Candlelit Console patch set to the OpenBSD framebuffer console

This page is CSS's reason-to-be.

I have a similar goal. When I first installed openBSD, I used it that way for a while using tmux. The main issue I ran into is that the console doesn’t support a number of the things I have gotten used to in gui terminals (Unicode, full color support, mouse scrolling) it was actually really close though, especially because on openBSD you end up using man pages instead of internet searches for a lot of tasks. I think what ultimately gets me every time I try this is the web browser.

I have done it up to maybe 75% from time to time.

Most of what I do is in ssh sessions to other systems in Xterm windows, so that's easy to do in console especially with tmux.

I read my email in a terminal as well.

I still need a web browser mostly for administrative stuff at my office that is only provided with a web interface.

Might be closer than you think... Check out Notcurses.

https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses

Here's a demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcjkezf1ARY

You may be interested in the work of Ali Gholami Rudi. Scroll down to the "framebuffer" section: https://litcave.rudi.ir

Apart from things like writing his own C compiler and typesetting systems, Rudi implemented several GUI programs that work on Linux without Xorg or Wayland. He claims there on his site he doesn't even use Xorg any more.

I'm a big fan of this as a principle, but I feel that the terminals / command lines haven't really evolved much beyond a VT102; the biggest widespread innovation probably being the ability to resize a window.

Let's agree that by "command line", I mean an actual command line: one program piping data into another. If you're using the terminal to run character grid programs, like lynx, vi, mc, top, mutt, etc, it's strictly inferior to running an equivalent X11 program of similarly minimalist UI design: the X11 protocol is already serialised, but with a terminal, you can barely get as far as rendering a basic picture (sixels exist, but barely anything supports them). The Macintosh did more in 1984, and the terminals never caught up.

The terminal emulator in Emacs is actually an interesting take: it pretends to be dumber than it is, but in return you can e.g. move your cursor freely around the terminal output; copy and paste; select, edit & rerun a command. Swift Playgrounds allow you to rerun a script, but starting from the line you've last edited; you also get a preview of what each variable is holding - it feels like a fusion of the "command-response" style, and writing code in an editor. These things are really cool, this is the kind of innovation that the command line could use.

For most day to day work though, you're likely fooling yourself by running mutt and vi - or you can prove me wrong and use MH[1] and ed, but let's agree it gets counterproductive real fast.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System

mplayer will play video in the framebuffer (at least I had this working a couple decades ago) and there are image viewers too. In the old days it was possible to run Firefox in the frame buffer but I have no idea what the status is on this now, nor have I done it myself.