All GUI's Suck, Just X Sucks Less

Just random thoughts, descriptions of computing with out or with little GUI-ness. The title is a play on Michael Elkin's Mutt email client philosophy: "All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less."

Last updated: 2009-11-22 06:11:27 AM (UTC)

by Sean Burns: cowl at sdf.lonestar.org

Sometimes it's just nice to not worry about all the GUI crap. Right now I spend most of my time on my laptop. I've installed Ubuntu Server 9.10, but without any major servers such as MySQL, Apache, etc. Just a base install. Because not having a graphical environment of any kind just isn't practical, I've installed the xorg package. And because a computer is, in many instances, nothing but a glorified typewriter if it's not networked, I've installed the wonderful, wonderful wicd network manager.

In addition to a browser, that's essentially it. I don't even have sound configured -- don't really need or want it. I boot into a virtual console and use either Vim, the newly discovered and delightful WordGrinder, a pseudo word processor console application, or the other newly discovered and delightful PyRoom application, also a pseudo word processor, but which requires X, and has a super wonderful user interface. Minimalism is a virtue, my friends.

I do have the ratpoison window manager installed, but it never automatically launches. I only use it when I have to do two things: multi-task and (copy & paste). Most of the time, I just startx into ... X. And the only app I launch from .xinitrc, is xterm. From there I can launch WordGrinder or PyRoom. If I need a browser, from virtual console 2, I can startx in virtual console 8. Other than that, I read a lot of PDF articles. I've added the below to my .bash_functions file, which is a nice way to read them:

function gopdf {
     xread="xpdf -rv -cont -g 1024x768"
     $xread $1 &
}

To launch X in vt7, the default:

To launch another X session, if necessary, in vt8:

And if it's really, really necessary, in vt9 also:

And that, my friends, is a little bit of sanctuary.

Proud member of the SDF Public Access UNIX System since:

Created:      Tue Jun 28 15:38 2005  on ttyp4
Validated:    Mon Jul 11 02:00 2005
Joined ARPA:  Sat Aug 20 21:29 2005
MetaARPA on:  Fri Feb 10 05:23 2006