Letting go of console applications

I’ve always been a sucker for a good, text based console app. In the past, I used alpine/pine exclusively for my email, but within the last few months I’ve just been using gmail.com. It took me a while to fully “break the habit” of alpine, but once I got everything on gmail.com (filters, labels) setup the way I wanted, I like it a lot. I also discovered a nice “hack” in the “labs” section that lets me modify gmail’s keyboard shortcuts, and I have my gmail.com set up pretty close to what I had in alpine. All in all, I’m happy.

The second console app I was hanging onto was irssi. For those who don’t know, irssi is quite possibly the most awesome console based IRC client available. There are tons of features, including python scripting, themes, and almost unlimited customization. The reality for me: I almost never changed the defaults (although I did recently start using Aaron Toponce’s 88_madcows theme).

Here lately though, I’ve just been using xchat-gnome. I didn’t really intend to stick w/ it. The last time I re-installed my machine I “lost” my config file for irssi and I didn’t have time to re-set irssi up the way I had it, so I just installed xchat-gnome and added my connections/channels there. I’m actually liking it a lot. First I had to change the chat window to be “White on Black”, but other than that, it’s been great - I probably won’t switch back to irssi.

So, what is the advantage of a console application over a GUI based app? Well, for one you can run the application in a GNU Screen session and re-attach too it from anywhere via ssh. I used to do this quite a bit from my laptop downstairs, but I’ve since sold that laptop, and I haven’t even set up ssh on my system in quite a while, so there went my “reason” for hanging on so long.