On Thu, Jul 6, 2023 at 3:36 PM <[email protected]> wrote: > That's too much options to check out for me, but a console-based option > (to me > that sounds like not needing X11? Because ideally that's what I'd want.. I > want > to get rid of a Window manager and in the future use something like dvtm)
I've been investigating options that don't require X11 as well. I've only seen two Linux distributions that were able to pull off running in framebuffer without X, nanolinux which uses nanoX and Rogue Class Linux. There are more distributions like GRML and INX but they're mainly console mode only and don't do much with graphics or the framebuffer. Unfortunately, development on both nanolinux and Rogue Class Linux systems are no longer active. However, they have some interesting choices for applications. SDL applications will run in framebuffer or kmsdrm mode. So you can read documents using bard or sdlbook without X. If you haven't checked it out, http://litcave.rudi.ir/ has some great framebuffer programs. I use a fork of pdftxt (command line program) from there. Also, I've been experimenting with using netbsd-curses from Sabotage Linux instead of ncurses. Last I checked, framebuffer applications ran great from the command line, but I don't think they played nice with console window managers. Was rather disappointed in that and I keep looking for other alternatives. I even investigated some unusual ideas like using sixel (there's a fork of SDL to output sixel) with a sixel aware console. Then you could probably use a console window manager like dvtm or mtm. However, I think it's too slow to be practical. I have a small and slowly growing list of console and command line programs that I can use to replace some of the common tasks I do. Always in search of other interesting and useful alternatives. This mailing list has had some great program suggestions posted to it. Sites like K.Mandla's Inconsolation blog are nice resources too. I believe there are some tty screen capture programs listed there too if you need one.
