Taking Back Console

Having tired of the bling-bling and the mouse? Just wanna the good ol' days? Or, you just like me, need the eye-friendly green and black? Oh, yeah, for you whom just left out in a console with no gui to play with.

You need to go to your terminal.

Pretty BASH
You can make a pretty BASH and make your console a powerful one.

Don't forget to put these on the .bashrc (debian users default is on, root not):

. /etc/bash_completion

Create a pretty BASH from *nix-style:

export black="\[\033[0;38;5;0m\]"
export red="\[\033[0;38;5;1m\]"
export green="\[\033[0;38;5;2m\]"
export yellow="\[\033[0;38;5;3m\]"
export blue="\[\033[0;38;5;4m\]"
export magenta="\[\033[0;38;5;55m\]"
export cyan="\[\033[0;38;5;6m\]"
export white="\[\033[0;38;5;7m\]"
export coldblue="\[\033[0;38;5;33m\]"
export smoothblue="\[\033[0;38;5;111m\]"
export iceblue="\[\033[0;38;5;45m\]"
export turqoise="\[\033[0;38;5;50m\]"
export smoothgreen="\[\033[0;38;5;42m\]"

PS1="$green┌─($coldblue\u@\h \$(date \"+%a, %d %b %y\")$green)─\${fill}─($coldblue\$newPWD\
$green)────┐\n$green└─($coldblue\$(date \"+%H:%M\") \$green)─>$white "

Yeah, a total ripoff, but you'll get the idea.

Don't forget the famous "." into PATH so you can execute any command from your cwd:

export PATH=.:$PATH

Pretty powerful enough to me.

Pretty Powerful Editor

The real deal, there are two powerful editors out there:
- Emacs: Editor for Jedi Master.
- ViM: Editor for anyone.

Emacs can embed virtually anything, based on LISP so it's highly configurable. ViM also have the ability to have plugin.

To do works, real man use scripts! But, just in case, you can use a macro. Some insane people also create Eclim, a headless Eclipse embeded in ViM.

Document Processing

The good ol' LATeX can do the job. Or, the docbook also can transform your XML based via XLST into a proper document.

I'm thinking of making headless OpenOffice.org. But, that's just insanely overwhelming. Use SiSU! It implemented the good concept of MVC and it has a fairly clean tag. It can be transformed into XML, (x)HTML, PDF, LaTEX, Presentation, etc.

Welcome to the semantics way of processing data.

Window Manager

Use GNU SCREEN.

Browser

Elinks or lynx

Conclusion

Phew, that was some, but as you explore, you can get powerful items.