Subsistence Living in Terminal Land (Part II)

Here is my line-up of terminal programs/replacements so far:

Text-editing

I'm already an Emacs user, so that was easy enough. I'll spare you the list of twenty things I like about Emacs. I also like playing around with Ed occasionally, but I don't think Ed has it's own system for easily entering any Unicode characters, like Emacs does.

E-mail

I've been using Mutt for a few days and have been happy so far. I had to make a few tweaks:

- Inserting code to allow automatic display of HTML-only email through w3m
- Adjusting the color scheme to my liking

img/mutt-screenshot.png

Contacts

I just started using "abook" which seems pleasant and useful enough.

abook contact management software (main screen)

abook contact management software (contact details)

IRC

Already covered by the built-in Emacs "rcirc" program.

Matrix

The emacs-matrix-client software available in Guix seems to work well enough.

Scientific calculator

Emacs Calc is great. I had been using the Gnome calculator because it has great multi-base number viewing support, i.e., easily seeing a number in binary, hex, and octal formats. You can acheive nearly the same functionality in Emacs Calc by using the Radix Mode adjustment shortcuts (d 2, d 8, d 6, and d 0).

Gemini

I like av98 (+ torsocks) for the most part.

Web browsing, etc.

I don't have any suggestion here. I know there are several text-mode Web browsers, but I would be hesitant to use them, due to browser fingerprinting. Firefox (Icecat) has an extension available called Chameleon which allows you to randomize a lot of the vectors used to fingerprint you, such as reported User Agent, screen size, and time zone.

Another GUI work tool I can't replace is KiCAD, for PCB design.

Right now I'm using Linphone desktop software for text-messaging my family, but I believe I could replace that with XMPP and an ncurses XMPP client.