At the console At the console t’s hard to argue that Unix is anything other than a textual caring if they live on the console, within a A GROWING NUMBER OF RENEGADE GEEKS ARE environment. Commands are text-based and manipulate “Emacs window manager such as Ion2, or even on the information primarily as text. Human and machine readability wire serial-wise dialled through to some remote overlap with a clarity unknown to users of other OSes. So how is my user. Multiplexors such as GNU Screen and CHOOSING TO SHUN THE FULL-BLOWN GUI IN well do GUI “desktops” or desktop environments play with OS and managers of monitor real estate such as SplitVT this fundamental Unix approach? One could well envisage are less obvious examples here. Editors such as Isome kind of GUI which could follow the Unix model of pipes and Linux Vi are clearer candidates, but GNU Emacs does FAVOUR OF APPS SUCH AS GNU SCREEN, GNU information flow, and there may well be such a project buried deep exhibit different behaviour under X. Lynx, Links, beneath the sludge of abandoned projects on SourceForge, but the its w3 and other such text-based, ubiquitous end result would still rely heavily on textual selection. browsers are essential items within the EMACS AND IN RARE INSTANCES A TINY WINDOW Unix-based OSes, particularly with an overwrought and in some device renegade text pistols bag of tools. Beneath ways elegant GUI such as Mac OS X do have a tough time integrating these can be found generic text and data the two approaches, and the command line is very much treated as a driver” manipulation tools such as sed and awk and MANAGER. MARTIN HOWSE CHECKS INTO THE tolerated, yet rather distant older relative. The default terminal app more domain specific and development biased seems clunky and washed out in comparison with the brighter, tools. Shell scripts and the shell itself could also broader desktop. be blocked in at this level, and though under WORLD OF THE STRIPPED DOWN INTERFACE Thankfully GNU/Linux users do have a choice and a good many popular distros with KDE or GNOME defaults it geeks would rather exercise their command line chops at a healthy may be easy to forget such facts, text rules distance from the rodent infested world of the desktop GUI. Some throughout our hierarchy. Code is text, have even gone so far as to pay homage to the green screened days commands are text and information primarily is of their forebears, picking up an elegantly designed DEC terminal (see and should be textual in a human readable and DECed Out) and coding strictly from this revered beast over a serial thus open networked environment. line. Indeed, working in what some may see as a highly restricted manner, say straight from the console, can readily and quickly hone CONSOLING THOUGHTS Unix skills and familiarise users with the richness of the shell. Whilst ultra minimal window managers, such as THE Nevertheless, which ever way you pan it, and command line the appropriately titled ratpoison, do offer the advocates can do a good job at selling even the most spartan app, best of both worlds for text pistols who may life at the console can get pretty claustrophobic with little wallpaper want to fire up the odd GIMP session once in a to brighten matters and a rather tiresome ctrl, alt and function key while, running barefoot with the plain old finger three step to further induce melancholia. Even comic fonts a console does appeal to purists preferring a totally la early Slackware, which could well be selected during one of the distraction free environment. Yet, unless you most exciting install moments, soon become tiresome. The GREEN SCREENED TERMINALS ARE THE STUFF OF MYTH AND HISTORY WITHIN HACKER CULTURE, AND MANY A DESCRIPTION OF MARATHON HACKING SESSIONS COMMENCES WITH A REFERENCE TO THEIR UNHEALTHY GLOW advent of full framebuffer support for a range of graphics cards does change matters and can readily be Text pistols by way of the GIMP, tweaked xterm, less and Ion2 window manager determined as a deciding factor in a stand off between console and ultra minimal desktop as environment of choice. With such a decision at the top of the tree in a hierarchy of components selected prefer a decidedly old school feel, handwritten to please the contemporary text pistol, we can begin to assemble a style font included, chances are you’ll wish to full roster of tools and tips. Choosing the role of X pistol or text console around in frame-buffer mode which pistol is a tough call. At the next stage down the hierarchy, this allows for smaller text sizes at higher resolutions. choice will impact on our toolset. Terminal emulators such as xterm Support for this essential mode, offering direct GOD SAVE GNU SCREEN. and rxvt make little sense on a real terminal. And framebuffer tweaks access to the graphics card memory, is enabled and minute console display apps are hardly at home on top of on most modern distros booting binary kernels, AND THE EMACS REGIME mighty X. Further down the line apps are reasonably generic, little or can be compiled into the kernel if you’re 44 LinuxUser & Developer LinuxUser & Developer 45 At the console At the console It may not be pretty but such a sample does give a good idea of what mayhem the Mrxvt terminal emulator is capable of tiled and conventional floating windows are all available, and, in A good Far from being purely anecdotal, such common with a raft of other such hardcore projects, a rather novel historical considerations do impact on our architecture is implemented. In this instance, inter-process many humble eterms and xterms. Unknown to many communication between heavily modularised window manager users the more or less ubiquitous xterm truly components is tackled by way of the authors own libixp, a virtual file geeks emulates a green screened forebear such as the system based intriguingly on the 9P protocol from Plan 9 OS. DEC VT220, VT102 or Tektronix 4014 models. Of course some would argue that wmii, with features such as would Thus to any text-based app such as Vi, the lowly fading through virtual desktops, and Ion, particularly with the Ion2 xterm will appear and behave as if you had one iteration, go too far, and the developer of evilwm in rather double rather of these pleasant to use relics right at hand. edged terms does describe Ion as a less bigoted project. Ratpoison, Xterms rich history is readily apparent both ASCII Rocks. God save the Queen performance and Lisp-based brother Stumpwm boil the window manager recipe exercise across the vast man pages for this seemingly tiny video courtesy of artist group C505 strictly down to key bindings and tiling. Of course a logical next step their tool, and if you attempt to configure an xterm would be to run bare and naked without window manager support, by holding down ctrl and pressing one of the Ion2’s flexibility lies in tiling and tabbing, though few users will enjoy enough screen real estate to make the most of this example by way of an .xinitrc script or plain old xinit command. command mouse buttons. A vast array of command line Yet even with such a stripped down, almost non-environment options control all aspects of an xterm’s look, feel dealing strictly with the source. which well rounds out an array of graphical console apps. Of course, choices do abound and this ever present attribute of free software is line chops and behaviour. The more or less identical Plentiful howtos exist for such a common operation, yet it’s old school and hardcore crews will already spurn such approaches, in both a blessing and a curse. A vast array of terminals, or, more .Xresources and .Xdefaults files can further worth remembering that both colour depth and resolution data must be favour of aalib, which can equally wrap up SVGAlib innocuously or correctly, terminal emulators are on offer under X, many boasting an at a override such settings, and the first file is used passed to the relevant bootloader by way of a decimal frame-buffer itself be wrapped as backend by ubiquitous libSDL. AVIs will never often confusing mix of legacy features and bloated novelties. You can when the window manager is fired up. Ironically code. A common option would be to specify vga=791 which allows the look the same, courtesy of the crack team of aalib and MPlayer. select an xterm, an eterm, an aterm, or even rxvt, a plain old healthy the xterm’s development dates back pre-Linux console to kick in at 1024x768 with a 16 bit depth. Some graphics apps, Classic films of certain genres rendered as high res colour ascii art are terminal, which is far from simple, and under KDE and GNOME and even pre X. The Xterm has spawned all such as basic image viewer fbview, or masterful multimedia tool MPlayer, well worth a second viewing. And just to put a new spin on the old feature packed offerings are also up for grabs. Terminal characteristics distance manner of progeny from both its code-base and can make full use of frame-buffer support, and Links, a pleasant web X11 versus console debate, why not confuse matters altogether by can be specified from the command line, menu bars and in some from the its feature set, and the authors of xterm do stress browser, which lives further down our tree of components, can render running an ascii aalib-based X server on top of GGI, XGGI running on cases floating arrays of icons.