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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

I find the fetish for terminal-based music players a bit odd. I associate terminals with doing work, so the idea of having one whose sole purpose is playing music (presumably in the background while you do other stuff) to feel like a waste of screen real-estate and something I'm likely to accidentally pull up while trying to cycle between my other terminal windows where I'm doing stuff.

I much prefer something that I can kick off to play an album or a playlist and have it all but vanish from sight, either into the taskbar or, preferably, into the system tray.

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Ah but how else are you going to have enough stuff open in tmux to impress people with your screenshot on r/unixporn

Found the elephant in the room, you did.

Shoot, you're onto us.

Any time I was posting there included screenshots of 'ranger', various permutations of 'htop', and a 'Matrix' style scrolling character feed.

With a tiling display manager like i3, dwm or awesome, system tray isn't that useful. You tends to have one app (or a group of app that you always use together) per virtual desktop that you access in one keyboard shortcut.

You never circle through apps as it's not necessary. Most of the apps are in fullscreen or tiled depending on your need. No window is hiding another one.

When you're use to it, having to move your hand to the mouse or trackpad and click on stuff feels painful. Then keyboard driven apps (which terminal apps are usually really good at) makes total sense because you still don't want to have to move your hands and click in stuff.

Basically usability switches from graphical apps made for mouse/trackpad to keyboard driven. It's a quite different way to manages windows that have usually a learning curve as it is keyboard driven, but it's really efficient.

Excellent analysis.

After using i3 for about 3-4 years, I have to admit that I'm always a bit lost on floating WMs now and feel like an idiot for a few minutes until I'm somewhat comfortable again.

To me tiling WMs are just vastly superior. Anecdotally, most people I know that have seriously tried to use a tiling WM usually end up sticking with them.

Is this true for you on a laptop as well? I could imagine this on something where I had a lot of screen real estate. But when I'm coding, in one virtual desktop I'll typically have the IDE, a few terminal windows, and a couple of browsers going. With a 14" screen, I can't imagine how I'd make a tiling window manager work.

Sure.

The great thing about i3 (and also other tiling WMs) is that they are very flexible and customizable to your preferred workflow.

Together with them being centered around the keyboard and easily scriptable, you can use them in a way that works best for your preferences and your environment.

For coding on my laptop, the active main workspace is split into three parts, with the editor taking the left half of the screen, and the right half split into browser and terminal (with the terminal being a TAB container with multiple terminals that I can quickly switch between).

When I need to focus on either the editor or the browser, I make them full screen (I have shortcuts to jump between full screen browser and full screen editor directly with one keystroke).

On other workspaces I have setups with music player, email, Jira/Bug tracker/etc that are always launched in the same configuration on boot and are also just a shortcut away.

So it works great on a laptop too, even if you spend a lot of time with one app maximized.

Tiling wms support tabs and workspaces, not just tiling. Similar to how floaings wms support fullscreen and workspaces, not just floating

For me it's true especially on a laptop. Mousing is even more painful on a laptop than a desktop.

I felt like the kind of micro optimizations that a tiling window manager gives you aren’t worth it in the long run.

Sure, it felt like I was moving faster when I used keyboard shortcuts to fly around but at the end of the day, switching between windows was never a real bottleneck to begin with.

FWIW I used i3 exclusively for 2-3 years.

What do you use now, and how does it compare?

I switched to i3 because I was just frustrated with what I had used in the past. I wanted a simple window manager without animations (disabling them on my phone was also a huge gain in terms of usability), that just works and does not get in the way (I had a slow laptop on which Gnome was painfully slow, at the time). The cost was basically to write a configuration file matching what I wanted, learning a few key to switch workspaces and windows, but that was it.

I agree with you that these are micro-optimizations time-wise, but the frustration can be real and it gets in the way when you use your computer all day long. The simpler, the better I'd say (although it doesn't have to be a tiling window manager).

Now I use Windows and MacOS, but immediately after leaving i3 I switched back to gnome.

I haven’t used a computer than ran gnome slowly in a long time, so that has something to do with it.

I often have one window in the foreground, but type into a background window (I had point-to-focus on and raise-on-focus off).

> I associate terminals with doing work

Most of us Linux users find you a bit odd. That's just how it goes.

The shell is a very useful interface. It allows abstractions that just aren't tractable with GUIs. Many of us have found that those abstractions are quite useful for fun things, too.

If you're using mpd the terminal interface can be opened/closed at will so you can just openit, queue up some music then quit. Exactly the workflow you're on about.

Exactly. It's especially nice since you can use the same UI to control different mpd servers - I have one running on my laptop and another on a machine plugged to my home stereo. And I can also control both from my phone using MPDroid.

I use cmus on the command line because it enables me to quickly slide over and really quickly adjust my playlist using only the keyboard. With a GUI player that would require much more steps.

The neat thing about terminal-based music players is that you can put them in tmux and not have them take up any screen real estate when you're not using them. :)

I like terminal based music players when I’m doing work exactly because the terminal already feels like work, so it doesn’t feel as much like Tidal or Bandcamp or SoundCloud are open in the background and something I could get distracted by. For keeping it out of sight, tmux or any terminal multiplexer is great at that.

Is there one that works with Soundcloud and Spotify?

There are multiple terminal-based Spotify players, with the caveat that you need a paid Spotify account to use them (because they're incapable of playing ads)

I find ncmpcpp (a terminal-based controller for the excellent mpd) great for being able to quickly and easily navigate through my music library and add/remove/edit tracks from playlists. Then I minimise it, and launch Cantata which I immediately minimize, and I thereafter just interact via the Cantata interface in the systemtray (or via kdeconnect on my phone), until I need to do something more involved than play/pause or switch tracks, and then I un-minimize ncmpcpp, quickly find new tracks or whatever, minimize it and so on and so forth.

I put my terminal based music player (cmus) in a Quake-style drop-down terminal (Yakuake). It's easy to access, doesn't add any clutter, works with ReplayGain, and it works with media keys.

I use mpd/ncmpcpp and couldn’t be happier.

It’s lightweight, responsive, and makes me feel like I have much more control over my music.

I have it always open in the corner of my sceeen with a tiling window manager.

That is how my setup works in the terminal. MPD (music player daemon) runs from the start in the background and I can start ncmpcpp in the terminal to choose a album/playlist and then I can close it again or leave it on a different workspace.

Play Pause etc. just work without the terminal. The biggest advantage in comparison most graphical players for me is that there is no startup time. If I want to play a song I can do so immediately and even without leaving the terminal I am currently working in.

The tiling window manager equivalent would be to put it off in a high-numbered workspace, or alternatively, in a detached screen/tmux session.

For me, no screen real estate is wasted. I keep about 40 tabs open in Konsole at all times, and if I'm not actively on a tab, I don't see it.

I'm so used to playing all of my media with mpv that using any kind of GUI app would feel like sludging through molasses.

I usually run 2 konsole windows with several tabs in them. One is for git, building, packaging, etc, and the other is for random tasks on the side, and in a second tab there is mplayer playing some internet radio.

It's less clutter IMHO. But i don't use tiling wm.

You just need a bigger monitor. I hooked a 4k 42 inch LCD to my laptop and for the first time ever I had visible desktop space

This works really well if you have excellent eyesight or if the screen is curved but so have to physically move sideways to see different windows with this size screen. It’s a good problem to have, of course!

mpd is the single best music player for what you're describing. You can choose how you want to interact with it. And if you can't find an implementation you like, the API is simple enough you can write something yourself.

Even better, you don't have to 'choose' - in the sense that you can simultaneously connect to mpd via different interfaces (in this same thread I mention how I use ncmpcpp for some things, and cantata for other things).

Command line interfaces can be put in the background just as easily as any GUI.

I run mplayer up in it's own rxvt

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