I accidentally found out that mpv can play videos from the TTY, meaning I don’t have to log in to a graphical session. It even has a scaled OSD, unlike anything I’ve seen in a terminal UI.
Obviously there are plenty of terminal applications that work in a TTY, (edit) intext-mode or using ncurses (/edit), but are there any others like mpv that aren’t strictly terminal apps but don’t require a display server (maybe because they do the job themselves)?
Have a look at fbida. It provides fbi (an image viewer), fbpdf (a PDF viewer), and a few other apps that all run in a framebuffer.
There’s also w3m, which is a basic web browser capable of displaying images inline; although this requires some hacking in order to work in a vanilla TTY. What could be easier is a using a kiosk window manager (such as Cage) to launch a lightweight terminal (like st, urxvt, or xterm).
You could include pass. It is a password manager that is primarily terminal-based, but because it uses standard GPG encrypted files to do so, they are viewable in your file browser and there are graphical extensions for your web browser.
It also uses Git so you can sync it to a remote repository, and Git can be seen as another application that works in a similar manner. It is terminal-based, but there are graphical front ends like gitg.
You mean sth like Mutt - mail client for example ?
http://www.mutt.org/#featuresUnsure what are those acronyms, but one text-only Linux program I can’t recommend enough is ncdu: it helps managing storage in your system, as well as, indirectly, browsing your files.
I love ncdu, thank you. I actually mean programs like mpv that are not limited to text-mode, though.
Pretty much anything using ncurses, no? https://github.com/gabriellluz/awesome_ncurses_apps
That’s a great list, thanks. But what I mean is applications that aren’t limited to the terminal / ASCII / ncurses. I’ve updated my question to clarify that.
