cirrus_minor

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The image above is a scrot (screencapture) from my 2nd monitor which i tend to use for CLI apps, in this post i aim to show you what apps im using and share some of my dotfiles, even though this is on an Archlinux OS, there is no reason why it cannot be replicated on any GNU/Linux system.

Now from the top, the terminal emulator im using is named ’tilda’ and in the prefs of the emulator i have it execute the ‘tmux’ command on startup, tmux is what allows us to split the terminal up into individual panes, here is a link to my .tmux.conf  which you should create in your home dir.,  after installing tmux of course, so install tmux and paste contents of this into a file named .tmux.conf  in your home dir.  .tmux.conf  (now do  source ~/.tmux.conf   so the new conf wil be seen) then     browse to your repo for the emulator named tilda (tilda is a GTK dropdown terminal emulator)  once installed right click for its prefs and edit to suit, then add the word ‘ tmux ‘ under the title & command tab in the custom command field, now when you start tilda tmux will execute , using ctrl+a+” or % (Ctrl+a+shift 2/5) will split the panes accordingly.

Now that we have the blank canvas, lets get painting :)  OK in the top left pane is my IRC client of choice named weechat, being a Scot i was drawn to the name, turns out its an amazing highly configurable IRC client,  it has a very large selection of scripts so you can tweak it till your hearts content, weechat too will be in all good repo’s  (also runs on Mac OSX)  once installed have a look at my weechat cheat sheet it shows how to set up weechat so we can connect to our favourite servers & #chatrooms weechat.txt  you should also check out my buddy FiXato’s guide Here

Directly below weechat to the left is ncmpcpp which is a media player for MPD (music player daemon) i use it to stream my music over http and to annoy the neighbours. MPD can be difficult to set up for the novice so if you are a new linux user id suggest replacing MPD/ncmpcpp with ‘ mp3blaster ‘ which as you see is just an ncurses media player, however if you want to stick with MPD/ncmpcpp then check out MPD  Once installed and configged , install ncmpcpp and here is my modified config which belongs in /home/USER/.ncmpcpp/config.

  Beside ncmpcc to the right is simply the links browser which as you might have guessed is a browser which again can be installed from any good repo.

If we keep going right this is youtube-viewer which i love, it enables us to watch you tube video without using the much despised flash plugin, the mplayer config file doesn’t  require much editing, below ill show you how to use it ..

       youtube-viewer -C             #start youtube-player with colour

  youtube-viewer -d [URL]         #download said you tube video

youtube-viewer -login       # Login to your account

         youtube-viewer -C -S        # colour output &  subscriptions

The chosen you tube video will open in an application named mplayer, to have mplayer maintain its size add xy=600 to ~/.mplayer/config file. Your distro will most probably come with mplayer installed if not simply install it from your favourite repo.

If You use an Nvidia GPU listed here

then  enable VDPAU by adding these two lines to ~/.mplayer/config file

vo=vdpau,

vc=ffh264vdpau,ffmpeg12vdpau,ffodivxvdpau,ffwmv3vdpau,ffvc1vdpau*

*I had to comment out the 2nd command, i use an Nvidia 8800GT GPU

If you use another GPU, for best results i suggest you read the mplayer section in the tremendous

Archlinux Wiki

Last but by no means least is an excellent RSS reader named newsbeuter this runs too on Mac OSX systems, simply install it and add URLs of feeds to  ~/.newsbeuter/urls  here is a list of some of my chosen feeds, edit to suit.  RSS URL’s

As you can see i prefer to use the terminal for things as its more stable/faster than any GUI equivalent  , It might not have lots of big shiny buttons but it gets  the job done and done well, (this is what the shiny buttons are doing under the surface).  I hope you found something of interest. Who knows it might even urge an OSX user to use his terminal, If you get stuck or have any questions feel free to leave a comment.

Regards

Cirrus