K.Mandla and Inconsolation were my inspiration sources. I still use a minimalist setup since mid-late 2000's, and it's amazing. No distractions, pure music from Jamendo/Magnatune, no notifications, no nothing. Mails, RSS' and news are fetched automatically via Cron, and read in text mode.<p>And OFC as I played text adventures thru retroemulation since ~2002, I play IF and Roguelikes as my main gaming sources. For the rest, libre gaming.<p>My setup it's an Atom n270 netbook with 1GB of RAM + 1GB of ZRAM acting like 2GB, but currently I'm following Solene's challenge on low resources, so I have 512MB of physical RAM limited by a Syslinux boot flag and a single core:
<a href="https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2023-06-04-old-computer-challenge-v3.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2023-06-04-old-computer-challe...</a><p>Once you use Groff+MuPDF, sc-im, mutt, AWK, and a few of C (Unix low-level knowledge) and Scheme (global CS terms), your skills skyrocket with very few resources and lower electricity bills. I could even chat with some nice people from Mastodon at <a href="https://brutaldon.org" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://brutaldon.org</a> and using Lynx and by calling sxiv/mpv externally for image and media links.
I once had a job at toxic company where all teams sat in pods, shoulder to shoulder facing the wall. The manager would walk around and look over everyone’s shoulders to monitor if they were working. I used lynx extensively to slack off and surf the web. I thought I was getting away with it until I noticed he used lynx too!
Found via <a href="https://tilde.news/s/xlrzqc/comparison_text_based_browsers" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://tilde.news/s/xlrzqc/comparison_text_based_browsers</a><p>I find the two smallest browsers mentioned here most interesting:<p>- <a href="https://retawq.sourceforge.net" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://retawq.sourceforge.net</a> is 25k LoC. Last release 2006.<p>- <a href="https://netrik.sourceforge.net" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://netrik.sourceforge.net</a> is 8K LOC. Last release 2009.<p>Both build flawlessly on a modern Linux machine. No js support, and the optional https in retawq is slightly bitrotted. But they seem fine for simple websites.
> Next is lynx, which is an obvious pun but a clever name.<p>I wonder if the author didn’t know Links is derivative of Lynx and not the other way around. There was a time when most people had used Lynx in a library somewhere if nothing else, but that time probably passed 20 years ago.
On that note, I really enjoyed using terminal-based Reddit clients like rtv. Simple interface and controls. No wasted space. I've never really liked text-based browsers, but a bespoke client for a specific site somehow worked for me.