619: The Trouble with TUIs

How much caffeine does this actually have?

Not enough. Let's do a simultaneous sip. You ready?

Here we go.

Three, two, cheers.

Oh, it's so sweet.

It's sugar-free!

That doesn't mean it's not sweet.

Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes.

And my name is Brent.

Hello, gentlemen. Well, we have spent the week trying to figure out how to exit apps, install dependencies, and try to earn a few bonus points. Because today is the conclusion of our TUI challenge. We're going to score up how we did and own up to it live on the show. And, of course, we'll read some of your challenge reports as well. Then we're going to round it all out with some great boosts, some picks, and more. So before we go any further, let's say time-appropriate

They're veggie dogs, but still good.

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Hey, happy Father's Day to you.

Oh, thank you. Yeah, happy Father's Day to all the dads out there, really. Doing the show on a Sunday, so I did my Father's Day festivities last night. It was nice. And we're going to have the leftovers for lunch today after the show.

Oh, hey-o.

Yeah, so you know it was a good meal. We had some steaks and we have some leftovers.

And now have more gray hairs.

That is true. And many of you listening have joined us. Collectively, we've all spent many days in the terminal this week. And I hope that those of you who are listening after the fact are still going to give this a try and then check in and let us know how you did. We want to know even down the road how it went for you. So let's start with a listener check-in. This is a great email. And Brent, you met this listener. They're a long-time listener. And we got a full report.

Yeah, this is Darnier, who I've met several times in Berlin when I've been there. You guys should go sometime.

Oh, yeah.

There's some great listeners over there.

Yeah, we should.

So Darnier sends a variety of emails because they sent in their TUI results via Git patches, sent in via email to our dear Linux Unplugged.

Amazing.

But here's the intro, at least. Hello, JB. Very long-time listener. Your first email, though. Not your oldest lister, I'm sure, but I remember watching the Linux action show on YouTube back in 2010. And have since followed JB through LAN, Coda Radio, self-hosted, and of course Linux Unplugged.

Thank you, sir.

Amazing.

I've been a member for as long as I can remember, but never actually wrote into the show. Well, you all finally did it. You made me write in by doing the TUI challenge. This is something very close to me. As a little bit of a background, I fell in love with 2Es when I did a 2E challenge about 13 years ago.

That is the truth.

I hope you enjoy reading the rest of these emails, which are long, as much as I've enjoyed listening to you over the years.

They scored themselves as we encouraged. And, you know, what I did is I took the TUI challenge rules and I said, hey, chatbot, make a scorecard out of this.

Yeah, you should have known.

I should have known better. I was moving quick. You know, I was trying to 10x my productivity.

Well deserved.

This is the challenge he was built for. I love that he did this on his own 13 years ago.

Darnier also left us a little hidden Easter egg in the emails, which we touched on in the members feed, which was a really sweet gesture. Thank you, Darnier.

Yes, and thank you for listening for so long and for finally checking in. Glad we got you. Finally, we got you. Now, we, it hasn't been going as well for us.

You don't sound so confident.

Yeah. And about midweek, I could tell the frustrations were rising amongst me and the boys. So I figured it's only fair. We got to capture the bad and the good on the show. So let's sit down and capture this. So earlier this week, we did just that. Yep. So it's midweek and we thought maybe we should do a check-in because at least two out of three of us, I'm not sure about all three of us, are feeling pretty bad. And I'll say myself, I'm feeling frustrated, like I am beelining for a failure

Well, I wrote down a couple notes before we sat down to record this, and the very first word in the note is frustrated.

Oh, really?

But I also added desperate.

Desperate, uh-oh.

And then the realization that I, previous to this challenge, was so cozy. And now I'm very much not cozy.

You didn't know how good you had it, did you?

I didn't really realize it. I guess I should have seen that coming, but I figured, oh, yeah, I use the terminal every day to do a bunch of stuff, but it's rough.

What in particular has struck you as the roughest bit?

Well, I've taken something like... at least two days to try to choose a text editor that just does markdown highlighting by default. And I think today I might have found one. So there's that. Took me a little while to try to escape out of some of them. So Nano's not the only one that...

You use an editor, right? I thought you were an editor guy now. I built you that custom version of it.

Right. Big NeoVim guy.

Well there's what i said previous to the challenge starting and my hopes and dreams and uh now that we're midweek i am drastically changing my expectations of what i'm supposed to be getting out of this challenge i thought you know had these big dreams of yeah i'm gonna learn vim bindings and that's gonna last me the rest of my life uh and then but i realized there's like we're we're trying of changed so many of our productivity apps that all of them have different key bindings and things.

Hit pause because that's the observation, just kind of watching you fight with some of it that has been a bit of a revelation for me because I think I took this bit for granted. Before the GUI, back in the old days, before the GUI, every application essentially implemented its same interface.

I remember as a kid playing with the computer that my father and mother supplied us. It was like an old Commodore of some kind. So that's the first computer I remember. But I remember on that keyboard, they had these... little helper i don't know what you call it.

Oh yeah a little like thing you could stick over the keyboard and then it would.

Tell you all the key bindings for that very.

Specific application lots of those is.

This a new swag item you know to go along with the tui challenge i.

Feel like i need this this week.

There you go um we yeah just a bunch of different ones you could print out and put over your keyboard yeah.

You know mpv i would use that one.

So wes how is the tui challenge going for you oh.

I'm definitely also feeling some frustration here i thought yeah i spend a lot of time in the terminal you know for like a computer average computer user in 2025 and i still think i do i almost always have one up but i also spend a lot of time in a web browser and it's as impressive as stuff like browsh and carbonyl are i i miss full resolution.

Pixels yeah.

I was trying to do some route planning and oh man you know something about the mapping applications they just they just don't work as good in the terminal at least not the ones we have today.

Yeah and the chatbots chatbots have been tricky as we've tried to look a few things up okay so here's my frustration and because i have not been frustrated with the tui interfaces i find it to be nostalgic i remember each application having its own bespoke way i set it up in different ways they implemented ways to input those configurations and i've kind of been enjoying that i mean i knew that coming in that would be something i'd have to do and i've liked that part

So this isn't a this isn't a two-week right fast this is something else.

Well just slightly because of i mean it's i'm i picked probably not the ideal ideal tool for this job right um if you want flat pack applications you got the the world uh if you want something packaged by brew so for a lot of so the the ideal combo in bluefin is flat pack for your gooey applications brew for your command line applications and then if you if you can't find it with brew you bounce out to maybe a distro box which they have done a tremendous job with

Maybe you need a TUI app spreadsheet so you can keep track of which things are where.

Yeah, I need a matrix. Right, I need a matrix. If I installed it via software and things, they'd be fine. So that's been interesting. And then there's been certain things I've installed, like the ERC email client.

Yes, I was going to ask about that.

Yeah, this is the one, I think, because it does give you a 2E for configuring your email options. And much like the beloved Nano, it gives you the commands at the bottom of the screen, where something like Neopine, you have to know the commands. So that's been nice, except for on all of my Bluefin systems, regardless of the terminal application and regardless of the environment, i.e. local or within one of the DistroBox environments, the TUI UI never renders

Have you gotten anything running?

Yeah, I mean, things that I can run via Podman or Docker container, no problem. So like my web browser. And I have gotten title DL working, title DL NG, working to a degree, although it can't find FFmpeg. So, yeah, and I've got the to-do as client working, so I've got my task management going.

Okay. So you're getting a couple points.

Yeah, but it's not what I expected to spend my time fighting. You know what I mean? I just didn't expect that.

Well, it sounds like you're spending most of your time learning the OS instead of learning the TUI.

Yeah, and really learning the limits of what DistroBox can do, too, because I haven't spent...

It's probably the most time in it, really, huh? Using it for real?

Especially using it in anger. Yeah, using it for real. Like, I've always played around, oh, I'll just try this random thing as an experiment. But now I'm, like, actively using it in multiple different ways and really, like, okay, this is a different workflow.

You should have been using Gentoo. I don't know. If you're going to be building stuff anyway, you might as well use a tool that's made for it.

You know what? You know what? I think it might have worked better.

My other thought is, can you run Bedrock Linux, that Linux that combines a bunch of distros into one? You just put that in a distro box, and then you only need one distro box.

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Well, we're back in real time. It's the end of the week, the end of the seven-day Tui challenge. Boys, how are you feeling now?

I'm feeling a little better. I think, yeah, I don't want to give it too much away. I don't think I'm going to be the champion this week, but I am feeling better.

Yeah. You know, I still miss a web browser, but I am feeling better than when we checked in.

Okay, out of the three of us, who do you think is going to score the highest?

I think it really depends how honest we are. Yeah.

Whoa.

I mean, you sprinted hard towards the end.

That's what I was going to say.

I'm kind of inclined to give it to Brett over there.

Uh-huh.

I think you're making a mistake here.

You were working right up to the start of the show.

Yeah. Yeah, you were cramming your homework. So, I don't know. I feel like you were trying to cram in on the bonies to get ahead.

I may have cheated lots this week.

Okay. So, you mean there may be some penalties?

I may have pushed hard because I needed the bonus points.

I got you. Yeah. So, you know, just to remind everybody, the TUI challenge had a few categories along with points. You needed to conquer text editing, email management, web browsing, music playback, file management, task management, system monitoring, and for bonus points, terminal multitasking. And then some categories also had additional bonus points available. So how did you do with text editor?

Well, as you're in that clip, I kind of wanted to find something that just worked out of the box. And it turns out from that day forward, I did. I found an application called Helix that I really liked. I wanted throughout this challenge to learn some Vim keybindings. Not all of them. That's ridiculous. That takes years. But I did learn a couple, and Helix uses them by default.

And they're kind of like regular language commands too.

Yeah.

That helps.

And it gives you the shortcuts as well. So it's a good discoverability for the shortcuts. So I found it a really nice balance between learning a new thing, having that like handicap, I guess, of that little panel that helps me out. And also being able to change the themes fairly quickly. Because I did one thing I really discovered I wanted was markdown highlighting that wasn't super complex to get out of the box. So I think in that regard, I found a happy place and maybe an editor that'll

Hey, that's supposed to be a Vim thing, okay?

I'm going to try out Helix after the show. I didn't really go outside my comfort zone when it came to text editors. I just felt like that was a category I had solved. But then watching you use Helix, and I tried it quickly. I'm like, oh, I might, even though I didn't really use it for the majority of the challenge.

You're switching after.

I might, yeah. I think so.

I was quite happy to find it. And I don't think all, well, maybe not most of these tools will stick with me, but I think Helix might be the one.

What about the email tool? Because you and I used, you and I went the same route. We used the same email tool.

I think we all did.

Oh, yeah, right. Yeah, we all three did. Right. So ARC or AERC, A-E-R-C.

ARC.

We talked about it earlier. We all three went with it, and I had initially just

I was outside tinkering on something and came back.

In like 20 minutes later between trying to read it off of the terminal web browser and then going through the google works i was so frustrated i had to take a little walk and brent was outside cooking i'm like brent i wish you were inside right now so you could commiserate with me you're not gonna believe what i'm going through, he's like you don't need to do that i'm like what now you don't need to do that, but once it got running we have a little admission to make.

Uh-huh it's embarrassing.

It is embarrassing i don't know where.

You want to start with this one but you and i both ran into it identically.

Yeah and.

We don't think west did.

And i think you need to be aware of this listeners if you use Nano.

Okay, so Arc is quite lovely in that it presents you with shortcuts and it tries to guide you through it. And I woke up pretty far.

It has like global commands and a lot of them are sort of Vim inspired.

Yeah, so I was feeling good. I thought email was going to be like the biggest challenge here.

And one of the sweet things about Arc is it uses your favorite default text editor. So the compose environment is the text editor you're used to, whatever it might be.

Which is awesome. So Chris and I both started composing messages to Wes. in nano of course because that was our default and couldn't figure out how to actually couldn't send it get out of the text editor to move on to the next step you.

Have to exit the text editor and then arc takes back over and then you're on a review screen and you can send the email it's.

Kind of like with git right like when you're presented with an editor to edit your.

Commit message.

And then you quit save and quit the file.

Exactly yeah which is a fine way to do it yeah the issue comes in that uh well as you know chris uh wes you might not know this but to exit nano you know you hit ctrl x yeah sure do just get out of that says.

It right there on the screen it's real handy.

Yeah it's awesome part of the problem though is that arc hijacks that keystroke ctrl x to bring up the command palette yeah so chris and i both ran into the situation where we composed our beautiful email and wanted to move on to the next step by just closing the editor and you can't actually ever do that you.

Can't close nano because it's like you said it's it's overriding that control X to be the global.

Command. I tried so many things.

So you get stuck. You get stuck. And you can never send the email, as far as we could tell, if you're using Nano as your default text editor. So this is where, for me, using Bluefin took a turn to the positive. And where I crossed from feeling like Bluefin was holding me back to where the Bluefin design was actually getting things done for me.

It's a pretty nice client.

It's powerful.

I do like it.

Yeah.

I think the setup on the Google side was annoying.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But the actual experience after that is totally fine.

Nothing Arc can do about that, though.

Right.

So once we switched editors, how did it work for you?

Well, I did the right thing and switched to my new text editor.

Oh, so you're using Helix to write your emails?

Yeah.

Cool.

My new default. I even committed.

Nice.

And worked perfectly fine after that. So got a nice little email off to Wes, and he confirmed that, yes, Chris, you and I both got points for this category.

All right. We should probably keep moving. Webb, what did you end up actually using here?

This is probably where I'm going to have to start getting honest.

Uh-oh.

Okay, you both had some success with Carbano. We kind of teased that last episode.

We're great.

I could not get this thing going.

Really?

I could not get it running.

Now, I believe, since I was running it via Podman.

I was also just doing Podman.

You opted to try to not do the Podman route.

I tried to nex it.

Yeah.

And failed quite miserably after quite a long time.

Which was very cathartic for me to see. After the struggles I went through, I have to say.

Yes. Yeah. I felt your pain. Yes, you did.

For one app, you felt my pain.

But I did pivot, and I used Browse, which was available by default in NixOS. And so I got a quick win there, and I loaded our website, and the images took about a minute to load. But I did get the website loaded. That said, I did not use that browser all week. I could not. So I feel like probably I should be deducted points, but given some for at least getting a browser working. So I don't know what you boys want to give me in this particular.

So web browsing was worth 20 points, but you have to deduct 20 points if you use Firefox or Chrome.

That sounds like a big zero for me.

Well, I could half that. I'd be willing to half that if we want to do funny math.

Okay.

Well, this is where you should get honest, because I don't think that you guys exclusively used the terminal browser.

There's just certain apps to publish our shows and stuff I have to use.

I tried to do stuff in Carbano first.

And then I would fall back. Oh, I suffered. I mean, the portion of suffering, getting things done on the Carbano was high. So, I mean, I definitely feel like I paid my pittance.

So maybe like, is that a 10 point then?

I feel like it's a 10 point for the web browser. Because, you know, we didn't hire a judge for this episode. So, all right. You and I both use CMOS for music. I'll talk more about that later in my segment, I think. But you use something that I didn't even bother with for your file management. I'm really curious about your choice of file manager.

Yeah, I mentioned two of them, Ranger and also Joshudo, which is just a Ranger-like file manager written in Rust. And I kind of used both 50-50. They're very similar to each other. I wanted to see what the differences were. They worked amazingly well. Very simple to use. They have shortcuts and all that stuff, too, that you can learn.

Ranger here, and I think you're going to get some bonus points here for this. Ranger has some neat support for multi-file functions. And if you look at the file management section... If you perform batch operations, you get plus five bonus points.

I sure do.

Yeah, you do. And I saw you perform the batch operation.

Did you?

I did.

I witnessed it. What? That batch bastard.

And you do the batch operations similar to the Git editing. So you change them in a text editor. So I had my text editor of choice Helix going in this. So everything kind of near the end of the week started gelling a little bit more than the frustrations I was feeling midweek. So I'll take the extra five points.

Yeah, I think you earned it. So keep track of that. I think the Ranger looks really interesting. And it reminds me to say that since the last time where I actually used these tools in the real world, more so than ever, Vim has sort of become almost a universal interface for these TUI applications. Not 100%, but 80% of these apps use Vim keybindings. And so it really gives you a multiplier if you just learn Vim keybindings, even the basics, because so many apps outside of Vim are using them now.

You know, that was my intuition coming into the challenge, and I think it turned out to be quite true. There were Vim keybindings in places I never even expected them.

Oh, yeah. All right, so how did you do on the task management?

I never got there. Yeah, I did exactly nothing.

Uh-oh, uh-oh. I'm surprised by that.

I went as far as opening a bunch of tabs of interesting-looking task managers that I could run, but of the terminal applications I thought I would learn the most, I decided this was last on the list.

That's a big fat negative 20 there on the points there, big guy.

That sets me back quite far. I should have did at least something. Jeez, now I regret that. Can I just go away for five minutes?

But you get the Btop points, so you get points for system monitoring. I'm going to give that to you, which is 10 points.

Thank you. Thank you.

And then did you do any multitasking on the command line?

I realized, you know, we put this as the last day's challenge and I did this as the last sort of challenge that I set some time to. I feel almost like this should have been first.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

I see. That was one of the things I realized about midway into. And then I started using the hell out of like Zelgi tabs and stuff. Yeah.

Yeah, because I opened Zellage, which everybody was raving about. So I was like, I've got to try this thing. But this was like... the hour before the show this morning and realized very quick. I played around and I was like, Oh, this is sweet.

Yeah.

And realized very quickly that I had missed out on using this all week.

Yeah. And I just have like, I just have my email up in one of the tabs. Just, Oh yeah.

Why not? So I did get it running. I did kind of fall in love with it very quickly, but I did not use it in anger. So I don't know. You guys are going to have to judge what that's worth.

No, you tried it. You got some multitasking going. So you get 30 points. Oof, I'll take it. You get 30 points from that. And then I see in the bonus category, you tried an LLM app. You tried some password apps. Can you give me a quick rundown on how that went?

Yeah, I found quite a bit of success. Yesterday I was griping about it, but I found some success with a little app called Teneri, which is basically LLM in your terminal 2E, written in Rust, of course. And this is pretty cool. You can, by default, it's connected to, like, your chat GPT API. Turns out I don't have one of those. So that instantly put me in hard mode. But it also supports, like, Llama CPP as a backend or Ollama as well.

Hey, go figure.

So it's modal and all that good, great stuff that I'm learning to love. So Tenere, I think, awesome tool. I would totally recommend.

We'll have a link to that in the show notes. And password manager?

This is another one that I wanted to get working, so I use KeePass XC generally. That's a GUI, of course. So I was looking for KeePass 2Es. There's, of course, a terminal... like just a console program you can use, which was real painful. So I quickly exited that. I didn't want it. But I did find a TUI for KeePass called KPXHS. It's basically interactive KeePass, and it's just a front end for the KeePass CLI.

You've identified an area to learn more about.

Yeah.

So homework after the show.

I feel a little proud of myself for trying cause it's a skill I've wanted to acquire, but I did not quite acquire it, but I got into it a little bit. So never got to the point of doing passwords in the terminal, but I tried.

So keep track of your score. We're going to total up all our scores at the end. Okay. So don't reveal it now. Wes, how did your week in the terminal go? Anything stand out for you in the categories when we get to text editing or email management? Anything there that surprised you? I imagine you probably used Vim.

I did. Yeah, NeoVim to be precise.

And you went with ARC for email.

I didn't get super creative on that front. That is true.

Well, I like that we all tried ARC. That's new for all of us. You got it working first, I have to say, because you figured out the app password route and I... So dumb.

I've done that before. I also asked an LLM, so I just got better LLM advice, I guess.

Oh, okay.

Well, and then I realized I tried using the JB email, which didn't seem to work, at least with my level of permissions or whatever. So then I pivoted to mine, and then I was able to... It was kind of hard because I ended up getting a link to the right place instead of finding it in the UI, and then I was able to sort of initiate what I needed.

That was the thing for me is I actually had to search for it and then click to it. You could not find it in the Google settings.

So once that hurdle was done, that worked pretty well.

What did you do for music playback?

Yeah, so I did do CMOS a little bit. I also did actually manage to try out Castero for podcasts.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

That one hadn't been updated in a little bit, but it does, you know, I was able to listen to our stuff. I listened to some other ones. I mean, you basically just have to add feeds yourself, but that's fine. So, you know, paste in the feed URL and then...

I know that's not quite considered streaming, because our bonus points said extra bonus points for streaming, But I feel like if you get podcasts going in the terminal, it could be worth extra bonus points.

I think so.

Can we give it to them?

Yeah.

All right. Five points for you, Wes.

I did try, what was it called? YTUE-music? YTUE-music?

Yeah, how did that work? I wanted to try it, but I did not get it.

I could not get it running.

Oh, okay.

I didn't try a ton, but in what time I did experiment with it, sadly.

Did you opt to use a TUI file manager at all?

Not, I mean, I didn't use it all of the time, but yes, I did try out Yazzie.

Which i actually have running here yeah yeah um.

Because i wanted to try the fancy image support.

Right in.

Kitty so check this out.

Okay whoa it's perfect yeah.

Isn't that nice.

So what i'm seeing is a three column uh file manager and in the third column is a perfect rendering of a pdf, It looks, so it's a manual for a microphone.

Oh, wow.

It's great. And that's a 1080p display, right?

Uh-huh.

And it renders, it all fits on there really nice. That's nice. Okay, so I kind of have to admit, I stuck with Midnight Commander here because, again, I was going for easy points. I use this all the time. I love Midnight Commander. It reminds me of Norton Commander from when I was a young lad and my dad's computer ran Norton Commander before Windows. and um i still have a very soft spot for it and so i just know how to whip through that thing.

That makes sense.

And it's got multi-pane support and so i i used midnight commander but yazzy's looking real good.

I did also use dua because i like it for specifically deleting files and because you can um you know go in and mark a bunch of stuff to delete and then have it delete all of it.

Did you do anything for task management.

Uh yeah i didn't again this was i didn't do a ton i kind of pivoted to this part of it a little late um but i was trying out let's see here i tried to open all these up a vault tasks it's a tui markdown task manager all right oh i like this markdown yeah so you kind of have a vault um you put a bunch of markdown files in there and then it's got like a its own little bespoke tui interface front end to that yeah so it has its own thing

That's cool nice little find there yeah i got i think i have a couple of finds maybe you guys haven't seen i'm not sure we'll see when.

Yeah it does have like some basic like filtering support you can browse through your your files in it uh and then it does have some support for parsing out stuff for like calendar and time management too which i didn't try the time management stuff but it you can have it like figure out calendar stuff which is neat.

It sounds like you got all the base points i'm guessing.

Yeah i did also cheat a bit on the browser part so you should i should only get the 10 there for sure yeah i think.

We're all just getting 10 for that one there were moments boys there were moments i mean you gotta get you gotta do the job and multitasking.

Uh yeah i was also just sticking with zelige because i've been using it a lot lately anyway it's solid it's kind of taking over it's.

Totally solid so i don't really you know mine were not that surprising i've sort of covered them as you boys have gone along uh but i did a couple of different so i'll swap mine out uh for task management, Todoist CLI, I've recently gone back to using Todoist about three months ago. It's just because, for this reason, everything talks to Todoist.

It's true, yeah.

It's really great.

I'm missing LogSeek because I've been spinning out of Todoist into Log.

Yeah, yeah.

If I hadn't done that, this would have been easier.

GoMux totally worked out great for me, a 2E matrix client written in Go.

Oh, yeah, I was using Iamb.

Oh, yeah?

Uh-huh, matrix client for Vim Addicts Red X written in Rust.

Yeah, there it is. This one is written in Go, and I think this is the one that's sticking. I've had trouble getting it verified, though. I think I'll figure that out. But I actually think this one might stick because I love just having the matrix chat in a terminal. The resource usage is fantastically different. Oh, yours looks a lot like IRC. Oh, mine looks like Element, but in the terminal. Yours looks like an IRC client. I kind of like yours, too. Have you been enjoying it?

Yeah. It's pretty minimal. And it is, right? So if I want to go explore rooms, I have to type colon and then rooms.

Yeah, yeah, sure.

But you can use slash and then just type for search. You can do a lot of the Vim key bindings are all there.

Of course.

You can use GG and Shift-G to navigate up and down the page. So it's all very natural if you know Vim movements.

As a Starlink user, ping times are pretty important to me. We've mentioned this app before, but there's a couple of these where I was like, oh, yeah, I know this app. I'm going to use this while I'm doing the TUI challenge. And one of those was GPing, which gives you an NCURSES graph of your ping latency up and down, which has been really nice to see. And then I started the TUI challenge at the studio, and then I realized I need to go home.

Oh, smart. I was just supplicating like an animal.

And then like you, Wes, I use CMOS. Small, fast, fast. Very light. And I just added a podcast. And it's really easy just to add also a directory or an individual file. And there's kind of like a Vim command. And you get into the command mode. And then you tell you want to add. And it'll start auto-completing the path for you. And then it just figures it out.

It's very efficient. If you just want to listen. Yeah, exactly. Like you have a folder of music.

Yeah.

Boom. No problem.

Yeah. Yeah. So that was, those all worked. I don't know. There was every, I got every category. I didn't get very many bonus points though, Brent.

Well, that's not quite true.

Oh, yeah?

Yeah, because you get a bonus point for syncing your tasks with Todoist.

Oh, okay. That's nice, I suppose.

Well, if you don't want to, we don't have to get it.

No, I'll take it. I'll take it. I think I was really struggling to get the apps running. And so then by the time I got them running, I was like, I'm just going to get to work here. You know, I'm just going to try to get the basics done.

I take it none of you boys did any batch operations in your TUI file manager?

Not unless do we count moving a directory of files as a batch operation?

Not at all.

No.

I did in DUA.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

I did a batch delete.

Okay.

I mean, I think we have to give it to him.

Yeah.

Also, I have a bunch more picks if we want to.

Yeah, give us a rattle off a couple while Brent totals it up, and then we'll get our total going.

Okay, so for more system management, I tried out system CTL TUI. oh cool yeah yeah just kind of a you know a nice little way to check out what's running in systemd which you know it's nice on the file management front it's not really management but i found um tdf which is a tui based pdf viewer uh that's surprisingly decent actually cool let's see i on the dev side i checked out uh jqp which is a tui playground to experiment with jq if you ever use jq you kind of write semi-cryptic little

Tui it means you can ssh in and use it you know what i mean yep that's pretty good all right.

Let's see for the LLM I did Parallama which you can it's kind of got a nice graphical TUI for choosing models and then you know kind of standard thing for chatting with them, And then to try to make my life a little bit easier for some of the stuff that I could answer this way, I started using WikiTui, which is a Wikipedia-specific Tui, you know, which has pretty nice support.

Wow.

It uses the text interface, right? So it's like you didn't have to backwards try to support the web. You could just get right access to the information.

It's so nice. All right. So we will have links to all of those plus all of ours that we used in the show notes at linuxunplugged.com slash 619. But you know what that means?

I have some math but I think I'm going to advocate for extra points for you guys if you want me to Okay So one thing we didn't answer, did you use your terminal multitasking app to have more than one session open? Yes Okay, let me add extra points here for you.

Would have gone insane if I couldn't do that.

Yeah, mandatory Okay, He's mathing.

Yeah, math hard. Actually, our rules don't actually say how many points you get for that. So how many points would you like for that?

Five?

Yeah.

That seemed fair? Five.

A little sprinkle of points.

Yeah.

All right. We'll give you extra points for that.

That's exciting.

You're using some sort of TUI-based calculator, right?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yes, indeed. Okay. And I also feel like you could get some extra, extra points here. So, Chris, you used GoMux to browse Matrix. I think that's pretty fancy. so I'm open to giving extra points for...

Is it? Is that?

I didn't do it.

Is it fancy?

Well, how about five for each of us then?

Okay, five for Wes and I, yeah. Now you've got to give us the math before the music runs out.

Oh, how much time do I have? But Wes, you also did LLMs. Do you want some extra five points for that?

Yeah, but you should get it then too.

Yeah, exactly. That's where I'm headed with this.

Wait, I use an LLM. I just did it in the browser. Does that count?

Not at all. Okay.

Then a judge comes out.

Do you want to guess? Who you think is at the top, based on our explorations here?

I think you.

Wes, any guesses?

I'm going to go with you as well.

Oh my god, you guys. Okay, here are the scores. So I have 9 zero points, 90 points.

Uh-oh.

I got a big minus 20 for the task management, but I also didn't get 20 points. So that's actually like 40 missed points. And Wes, you got...

145 nice job wes nice.

Job nice job and.

Chris you got 75 points.

So wes you are the winner.

I did not expect that congratulations wes i have to share my prize with next packages because i gotta say compared to your experience it felt like cheating because not only could i browse for ideas to try but then like for most of them i mean not all of them worked but most of them you know they just pretty much ran i.

Hey man i picked the hill to climb and at the end i think It was helpful, but it took me the entire week practically to get there. So a couple of these, I think the matrix client and the email client are sticking because I have them set up already. So I'm just going to keep using them. So in the end, I'm walking away with a couple of applications I'm still using.

I'm curious in this challenge, do you have any lessons learned you want to share? Anything that really was like an aha moment in trying all of this?

If you haven't used Midnight Commander yet, give it a try. Unraid.net slash unplugged. Head on over there to check them out and support the show and unleash your hardware. Unraid.net slash unplugged. I'd like to introduce you to Unraid. You might not be familiar with them. They're a powerful, easy-to-use NAS operating system built on top of modern Linux for those who want control, flexibility, and efficiency in managing your own data, your privacy, and your own applications.

Well, we got a bunch of feedback from the Terminal 2E Challenge. Thank you, everyone. We got one here that we're pulling out from Don Harper, who sent in an email. Hashtag 2E Challenge. Hey, guys, I thought you might want to follow my attempt on the 2E Challenge. They wrote a series of blog posts over at duckland.org. And he says, great to see you folks in Boston. So I've pulled a couple little excerpts from those blog posts. You want to hear?

Yeah, sure. Thanks, Don.

All right. Day one here. Text editing. Since I normally read my email and RSS feeds in a TUI app, and I use Vim as my editor and IDE, I figured it would be fairly easy for me to take part in this one.

That's what I was thinking coming into it. I thought, hey, I've used some of these apps for years. This is going to be no problem.

Yeah, turns out not so much. Zidane says, there are bonus points for using a script to help things out, and I guess the script I use to start editing a file should work. And he included that script, which is kind of nice. Day two here, email, since I already live in NeoMutt, I should probably describe my setup. So they use Gmail, and for filtering, use a tool called Gmail CTL.

That is a real Linux nerd solution.

He also uses SystemDTimer to schedule the sync runs for the email and runs not much to index the mail so you can search through it all. And day 7, TMUX, with the first pane split into 4 to show the tools off, but I have also I also have panes for my email RSS, Mastodon client and SSH shells on a couple other machines, which brings my grand total to 200 points.

Not bad! Not bad at all!

There's a bunch more details in there. There's basically a blog post for every day's challenge, which is a fun read. So duckland.org for that.

Yeah. Thank you for sharing.

I love that we heard from some folks now that have been like mostly living in the TUI, you know, already using their TUI apps. It's hilarious.

Speaking of mostly living in the TUI, Darnier sent in really fascinating details about how they use the TUI and some tools that they were involved in way, way early. so neomut being one of them actually so i think we'll read that in the post show.

Well that means it is time to read some boost and we got some tui challenge follow-ups in the boost too and we're going to start with someone else who is our baller booster this week with a generous 100 000 sats, Thank you very much, someone else. Our longtime listener, Sporadic Booster. That's, well, we appreciate it very much. Checking in with a nice valuable boost. Making up for lost time. It's good to hear from you.

Adversaries 17 comes in with 42,000 sets.

Hey, it's adversaries. There he is.

So, does Emacs count as a TUI? Technically, doesn't it have a daemon and then a GUI client app? If it does, then I don't know what problem there is, because Emacs is the whole darn operating system. A long time ago, he goes on, in a Pacific Northwest far away from me, three hosts, well, really only three years ago, had a mission to get a ham radio license.

Oh, no.

Uh-oh.

I waited and waited and waited and waited, saying when they do, I will. It'll be a whole JB community thing.

Oh, no.

Well, I got tired of waiting, so I went and took the test. Get your ham radio license, guys. It's not that hard. ke9 dmq out.

Thank you adversaries very nice now you know adversaries maybe we should do that for another challenge one day we got to recover from these challenges this one ham chow this, yeah make a whole ham sandwich theme out of it too thank you for the boost.

Well shy fox boosted in 30,999 cents. I love this challenge. I learned a lot and will keep using some of those TUI tools. They also link to basically their TUI challenge results here. Let's see if we can figure this out. The total didn't do so good on email management, it looks like, but the total, 100 points.

100 points, not bad at all.

Excellent.

Beat me.

Right?

I think that beat me. That's so bad.

They also included a bunch of backgrounds and some screenshots. We'll be sure to link to that.

I'm glad you enjoyed it. I think ShyFox, I also, you know, parts of it were torturous for me, but it was sort of a nice reminder of how good we have it now and to get out of the comfort zone and then to walk away with a couple of apps and kind of like a new understanding of how to use Bluefin.

It doesn't seem like maybe the email worked great for them, but they did find Himalaya.

Oh, yeah, okay.

A CLI to manage emails written in Rust. It's got a nice little minimal UI to it. So there's a lot of good options.

Thank you for the boost, Jack Fox.

Oh, they also use tell jelly fin to we.

I wanted to try that. I was on, that was on my list of things to try. I just really, we just didn't watch much TV this week. We were busy.

Do we challenge week two is coming up?

Oh my gosh. Turd Ferguson comes in with 22,000 sets. Loved the last episode. It had me laughing. Some of us still use mutt. And let me tell you, that old dog still hunts. You know what? We're finding out a lot of our audience is still using these.

That's surprising.

Chris, you said you were going to use mutt when this all started.

I thought I was. And I did not remember how to use it. It's true. It's true. That was it. I just don't know what happened.

Big ol' boosts in with 21,000 cents. I love the TUI challenge idea. I use system CTL TUI, Enmon, and Alacrity with Zellage, and I'm looking forward to trying many more of the TUI applications mentioned in the show.

Ah, very good.

See, another TUI natural.

Yeah.

Well, Gene Bean sends in 4,444. That's two. What do we call them?

You mean rows of ducks or like a McDuck?

Two rows of ducks.

It could also be an Aflac duck.

Says i'd love some open shift coverage.

Okay you.

Were asking for some feedback.

I was thank you.

I'd also welcome coverage of its upstream okd.

Oh yeah that was something that crossed my mind too was chasing down the upstream projects and taking a look at those uh he also sent me a dm and i'm going to share it with you guys after the show uh i don't want to share too much because it was a private dm but uh shout out to gene son who also listens to the podcast that's cool, Outdoor Geek is here with 5,000 sats. A tip for the privacy tech person. The 2024 Subaru Crosstek base model doesn't have a cell modem.

You don't love subarus.

I mean i just don't love what they've become.

What have they.

Become they're like minivans now on car platforms that's their huge vehicles um yeah.

Complicated often too.

But i do like this this is i like that direction they start going more in that direction i'm all about that.

They're finally listening.

Walk it back manufacturers just walk it back a little bit my.

Other suggestion would be i don't know a van of the.

1990s era.

Early or late.

Early go.

Early Antoine 1109 boosts in with 4,444 sats, definite yes on the red hat open shift deep dive we use vmware currently and i've looked at proxmox and hyper v and would really love to get your take on open shift from a linux admin perspective.

I think it's time to get on that i think it is thank you antwan appreciate that feedback and i've heard that from a lot of people at red hat summit uh they are not happy with the direction things are going through vmware and they are shopping and i think it's a good time for us to take a look in because they've been modifying upgrading improving the product to try to address that customer base. Let's see if they've done it.

Well, SystemDBSDD sent in 3,433 sats. What do you all think of Apple's new containerization framework? Answer to WSL, maybe? Threat to Linux?

We did some coverage of this in the members bootleg version earlier today in the show, and it's interesting. Just a quick overview. In macOS 26, a new container command is going to be available, And when you execute it, it will pull down Linux images and then it will run them in what they're calling a lightweight VM. So it's like a tiny little VM that runs a tiny version of Linux kernel with a custom in its system.

Just enough to boot up and then start the container.

Each container does run its own kernel.

I think the thing for me is like, you know, there's a lot of developers with Mac laptops and there are a lot of options, Podman desktop, Docker desktop, Colima and Lima, I think have been pretty great tools, but all of these, there's kind of like more setup and for some baby, maybe you want to customize, you want to have ability to like run more stuff inside this VM where all your containers are running or take advantage of other workflows.

Oh, that could be interesting.

You could totally see some more open source stuff making this easier.

Yeah, I bet you will. GUI apps and whatnot. I'll just add this system, DBSD. I think it's a capitulation from Apple. And when the WWDC video that explains this feature starts, they introduce it by saying containers are the standard way to ship software on servers, not on Linux, but on servers. Now, that's a pretty big statement when you consider that it wasn't that long ago that macOS server was a product and Apple even sold server hardware.

I know what the user agent here is for Brent instead of something like fountain. Interesting.

Very sus. Brett's hacking the system.

Brett Johnson, that is.

Kalech Bussin with another Robodux. Greetings from Poland.

Hello.

I started my journey with Self Hosted a year ago and have been hooked on the network ever since. Welcome aboard. Thanks for listening. I just want to say thank you for the great content. I discovered a ton of self-hosted apps from your podcast and now use them almost every day. All running in Docker on a VM on an i3 8100T Fujitsu mini PC running Proxmox at home with USB 2TB hard drive for the Jellyfin library.

Ooh, a mini PC. I love the mini PC for the HomeLab system. And I bet the i3 doesn't use too much power either.

Yeah.

Nice. Okay.

I will second the recommendation I heard here for Obsidian syncing. The Obsidian LiveSync plugin with a quick CouchDB container running over tail scale works really well across iOS and Linux.

Okay.

As for Nix, because of you, I'm tempted to try it one day.

Yeah, you could always install it on your existing Linux of choice and play around with Nix.

Yeah, a little Proxmox VM. Why not?

So it's interesting the timing of this boost because just this last weekend, I was thinking, do I really want to pay another year of Obsidian Sync? Because it's not cheap. And so the LiveSync plugin and a CouchDB container on my tail net does seem like a pretty good solution. Thank you for that idea. I appreciate it, Kellogg.

Well, hybrid sarcasm boosted in 10,000 sats. I spent some time with GoMux this week. I think I'll keep it around. Otherwise, you're all better men than I. I need my Goey.

Oh, I don't know. I read we were suffering too. We were suffering. There were moments of bliss and retro beautiful nostalgia. You know, that nostalgia kit did come, and that is almost worth it on its own. But I agree. The Matrix client wasn't too bad. Thanks for the boost, Hybrid. Kongaroo Paradox is here with 8,400 sets. Hey, I'm boosting with my progress for the TUI Challenge. No time for more. So he's trying to do a little bit at the last minute. And he,

That's pretty good.

That is pretty good.

I mean, I'm saying it's pretty good because that's about what Chris and I got.

He got a negative 20 on the email, but he got some bony points on the text, on web, on file. He's liking Yazzie, too. Very well done. To-do man was his task manager of choice. I had a great time with the TUI challenge. It was easy for me on the NeoVim and Tmuc side because, well, I daily drive it. But for the rest, it was great discovering all these new apps. The big surprise for me was how manageable it was to live without a full-fledged browser.

Full Tui.

Can't wait to hear how you guys did. Full Tui is great.

It's not title material.

Thanks, Kangaroo. Thank you for that boost. It's good to hear from you. And if you're listening after the fact, we still want to hear your reports. This is a topic we'd be happy to revisit for many episodes to come. So feel free to hashtag TuiChallenge email, or if you'd like to support the show with a boost, it's a great topic to boost in. Thank you everybody who boosted. We did a 1,000-sat cutoff for this week's episode, and we appreciate it.

Yeah. Enter SOMO.

Oh, okay.

A human friendly alternative to Netstat for socket and port monitoring on Linux. pleasing to the eye thanks to a nice table view filterable interactive killing of processes also instead of having to do netstat netstat dash t-u-l-p-n you can just do somo dash l.

I have to say you got me with this one because it's always really handy to be like what app is listening on what port what ports do I even have open who's using it is anything listening is there a connection established this gives it all to you in a TUI table.

There you go.

Fits in with the show and you didn't say it, but you probably guessed it. It is written in Rust and it is MIT licensed. So you can do with it as you will.

Did Chris really say that? You can check.

Uh-oh. Yeah, I suppose that's the downside right there. And, of course, we'd love it if you joined us live. It gives it a special vibe, as the kids say. Yeah, that's right. We do the show at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern over at jblive.tv or jblive.fm in whatever IceCast stream client you want. Or pop in that mumble room and listen to a low latency opus stream.