asking for CLI-friendly software recommendations
#1
I'd prefer to stick with Mobian, because I'm most used to Debian-based distros (and Mobian seems like the closest available to vanilla Debian on Pinephone/Pinephone Pro). But I'm looking to switch as much of my computing as possible to the tty. What recommendations do you all have?

My progress so far, aside from the utilities that ship with bash (at least on Debian):
* nvlc - stream internet radio and play downloaded audio
* curl wttr.in - weather service
* tilde - yes, it's heresy not to use vim or emacs or nano, but tilde is a simple CUA text editor and gets out of my way
* elinks - read HTML webpages online (but doesn't look like a way to access web-based services that require logging in); it is easy to use and impressively snappy except when my internet is slow
* alpine - takes tinkering in the config file and browsing forums, but seems to be working now
* pdftoppm, cacaview - initial tests suggest that they can act as a minimally adequate pdf viewer together, with much zooming in
* mapscii.me - would not work online with telnet, but the local client over node.js works; if you don't have unicode, it's not quite as rich of an experience
* will experiment with apertium for machine translation and csound for synthesizing music

Holes in my environment:
* browsh, carbonyl - respectively based on Firefox and Chromium, they purport to bring more extensive and modern access to more complicated web services, and they render webpages relatively impressively, but after a complicated installation process they both appear to require a mouse to do anything beyond scrolling whichever page you initially requested (and they may have other holes), but my tty does not have touch or mouse support; so a big hole is any web-based services that I can't find some alternative for (dropbox for file backups, ecommerce, proprietary financial services, and anything else that needs login and/or interactivity even as simple as a forum or shipping carrier website)
* clocks - any way to set alarms from the terminal and have them wake the phone to go off; gnome-clocks's command line options are exceedingly limited
* ditto for any kind of calling or text messaging; command line options are exceedingly limited for gnome-calls and chatty; gnome-calls refuses to work without a graphical display; chatty does have an intriguing daemon option but no documentation in the man page about how to use it; emailing a text to myself did not work either (phonenumber@txt.att.net)
* and a big miscellaneous category for various services that i took for granted on the gui, for example turning the volume or brightness up and down, checking the statuses of battery or mobile data or wifi, anything to do with bluetooth, even turning the torch on or off - hopefully some searching around online can come up with commands at least for the things that also apply to desktop Debian

* not to even mention a zoom videochat client, which is the only reason I still keep an old Android phone lying around because zoom's desktop client appears to be for x86 only, and their web client wasn't picking up my camera or microphone even in GUI Firefox
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#2
I doubt you will get many answers. I think you are pretty much alone in wanting to exclusively use CLI applications on the PinePhone Pro (or the original PinePhone, for that matter). For me, sometimes, a CLI or TUI solution is a last resort if no mobile-friendly GUI application is available (e.g., the maxima TUI, which is basically just a non-shell CLI, is workable as a CAS calculator, even with the virtual keyboard in QMLKonsole), but I do not see why I would want to use a CLI browser or e-mail client over perfectly fine touch-friendly applications such as Angelfish or Geary (not to mention that pure TTY mode, as opposed to a GUI terminal emulator, does not work at all without a physical keyboard, but even if you have the hardware keyboard, touch-friendly GUI apps are still likely to be easier to use).
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#3
(11-11-2023, 08:04 PM)Kevin Kofler Wrote: I doubt you will get many answers. I think you are pretty much alone in wanting to exclusively use CLI applications on the PinePhone Pro (or the original PinePhone, for that matter). For me, sometimes, a CLI or TUI solution is a last resort if no mobile-friendly GUI application is available (e.g., the maxima TUI, which is basically just a non-shell CLI, is workable as a CAS calculator, even with the virtual keyboard in QMLKonsole), but I do not see why I would want to use a CLI browser or e-mail client over perfectly fine touch-friendly applications such as Angelfish or Geary (not to mention that pure TTY mode, as opposed to a GUI terminal emulator, does not work at all without a physical keyboard, but even if you have the hardware keyboard, touch-friendly GUI apps are still likely to be easier to use).

That is an understandable reaction. I've seen a wealth of enticing console applications to try, but I understand that what I'm trying puts me in the minority of the minority. I'm using a Bluetooth keyboard so far but curious what life will look like for me when I get the keyboard case.

(11-11-2023, 09:20 AM)andrew907 Wrote: I'd prefer to stick with Mobian, because I'm most used to Debian-based distros (and Mobian seems like the closest available to vanilla Debian on Pinephone/Pinephone Pro). But I'm looking to switch as much of my computing as possible to the tty. What recommendations do you all have?

My progress so far, aside from the utilities that ship with bash (at least on Debian):
* nvlc - stream internet radio and play downloaded audio
* curl wttr.in - weather service
* tilde - yes, it's heresy not to use vim or emacs or nano, but tilde is a simple CUA text editor and gets out of my way
* elinks - read HTML webpages online (but doesn't look like a way to access web-based services that require logging in); it is easy to use and impressively snappy except when my internet is slow
* alpine - takes tinkering in the config file, but I'm figuring out how to access emails, just not send them; maybe another email service like Purism's Librem One would be friendlier to alpine? maybe I should climb the mutt learning curve?
* pdftoppm, cacaview - initial tests suggest that they can act as a minimally adequate pdf viewer together, with much zooming in
* will experiment with apertium for machine translation and csound for synthesizing music

Holes in my environment:
* maps - telnet mapscii.me never loads any maps
* browsh, carbonyl - respectively based on Firefox and Chromium, they purport to bring more extensive and modern access to more complicated web services, and they render webpages relatively impressively, but after a complicated installation process they both appear to require a mouse to do anything beyond scrolling whichever page you initially requested (and they may have other holes), but my tty does not have touch or mouse support; so a big hole is any web-based services that I can't find some alternative for (dropbox for file backups, ecommerce, proprietary financial services, and anything else that needs login and/or interactivity even as simple as a forum or shipping carrier website)
* clocks - any way to set alarms from the terminal and have them wake the phone to go off; gnome-clocks's command line options are exceedingly limited
* ditto for any kind of calling or text messaging; command line options are exceedingly limited for gnome-calls and chatty; gnome-calls refuses to work without a graphical display; chatty does have an intriguing daemon option but no documentation in the man page about how to use it; emailing a text to myself did not work either (phonenumber@txt.att.net)
* and a big miscellaneous category for various services that i took for granted on the gui, for example turning the volume or brightness up and down, checking the statuses of battery or mobile data or wifi, anything to do with bluetooth, even turning the torch on or off - hopefully some searching around online can come up with commands at least for the things that also apply to desktop Debian

* not to even mention a zoom videochat client, which is the only reason I still keep an old Android phone lying around because zoom's desktop client appears to be for x86 only, and their web client wasn't picking up my camera or microphone even in GUI Firefox

battery information appears to be updated in real time in /sys/class/power_supply/... - I got this location from elsewhere on the Pine forums, it seems to differ from the locations in a typical Linux desktop mentioned on forums elsewhere.

(11-11-2023, 08:18 PM)andrew907 Wrote:
(11-11-2023, 08:04 PM)Kevin Kofler Wrote: I doubt you will get many answers. I think you are pretty much alone in wanting to exclusively use CLI applications on the PinePhone Pro (or the original PinePhone, for that matter). For me, sometimes, a CLI or TUI solution is a last resort if no mobile-friendly GUI application is available (e.g., the maxima TUI, which is basically just a non-shell CLI, is workable as a CAS calculator, even with the virtual keyboard in QMLKonsole), but I do not see why I would want to use a CLI browser or e-mail client over perfectly fine touch-friendly applications such as Angelfish or Geary (not to mention that pure TTY mode, as opposed to a GUI terminal emulator, does not work at all without a physical keyboard, but even if you have the hardware keyboard, touch-friendly GUI apps are still likely to be easier to use).

That is an understandable reaction. I've seen a wealth of enticing console applications to try, but I understand that what I'm trying puts me in the minority of the minority. I'm using a Bluetooth keyboard so far but curious what life will look like for me when I get the keyboard case.

(11-11-2023, 09:20 AM)andrew907 Wrote: I'd prefer to stick with Mobian, because I'm most used to Debian-based distros (and Mobian seems like the closest available to vanilla Debian on Pinephone/Pinephone Pro). But I'm looking to switch as much of my computing as possible to the tty. What recommendations do you all have?

My progress so far, aside from the utilities that ship with bash (at least on Debian):
* nvlc - stream internet radio and play downloaded audio
* curl wttr.in - weather service
* tilde - yes, it's heresy not to use vim or emacs or nano, but tilde is a simple CUA text editor and gets out of my way
* elinks - read HTML webpages online (but doesn't look like a way to access web-based services that require logging in); it is easy to use and impressively snappy except when my internet is slow
* alpine - takes tinkering in the config file, but I'm figuring out how to access emails, just not send them; maybe another email service like Purism's Librem One would be friendlier to alpine? maybe I should climb the mutt learning curve?
* pdftoppm, cacaview - initial tests suggest that they can act as a minimally adequate pdf viewer together, with much zooming in
* will experiment with apertium for machine translation and csound for synthesizing music

Holes in my environment:
* maps - telnet mapscii.me never loads any maps
* browsh, carbonyl - respectively based on Firefox and Chromium, they purport to bring more extensive and modern access to more complicated web services, and they render webpages relatively impressively, but after a complicated installation process they both appear to require a mouse to do anything beyond scrolling whichever page you initially requested (and they may have other holes), but my tty does not have touch or mouse support; so a big hole is any web-based services that I can't find some alternative for (dropbox for file backups, ecommerce, proprietary financial services, and anything else that needs login and/or interactivity even as simple as a forum or shipping carrier website)
* clocks - any way to set alarms from the terminal and have them wake the phone to go off; gnome-clocks's command line options are exceedingly limited
* ditto for any kind of calling or text messaging; command line options are exceedingly limited for gnome-calls and chatty; gnome-calls refuses to work without a graphical display; chatty does have an intriguing daemon option but no documentation in the man page about how to use it; emailing a text to myself did not work either (phonenumber@txt.att.net)
* and a big miscellaneous category for various services that i took for granted on the gui, for example turning the volume or brightness up and down, checking the statuses of battery or mobile data or wifi, anything to do with bluetooth, even turning the torch on or off - hopefully some searching around online can come up with commands at least for the things that also apply to desktop Debian

* not to even mention a zoom videochat client, which is the only reason I still keep an old Android phone lying around because zoom's desktop client appears to be for x86 only, and their web client wasn't picking up my camera or microphone even in GUI Firefox

battery information appears to be updated in real time in /sys/class/power_supply/... - I got this location from elsewhere on the Pine forums, it seems to differ from the locations in a typical Linux desktop mentioned on forums elsewhere.
set global system volume: amixer set 'Master' 10%
(or whatever percent you want)
I'm not sure how universal the ALSA soundcard driver is for Linux systems, but works on Mobian on the Pinephone.
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#4
here is something.

Code:
# can adjust something, using alsa interface
alsamixer

# networkmanager for some network control
nmtui

# dumping info on batteries
upower -d

if there is text based browser with complicate features like javascript, i have use for it.

mpv could be used for text systems.
Code:
mpv -vo help
  Reply
#5
(11-11-2023, 09:05 PM)zetabeta Wrote: here is something.

Code:
# can adjust something, using alsa interface
alsamixer

# networkmanager for some network control
nmtui

# dumping info on batteries
upower -d

if there is text based browser with complicate features like javascript, i have use for it.

mpv could be used for text systems.
Code:
mpv -vo help

All worthy additions, thank you!

And I feel you on the (perhaps unfortunate) need for a web browser that can mediate adequately between a lightweight text-only environment and the interactive web services that it's hard to live your life without but that were built with the assumption that everyone is using Google Chrome.

I actually feel lucky that I don't have further need for iPhone or Android specifically, and that's probably something that a larger percentage of folks here can relate to. It is frustrating when enterprise IT decisionmakers force everyone to use the same outdated version with Windows (and block WSL at that), while it doesn't even occur to any other decisionmakers that anyone besides iPhone and Android users even exists. We are all swimming against the current of society. It feels worth it so often, but sometimes the current sweeps you further downstream than you wanted.
  Reply
#6
For clock software you might try "at". Dunno whether it would wake the device, though.
  Reply
#7
(11-15-2023, 01:10 PM)tmschmitz Wrote: For clock software you might try "at". Dunno whether it would wake the device, though.

That looks like a really useful command that I did not know about, thank you! In general, I still have to learn how sleep works--I think that systemd has a suspend command just like a power off and reboot command, but I'm not sure how to awaken the system after suspend (not sure whether it would be typing a key like in the GUI). Leaving my phone screen on all night, even at 10% brightness, just so a sound plays in the morning is not my favorite idea.
  Reply
#8
In Plasma Mobile, I can use the kcmshell5 powerdevilprofilesconfig desktop version of the power management settings to set different power profiles for plugged in vs. on battery. (The mobile version does not support this feature.) So I set it to only blank the screen and not suspend when plugged in (same configuration I also use for a notebook). Even if I explicitly press the power button, it will only blank the screen and not actually suspend while plugged in. And since I need to keep my PinePhone plugged in overnight anyway (because even when using suspend, it still consumes too much battery), I can also rely on the alarm clock coming up (because suspend is not used). And also ssh in whenever I want, because the PinePhone also stays connected to WiFi that way. I do not know whether you can configure something like that on the CLI though.
  Reply
#9
(11-15-2023, 07:38 PM)Kevin Kofler Wrote: In Plasma Mobile, I can use the kcmshell5 powerdevilprofilesconfig desktop version of the power management settings to set different power profiles for plugged in vs. on battery. (The mobile version does not support this feature.) So I set it to only blank the screen and not suspend when plugged in (same configuration I also use for a notebook). Even if I explicitly press the power button, it will only blank the screen and not actually suspend while plugged in. And since I need to keep my PinePhone plugged in overnight anyway (because even when using suspend, it still consumes too much battery), I can also rely on the alarm clock coming up (because suspend is not used). And also ssh in whenever I want, because the PinePhone also stays connected to WiFi that way. I do not know whether you can configure something like that on the CLI though.

Thanks for the input. I was using Gnome Clocks but alarms rarely go off for me even when I'm using the Pinephone let alone during suspend. I never get any missed alarm notifications either. Both of these features work without fail on the Librem 5 also using Gnome Clocks.
  Reply
#10
Confirming the Keyboard and Onboard Battery status from CLI on PinePhonePro ;

cat /sys/class/power_supply/rk818-battery/uevent

and for the Keyboard Accessory ;

cat /sys/class/power_supply/ip5xxx-battery/uevent

I find I have to regularly used these as there appears to be a status update delay in Power Manager in Mobian Posh Settings ? And I do all to often see "Strange things afoot at the OK Coral" when it comes to the Keyboard Accessory / Charging and Power Manager Posh Settings Keyboard Charging Status ? Sad (Might be just my dodgy Pogo Pin connections ?) Haven't "Nailed' it yet ???? In fairness Posh Battery Status indicator is pretty good for the Onboard Battery when it's only in use !

I some times see crazy stuff like I can use the Keyboard Keys yet it doesn't detect the keyboard battery or keyboard battery drops out in Posh Battery Status or even via CLI ??? Operator error perhaps ? lol

Linked from the PinePhone Wiki Keyboard Accessory page ;

https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_(Pro)_Keyboard

The below link confirms the Keyboard's power supplies are represented by ip5xxx-charger and ip5xxx-boost in /sys/class/power_supply

https://xnux.eu/pinephone-keyboard/faq.html#charging (I found this a very good document to help me learn and fault find the Keyboard Accessory !)

I'm pretty sure I got the above CLI syntax and info from the PhinePhone Forums just can't remember who / exactly where ? Apologies Sad
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