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Title: CLI and TUI
Date: June 26, 2024
Written On: Emacs on MacBook Pro (Snow Leopard)
Listening To: 1Mix Radio Trance[0]

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  Real quick: Apologies to those who've been emailing me over the last couple
of months. For whatever reason, my login was silently failing, so I didn't know
about anything coming in until this week, when I didn't get an activation email
for something. Need to find a better place for my regular mail to go to.

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  Right now, I'm taking a break from working on a thing in `wordgrinder`, and
that's something I didn't think I'd be saying again for a long time. See, I'm
trying to get myself into the mindset of using Linux for a daily driver OS
again[^0], but one of my things is that, outside of Trinity DE[1], I'm not that
big of a fan of most GUI apps on Linux. I /tolerate/ most of them at best, and
with the likes of GIMP and a few others, that's a stretch of a term. "I accept
their existance, but not much more" would be more accurate.

  But because of that, if I'm on Linux, a vast majority of what I do is in a
terminal. Emacs, mplayer, modplug-tools, mc, wordgrinder... I could actually
survive with just a framebuffer for movies and pictures (fbi for the latter), 
though I much prefer having a light desktop so I can use SeaMonkey or Pale Moon
for web browsing. I've used i3wm and ratpoison in the past, though I also like
Openbox, WindowMaker, and TDE for that task. As I've said before, really don't
like anything offered by Wayland, and Wayland itself has never really worked
for my general needs as it is, so I'm not gonna bother there.

  Also, using ncurses and TUIs makes things easier when I get back to learning
C and C++, since I won't have to deal with choosing a GUI toolkit and
potentially screwing myself in several places. At least Perl works well with
TK...

  At the same time, I've been moving toward more of a sustainablity kick, and
part of me wants to acquire something like a Raspberry Pi 400 to use as a
device I could run off of solar power or batteries for long periods, coupled
with a low-powered display to really do that justice. There's also the PiTop
projects to turn various RPis into laptops, so it's an option I can look into
as well. And with a CLI/TUI-oriented mentality, that's even more power I'd be
saving, since moving text on a screen doesn't need a massive GPU driving the
thing constantly, unlike the Windows 10 gaming rig sitting under my big desk
right now, or the (soon-to-be recycled) broken Mac Pro 1,1 sitting on my floor
across the room.

  (Aside: I'll write more about my eco/sustainability thoughts in another post
later, maybe even later today.)

  Right now, my Dell laptop is sitting on the larger desk behind me (I'm at my
writing desk), and an SSD is sitting on top of it, waiting to be put in for a
Debian install--probably after I finish my coffee--but I'm not switching right
away. I still need time to get my mind back into that headspace, and after all
of the stressful hell from when I left in 2012, and the problems I ran into in
2020-2022, it's not been the smoothest of transitions. I'm still fighting all
of those memories and stress reactions, even today, but I ran Linux for over a
decade before, and I still use it on my server, so I'm sure I can switch again
with some time, patience, and by avoiding most modern stuff, as I do anyway.

  But now, I've written more today than I have in the last several weeks or so.
Maybe this is what I was needing to kick off my authoring habits again. Just
need to figure out some proper templates to use with pandoc for epub and PDFTeX
output.

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[0]: http://fr2.1mix.co.uk:9000/256
[1]: https://trinitydesktop.org

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[^0]: Yes, again. Even though my last attempt failed, it didn't fail as bad as
      when I last left the OS.