Using bad hardware: why I work in the terminal (2024)

This has more-or-less been my setup for over twenty-five years. I&#x27;ve used gentoo and vim that entire time, but have changed desktops a few times (i3 currently, but always something along those lines). All development -- and all writing -- is in terminals.<p>The difference is that I tend to to work on pretty high-powered machines (not for graphics or gaming, but for audio).<p>But the main reason I have this set up is that I find the minimalism . . . calming? It&#x27;s not entirely distraction free, but I just find it easier to work in a kind of low-stimulation environment. I do occasionally work on way less powerful rigs (and way more powerful servers), and it&#x27;s nice that the basic tools don&#x27;t change. But ultimately, I think my fondness for this way of working might be aesthetic.

There is definitely value to be had in using systems that force you to write high-performing code. In the web space we all too often we sit down at high powered macs to write code that will be run by low-end Android devices, and fail to appreciate the consequences.

When talking about Linux workflows on older devices it is always worth it to remind people of the existence of kmandla[0] and their later website Inconsolation[1]<p>Too bad they don&#x27;t seem to publish anymore.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kmandla.wordpress.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kmandla.wordpress.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;inconsolation.wordpress.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;inconsolation.wordpress.com&#x2F;</a>

&gt; Terminal text editors are also lighter due to the fact that the terminal is providing all of the windowing fuss for them and that terminals are light applications in and of themselves due to not having to do much that is extremely novel or intensive on a CPU<p>I think this is a common fallacy. Fundamentally adding an tty layer in the middle does not make lighter solution, so in almost all cases terminal application+terminal emulator is inherently heavier than equivalent application talking directly to display server.

During my grad school years in India, my advisor had a DEC Alpha desktop. Everything he did was through an Emacs session. God knows how many years old the session was or what was the last boot time.<p>Memory fails me on whether it was running Linux or another Unix.

Covers a lightweight window manager on Linux, a terminal emulator and editor. I wonder how this person manages modern web browsing on underpowered systems though.

I upgraded from an outdated system (Pentium+HDD) only when web browsers started giving me grief. Now I&#x27;m on a relatively modern AMD system and it does anything I can throw at it. Debian Stable XFCE4 works very well. XFCE4-Terminal is one of the best terminals out there but doesn&#x27;t get much recognition. XFCE4-Terminal, Emacs and Firefox are my Big 3. I use Thunar occasionally. I use XFWM, it can act as a pseudo tiling WM with wmctrl &#x2F; xdotool shortcuts.

Many years ago I gave up on X11, etc. to remain in the console and virtual terminals 100% of the time, unless I need to view graphics. I use VGA text mode on NetBSD and something like kmscon on Linux. I use tmux instead of a window manager. Before I ditched X11 I used evilwm.

If you were ok with such a basic editor like nano you&#x27;d be just fine using it in those server cases, it still wouldn&#x27;t justify the need to use a worse option universally, but also gui text editors have been light enough to work on even less powerful hardware of decades ago, so the one doesn&#x27;t justify it either

I like this philosophy. At home, my dev machine is a Raspberry Pi with Raspberry Pi OS Lite installed to keep things minimal and clean. I added OpenBox, Helix, and Konsole, then I&#x27;m pretty much sorted (besides tooling for OCaml &amp; Lua). It&#x27;s a refreshing change to my work laptop.

This is close to what I do, but my Window managers of choice is fvwm and cwm depending on screen size.<p>I dread the day we are forced to move to wayland, in that environment one is forced to use a Desktop Environment or a Tiling WM.<p>Luckily, the site works well in lynx. The colors under Firefox was atrocious for me.