Re: [orca-list] text console use

[Kyle <kyle4jesus gmail com>]

It's not even about Youtube for me. Back in the day about 15 years ago, 
I was stuck with a different OS that I cursed every day running on a too 
expensive second-rate laptop just so that I could pay my bills using 
online banking. Online banking works from phones and such now,  but many 
websites use technology that is just not compatible with text mode 
browsers, and I can't be bothered to limit myself to the small subset of 
today's websites that still use the old technologies supported by the 
underdeveloped browsers. To this day, no text mode browser supports 
HTML5 standards, and like it or not, JavaScript is a fact of life, and 
no text mode browser supports it well enough to make it practically 
usable, so with the exception of reading some text documentation and a 
few other very simple things, text browsers are pretty much out of the 
question for me. And yes, WebRTC is another consideration that keeps 
text mode browsers from being usable or productive, though I don't 
really find myself using it much.

The worst thing about exclusive text mode use is consistency of 
keybindings and the major project of editing configuration files. Take 
Mutt for e-mail for example. Leaving aside the fact that it limits my 
mail reading to a screen at a time, precluding the possibility to use a 
"SayAll" function to read an entire message as I prefer to do, the last 
time I used it, I couldn't just press the delete key to delete a message 
or thread, and worse, it took nearly a week just to get my configuration 
working, and that was using a local mbox file as it came from fetchmail 
and a pop3 mailbox. Imap, once it came to Mutt, was much more difficult 
to configure, and never worked for me. With all that said, consistency 
is in fact the key. In a graphical environment, I always have certain 
keys that do certain things. For example, control+q or alt+f4 to close a 
window or application, control+w to close a tab or window in a 
multi-window application, control+x to cut, control+c to copy and 
control+v to paste, alt+tab to switch applications, etc. Such 
consistency leads to much better productivity, since everything is 
expected to work similarly and most things usually do. Text mode just 
makes things more difficult and less productive, because different 
applications tend to have different keybindings to perform similar 
actions and copying, cutting and pasting generally has to be handled by 
an entirely different application, either a screen reader or a terminal 
multiplexer, and in the multiplexer, copying and pasting is limited to 
the applications that run inside of it. To further muddy the waters, if 
you have to have text mode and graphical applications running on the 
same system, copying and pasting between them becomes even more 
difficult, unless you run a terminal on the same desktop with your other 
applications, although selection of text then becomes a bit more 
problematic.

So overall, though I use text applications for some things, especially 
for file and software management and scripting, I find that in most 
cases, graphical applications with consistent keybindings and similar 
features generally make me quite a bit more productive, and the things I 
do in text mode can be just as easy and productive in one or more 
terminal windows running in the same workspace. That said, performance 
of hardware sometimes still makes primary text mode a bit faster than 
graphical environments running a few text applications in terminal 
windows, though consistency must be sacrificed in many cases to make 
this work. On the other hand, very light weight graphical desktops do 
exist, and only RAM constraints on the most inexpensive hardware tend to 
make them less than performant now. Still, I think even the Raspberry Pi 
may be able to work better with things like MATE given the performance 
boost that the newer 64-bit A53 processor can potentially offer.
Imetumwa kutoka maji