Introduction
I must admit, I’m a command line geek. Whenever I have the chance, regardless of desktop environment or distribution, I open a terminal and start fiddling something. This does not mean everyone must be like me, of course. If you’re the person who is mouse and GUI-oriented, no problems. However, there are situations when all you have at your disposal for a while is the command line. One of those situations might be an upgrade of your kernel/graphics drivers that leave you high and dry until the bug is reported and the developers look at the issue. You have to send a very important e-mail or you have to check the evolution of prices of your favorite laptop. All the essential desktop tasks (with some exceptions, though) that you do on a GUI-enabled machine can be done on a CLI-only machine as well, so if you’re interested…
The tasks
The everyday tasks we will refer to are the ones we usually do in a usual day, be it a work day or a weekend. We need to check our mail, maybe watch something on Youtube (yes, it’s possible), chat with our friends or simply browse away from URL to URL. These are the kinds of things we are talking about in this article. By the way, another huge advantage of the CLI approach is (besides efficiency and low resources) uniformity. You don’t have to worry, if you use many Linux computers, that some of them won’t have your favorite desktop installed: these programs we will tell you about work everywhere, GUI available or not, as long as you have a terminal emulator installed, of course. Note that this article is comprised only of ideas and suggestions, and will not guide you step-by-step on how to use the presented applications.
Web browsing
It’s true, you can’t see images , but they are practical to have, way faster and even more secure, because some of them don’t even support Javascript unless you tweak their compile options. Ladies and gents, I give you links, elinks and lynx. You can install them on almost any distribution with the native package manager, or you can install them from source, and of course compilation will not take a lot, because there are no heavy dependencies. links also offers a command-line flag (-g from graphical) that, if compiled with the right options, will offer you a very simple but fast GUI browser.
On Debian, when I wanted to do ‘links -g’, I got “Graphics not enabled when compiling (use links2 instead for graphics mode)”. After installing it, typing
$ links2 -g
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