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+date = 2022-06-16
+title = "A Terminal Lifestyle"
+description = "Explaining how I live my digital life mostly in the console/terminal."
++++
+
+## Text-Based Simplicity
+
+I've detailed my views on web-based minimalism and related topics in
+other posts throughout the years; e.g., JavaScript/CSS bloat slowing
+down websites that are essentially a text document. However, I have
+never really expanded beyond talking about the web and describing how I
+focus on minimizing distractions in other digital environments.
+
+This post is going to set the baseline for how I *try* to live my
+digital life. It does not necessarily get into my physical life, which
+is often harder to control and contain all the noise in our modern
+world.
+
+While there are new things to do every day in our digital world, I find
+that keeping a core set of values and interests can ground you and keep
+you mindful of *why* you are participating in the digital world. For
+example, if - at your core - you have no interest in what strangers
+think about random topics, it would be unwise to start participating in
+social media. However, I am someone who has been dragged in by effective
+advertising to participate in communities that I realize I do not care
+for.
+
+I won't dive much further into explaining the philosophy of all this,
+but I will link a few helpful articles that may pique your interest if
+you're in search of more meaningful experiences:
+
+-   [Mindfulness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness)
+-   [Minimalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalism)
+-   [Stoicism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism)
+
+## Living Life in the Terminal
+
+My personal approach to reducing digital distractions and increasing my
+focus on the task at hand is to use a terminal for as much as I possibly
+can.
+
+Most days, this means that I have a few tabs open constantly in my
+terminal:
+
+1.  A web browser
+2.  A chat client
+3.  An email client
+4.  An RSS feed reader
+5.  A local shell for navigating my computer's files
+6.  A remote shell for managing servers and other machines
+
+Beyond this, I rarely open other tabs or GUI applications, unless
+absolutely necessary. If you look, you may be surprised what can be
+accomplished in the terminal.
+
+For example, I have moved my music and entertainment downloads to the
+terminal, along with my device VPN connections. I am exploring options
+for moving my RSS subscriptions to something like
+[Newsboat](https://newsboat.org/), so that I can read my daily articles
+without all the fuss.
+
+Now that we have some examples out of the way, let's dive into the
+specifics.
+
+### Browsing the Web
+
+I'm going to start off with a hard topic for those who prefer to live
+in the terminal: web browsing. This task is made hard mostly by websites
+and web apps that require JavaScript to run. The other difficult part is
+that if you're using a text-based browser, that means images won't
+load (hopefully that's obvious).
+
+I am using [Lynx](https://lynx.invisible-island.net), a text-based
+browser that runs quickly and easily in the terminal. Lynx allows me to
+browser most websites by simply typing `g` and then typing in
+the URL I want.
+
+![Lynx](https://img.cleberg.net/blog/20220616-terminal-lifestyle/lynx.png)
+
+If you need a search engine while in Lynx, I recommend [DuckDuckGo
+(Lite)](https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite/), which allows you to search
+the web using their text-only interface.
+
+![DuckDuckGo
+!Lite](https://img.cleberg.net/blog/20220616-terminal-lifestyle/ddg.png)
+
+Eventually, you will run into websites that don't work (or are just too
+ugly and messy) in a text-only mode, and you'll be forced to switch
+over to a GUI browser to look at that site. Personally, I don't mind
+this as it doesn't happen as often as I thought it would.
+
+The only time I need to do this is when I want to browse an
+image/video-focused webpage or if I need to log in to a site, and it
+doesn't support a text-only login page. For example, I am able to
+easily log in to [Sourcehut](https://sr.ht) in lynx.
+
+### Chatting with Friends
+
+After web browsing activities, my main form of terminal communication is
+Matrix. I use the [gomuks](https://docs.mau.fi/gomuks/) client
+currently.
+
+This was incredibly easy to install on macOS (but I will need to see if
+it'll be just as easy on Linux when my new laptop arrives):
+
+```sh
+brew install gomuks
+```
+
+Once you launch gomuks, it will sync and require your username and
+password to login. After doing so, the only problem I ran into was
+verifying my gomuks client so that I could participate in rooms with
+E2EE.
+
+Finally, I was able to verify the session by opening the Element desktop
+app (I assume you can do this in the browser and mobile app too, but
+I'm not sure) and manually verifying myself with this process:
+
+1.  Open the Element desktop app
+2.  Open a room I was a member of
+3.  Open the `Room Info` pane
+4.  Open the `People` menu and search for myself
+5.  Click on my profile name
+6.  Click on the session link under the `Security` section
+    and follow the prompts to manually verify the session
+
+Overall, I like gomuks and am able to enjoy all the features I was using
+in Element. The only hiccup I have occurred is manually downloading
+images to view them, which can be annoying.
+
+![gomuks](https://img.cleberg.net/blog/20220616-terminal-lifestyle/gomuks.png)
+
+### Email
+
+Moving email to the terminal has been the hardest of the tasks for me.
+Unlike web browsing, where I can simply decide to not look at a website
+that does not work in the terminal, I cannot simply ignore emails sent
+to me.
+
+Personally, I am experimenting with [neomutt](https://neomutt.org/) as a
+potential email client.
+
+However, this requires a **TON** of configuration and tweaking to get
+right. Even when I was able to set up neomutt, configure my email
+account, and customize a few personal preferences, a lot of emails still
+do not display correctly (mostly due to HTML and images).
+
+I won't get into the details of configuring `neomutt`; I
+mostly followed this blog post: [Email in the Terminal: Configuring
+Neomutt](https://gideonwolfe.com/posts/workflow/neomutt/intro/).
+
+Finally, I have yet to figure out how to connect my GPG keys to
+`neomutt`, but that's a problem for another day.
+
+### RSS Feed Reader
+
+I have just started using [Newsboat](https://newsboat.org/) to read
+articles in my terminal and have found quick success with it.
+
+I'll show you a quick screenshot first:
+
+![Newsboat](https://img.cleberg.net/blog/20220616-terminal-lifestyle/newsboat.png)
+
+The configuration was super easy for this app; I simply installed the
+app, created a file for URLs, and imported my OPML subscriptions that I
+had exported out of my old feed reader:
+
+```sh
+brew install newsboat
+```
+
+```sh
+touch ~/.newsboat/urls
+```
+
+```sh
+newsboat -i=my_subscriptions.opml
+```
+
+### Writing & Programming
+
+Unfortunately, the weak link in my terminal-based environment right now
+is my grasp of the possibilities of editing files within a shell.
+
+I am used to the easy extensions found in VSCodium and Kate, so I am
+slowly learning how to mold the default editing tools to my needs.
+Currently, this means I am using `nano` with the following
+configuration:
+
+```config
+set breaklonglines
+set autoindent
+set linenumbers
+set tabstospaces
+set tabsize 2
+set fill 80
+```
+
+This configuration allows nano to automatically hard-wrap lines at 80
+characters, autoindent the wrapped lines (if the previous line was
+indented), use 2 spaces per tab, and display line numbers within each
+file I open.
+
+I am currently looking to see if `vim` or `emacs`
+would be more useful for my current needs, but I'm not in any rush, so
+I don't expect to find an answer anytime soon.
+
+With my current life demands, I am not programming at the moment and
+have not explored the best terminal set-up for programming. However, I
+have seen many peers find success configuring `vim` and
+`emacs`, so that's where I will start when I pick my
+projects back up.
+
+![nano](https://img.cleberg.net/blog/20220616-terminal-lifestyle/nano.png)