pebkac thoughts : learning to live without a GUI

I’m writing this post from within elinks. “Why on earth would you do that?” you ask. On Friday morning I pulled an update for xserver-xorg-core and it killed my Xorg. Rather than fall back, I persisted in trying to squash the bug (launchpad.net/bugs/141609). I haven’t been successful. Still, I’ve had to get things done, so I’ve been learning to live without a GUI.

I’m actually surprisingly productive… except for all the time I’ve spent trying to figure out the best curses-based alternatives for the things I normally do in a GUI. For mail I’ve already been using mutt. For IRC I was already using irssi. I tried both naim and finch, but the former makes its own nested screen session and doesn’t do jabber, while the latter isn’t available in feisty, which meant either backporting it (no thanks) or running it locally on the laptop, which means no use of cut and paste from screen (again no thanks). I finally settled on bitlbee.

I’m comfortable with screen, so on that front it’s mostly been a matter of consolidating my various (three) screen sessions onto one server, which has meant installing bitlbee on garp (and learning how to configure it), switching my irssi session from trilug to metalab, and… that’s about it.

The most painful thing is elinks. I’m far too used to firefox. elinks just doesn’t cut it. Too many sites (this one included) aren’t built with text-only browsers in mind. Le sigh.

We’ll see if the bug gets squashed on Monday. If not, I’ll be falling back. Still, this has been a valuable learning experience.