Lot has been said about how the web evolved to become a kind of monstrous entity. The mail protocol has followed a similar evolution but it’s a bit more subtle and has often been summarised as « too much email. ».

The text-based environment in UNIX is incredibly versatile and powerful, programmers and system administrators who log into a UNIX server remotely will typically work exclusively in the console, working on a remote desktop (similar to TeamViewer in Windows) is just too inefficient.

But can a console really function as an everyday desktop? That is what this article will try to explore, and I think you will be pleasantly surprised at just how useful a text-based environment can be!