One of our Members Jas (
@JasKinasis ) works a lot with Debian Sid Testing, he may have a few ideas, and with my mentioning him, I have "pinged" him, so if he is free he may swing by.
Hello! What's going on? {Reads rest of thread}
@wizardfromoz - when I was going through my rough-patch a while back, I disabled all notifications in the settings. So I don't currently get any notifications from linux.org at all. On or off the site.
I suppose I aught to go into my settings at some point and turn some of them back on! :/
Getting back on topic. The OP seems to have things well in hand WRT terminal-based programs. And I know next to nothing about virtualisation - I've never had a need for it, so it's not something I've ever used.
@Tolkem :
I use Debian Testing (installed via the minimal net install). I install the minimal base and then incrementally built my system up from there by installing additional software as and when I need it.
I use lightdm as a login manager, dwm is my WM of choice.
stterm is my default terminal application.
I use the suckless-tools package, which includes dmenu, lsw, slock, sprop, sselp, ssid, swarp, tabbed, wmname and xssstate.
dmenu provides a text-based menu and launcher for my install. No graphical menu with fancy icons.
vim is my terminal based editor of choice.
I also have vifm - a terminal based file-manager that uses vim-like key-binds.
I use w3m for browsing from the terminal. I'll have to take a look at links2.
I also have my own note-management application called note (a simple shell-script based system that uses the users default editor and pager and saves all notes to a centralised location).
Plus tons of development tools compilers, debuggers, scripting languages/interpreters and development libraries etc.
And that forms the basis of my setup, but I do also have a lot of typical graphical applications too - e.g. Gimp, Blender, Inkscape, Libreoffice, Scribus, Manuskript etc etc..
If you're going for mainly terminal based applications, then your list so far looks pretty good.
cmus is a particularly good choice - I love that program. I have no need for any of the other GUI based music/media player applications now. I only keep VLC for DVD playback on my laptop and that's it. But for music - cmus all the way. It's a really nice, lightweight way of managing your music library and listening to it!
Mutt is great for email too. Another good choice!
You may also want to consider installing some kind of terminal based volume/mixer application like Alsamixer, so you can control the system volume from the terminal.
I would also recommend installing tmux - a terminal multiplexer. tmux allows you to create entire layouts using multiple terminals running different terminal based applications. And all in a single terminal window.
So you can have the main window split into several panes vertically and/or horizontally. You can also set up individual tabs (or windows in tmux speak), with even more terminals laid out however you want in each window/tab.
Another popular alternative to tmux is screen. Personally, I prefer tmux!
Another great tool to install is ag (AKA the silver searcher). ag is a drop-in replacement for ack. It can also be used instead of grep. ag is multi-threaded and optimised. So it is typically a lot faster than ack or grep (depending on how many processor cores you have available. The more cores - the faster ag will be!).
Now, I don't know how much you use the terminal. But another great tool for power-users is GNU parallel - which will allow you to simultaneously execute terminal commands in parallel. Which can speed up the execution of certain types of scripts. Parallel can leverage additional processor cores to run tasks, or even delegate tasks to cores on other machines.
So if you have a repetetive task that needs to be performed on a lot of files - e.g. you need to move, remove, or rename a large amount of files, or directories. Or if you need to extract a lot of zip files, or convert a bunch of .jpg's to .png's etc. etc.
These kinds of tasks can be sped up by using parallel. And again, as with ag - the amount of speed-up would depend on the amount of processor cores that are available.
Likewise with any scripts that do something in a loop, or which use xargs or tee. These are good candidates for using parallel.
Learning to use parallel in your scripts does have a bit of a learning curve. I haven't used it for a while myself. Looking back at the man pages - things are still a bit fuzzy. It was only after mentioning the parallelism used by ag that I suddenly thought of parallel!
NOTE: I've only ever used parallel locally and not recently - so don't ask me how to get it to work with a remote PC! XD