Make my self a plan to working almost completely in the terminal

Table of contents

Current status

Since I get comfortable with Vim, I became want to do almost every thing using vim-like key binding. For example:

But it’s not enough for me. There a lot of things still need to be done using the mouse and GUI tool:

  • Browsing Youtube.
  • Checking and reply email.
  • Extract only a part of a zip file.
  • …

Goal

  • Minimize the need of using GUI application.
  • Get comfortable with seeing the terminal all day.
  • Become a hacker (just kidding, hacking is not my interesting for now)

Why?

Many reasons:

  • It’s usually faster to use the keyboard than the mouse because you always know where your key is.
  • Text-based application renders much faster the requires less resources than the GUI alternatives. Of course, it’s not as pretty as GUI application, but who care? As a developer, I mainly work with text.
  • In some contexts, you can only use terminal applications (work over SSH, use some git advanced command or maybe just fix your broken OS).

Last but not least, I love the feeling that my fingers are dancing on the keyboard.

The list

Basically, I want to replace my current application with their text-based alternatives. For each category, there are a lot of choices. So, it’s will take time to try and settle down the one to use. In this post, I’ll list the top interesting tool, and then, after trying all of them, I will show you my setup for daily usage in subsequent posts.

Here are some criteria for my final decision:

  • Fast and lightweight
  • Extensible
  • Customizable
  • Work well inside tmux
  • Cross platform (although I’m mostly using Linux)
  • Vim-like key binding is a plus

Web browser

  • w3m
  • lynx
  • elinks
  • links(2)

File manager

  • Ranger

Mail client and feed reader

  • Mutt (tmux notification)

Todo manager

  • Vim with vimwiki.
  • Task warrior (show number of task on the tmux status bar?)

Messaging client.

  • https://github.com/irssi/irssi (twitter, viber?)
  • finch

Music player and library manager

  • cmus + lyvi

Archive manager

  • tar (very hard to remember all of the options, and how do I extract a single file.)