How it all started

I found this machine in my drawer where I keep all my cables and electronics. I bought it years ago, even before my first Raspberry Pi, but never got it to work, so it just sat there. The fix was as simple as using a barrell plug 5V power supply instead of usb - even the manufacturer states that the micro usb port is not for powering the thing. But younger me did not think to RTFM, so here we are years later with a brand new unused Orange Pi.

It is a Orange Pi One a 4 core ARM single board computer with 512 MB of ram. I have to admit that although I love these tiny computers, I do not have much use for them - one first gen Raspberry Pi is running some ambient lights in our apartment for years and that is pretty much all use I have for them.

Since I had no use for embedding the computer anywhere, controlling stuff with it or hosting some software, I just connected it to the second input on my monitor and started playing with the command line.

The notes PC

As I was playing in the terminal, I started to wonder just how much of my everyday computing can I achieve using only the command line.

Some of the usual tasks that I do consist of:

  • Writing code and working with git repositories
  • Taking notes
  • Reading articles
  • Writing and reading email
  • Chatting either on Slack or on other messaging platforms
  • Watching videos

I is clear that some of these tasks could not be achieved through command line, but some can not only be achieved, but can be even better in some aspects as in the terminal no Slack messages, email notifications or similar distractions disturb me when a I am doing something. It can be the optimal machine when I want to take some time off after working on my main computer for the whole day, read some text based documents or write an article for my blog.

The fun in enjoying that the machine is running just fine from a 1A power supply and as am writing this article it is only on 149 MB of memory usage also contributes to the enjoyment.

The setup

These are some of the applications that I want to use this computer for and tools how I achieve it. It is also a reference for myself for some of the keyboard shortcuts and commands that I may forget.

Multitasking

screen
  • split screen horizontally ctrl + a + shift + S
  • split screen vertically ctrl + a + shift + |
  • jump between split sections ctrl + tab
  • start a terminal session in the split section ctrl + a + ctrl + c

Taking notes

Taking notes seemed like a problem when I first thought about it, as my primary note taking platform was obsidian with my data synced over iCloud. After some digging I found that obsidian has pretty decent support for git and as soon as I moved my vault to GitHub from iCloud, everything was set. I configured the computer to pull changes from GitHub on power on and I can comfortably read and edit my notes in markdown using vim.

Reading articles

For reading articles I initially wanted to use a terminal based web browser such as w3m, but as modern web is so full of javacript and expects you to use either a mouse or a touchscreen, it is pretty much unusable in a terminal setting. Therefore I gravitated to a simpler solution - whenever I want to save an article, instead of saving a link to my reading list, I just copy the whole content to my obsidian vault. This way I do not have to deal with opening it on the notes pc, but I also have a backup in case the article stops being available before I get around tno reading it.

Reading emails

I did not quite get around to this. I am sure that there is a way to read your emails in the terminal, but as one of the purposes of this computer is to avoid working and being disturbed, reading emails does not really fit the purpose anyway.

Browsing the web

As mentioned in the Reading articles section, browsing the web is so uncomfortable, that it is just not worth the effort in my opinion.

Conclusion

Partly a helpful tool, partly a fun project, I really like this computer. Time will tell how much use it is going to get, but as I am typing this article, I just love how simple and not disturbing this whole process really is. If you have the option, I highly recommend building something like this and see how much of your everyday computing are you able to do in terminal only mode and also brush off some of your terminal-fu.