That's truly a life safer. It's also more comfortable to use than copy-and-paste in X11, because GPM only has one buffer (you don't accidentally clobber the current contents) and there is no risk of accidentally closing a window and thus losing the buffer with it (X11/Wayland clipboards are terrible, we discussed it a couple of times on IRC). Now that I'm a spoiled user of GPM, I'll have to look into X11 clipboard managers. I'm sick of accidentally losing clipboard contents when I forget that I'm not allowed to close a window. Yes, this still happens to me sometimes.

GNU info turned out to be not that bad. I like links and cross references. Maybe I'll even use it myself in one of my projects, if I really need to write a long book-like documentation. I'll certainly try to stick to manpages first, though.

Throughout the week, I just used the default VGA font. I'd love to be able to use a broader Unicode range, but it's not possible. freem told me that PSF fonts can only hold a very limited number of characters and that this limit doesn't exist for PSF2, but after digging in Linux's source code, I found out that it doesn't matter: Loading a font/map is done using the ioctl KDFONTOP and around line 4604 in drivers/tty/vt/vt.c we can see that the kernel refuses to use more than 512 characters.

There was little change to my environment. I changed "i" (image viewer) and "m" (movie player) to autodetect whether it's X11 or TTY, but that's basically it. There were things that I just couldn't do on the TTY:

• Running Cura and Blender to prepare models for my 3D printer.
  
• guitarix has a headless mode, but loading presets is broken. And you can't really make changes to your rack anyway.
  
• Netflix obviously doesn't work. I missed that a little bit.
  

It was a pretty relaxing week. Hardly any distractions. I think it's healthy to do a TTY week every now and then to reassess your setup and your workflow in general. For example, I turned off my "new mail" notification widget. I don't need it, it's just a distraction.

And there's always something new to learn when you're in a restricted environment like this.