Why would you want to toggle air plane mode with Termux? That’s doesn’t make sense.

You would think of some reasons if you tried very hard. The point is that it’s my device and I shouldn’t have to beg permission.

This conversation was about doing things with Termux

Then your device must be powered by magic, or more likely it’s not a recent Android version. That the toggle is there does not mean it works: it doesn’t work without root.

Incorrect. Wifi only without root.

But who decides what I need? For instance, I want to toggle airplane mode. Without root: not allowed.

Giving full admin privileges over device? Doubt it.

Yeah but to do that one thing that you really want to do, you need root and daddy says no.

And yet there they all are, using corporate garbage.

Citation needed, man page says nothing about that. Of course, you can use GPG directly to get symmetric, that is what I chose to do

What does the day-to-day operation of Pass compared to Keepass look like?

Someone else can confirm but Keepass seems to use symmetric encryption, whereas Pass definitely uses an asymmetric key pair.

This is why I gave up on Pass. Obviously it has its advantages or they wouldn’t have done it, but personally I find that this is too much complexity for something as critical as password storage. I want to be able to access the vault with a single memorized master password and nothing else. That is only possible with symmetric encryption.

The issue is more general. When dealing with, say, apt, my experience is that nothing ever breaks and any false move is immediately recoverable. When dealing with Python, even seemingly trivial tasks inevitably turn into a broken mess of cryptic error messages and missing dependencies which requires hours of research to resolve. It’s a general complaint. The architecture seems fragile in some way. Of course, it’s possible it’s just because I am dumb and ignorant.

If you’re having to type out version numbers in your commands, something is broken.

I ended up having to roll my own shell script wrapper to bring some sanity to Python.

i dont want to learn 400 obscure keystrokes among other nonsense. we dont need to hear about your text editing stockholm-syndrome.

This reads like projected insecurity. Or maybe even… jealousy.

always find myself needing to fire up a window manager just to get a browser eventually

A chromeless tiling WM is basically invisible and AFAIK has almost zero performance impact. That’s roughly what I do.

Launching it using the raw framebuffer means it blocks the screen until you close it, and there’s no means to do anything else except switching to another TTY, is that it?

Fair point about raw speed. I never found the keyboard-vs-mouse speed debate very interesting either.

But cognitive load is a double-edged sword. Sure, the first time you attempt a task, the abstraction of a GUI is really helpful. There’s nothing to remember, you just point and click around and eventually the task is done. But when you have a task with 7 steps which you have to do every 2 weeks, then the GUI becomes a PITA in my experience. GUIs are all but impossible to script, and so you’re gonna need a good memory if you want to get it done quickly and accurately. This is where CLI scripting becomes genuinely useful. Personally I have quite a few such tasks.

Great! I guessed that going full framebuffer would be trickier than that. You’ve laid me down a new challenge.

How much can you actually do without a windowing environment? […] Opening images in fbi, PDFs in fbpdf, listening to music in cmus, watching movies in mplayer

Maybe not an “environment” but it sounds like you’re at least using a window manager. The PDFs and videos, not to mention web browser, are gonna be hard to pull off from a raw shell. [Hard but not that hard, apparently!]

But that’s a detail. Otherwise I share your enthusiasm, I’ve been doing things this way for a while. Basically: tiling window manager + TUI file manager + scripts which do precisely what I want, if possible in the terminal, if necessary by launching a GUI app. In practice the GUI apps are Firefox, mapping app, and messaging apps.

The general discovery I made was this: for the small price of foregoing pretty colors and buttons and chrome, you can get a computer to do exactly what you want it to do much quicker. Assuming a willingness to learn a bit of shell scripting, of course.

For example: I have a button which runs a script with getmail that pulls in my email and then deploys ripmime and weasyprint to convert it to datestamped PDF files, which it dumps with any attachments directly into an inbox folder. In other words, I have made ranger into my email client and I never need to “download” anything, it’s already there.

And those PDFs I can then manipulate with a bunch of shell scripts that use standard utilities, i.e. to split them, merge them, shrink them, clean them of metadata, even make them look like they come from photocopied paper (dumb bank!). All the stupid shit I once did with 10 manipulations hunting thru menus with a pointer in a fiddly app and always forgetting how it was done. Now I just select the file in the terminal, hit a button and it’s done, I don’t even see the PDF.

Of course, it’s not for everyone, but this is the promise of free computing.

While I appreciate the amount of development those companies bring to the table, the moment they’re in control of the project they’ll try to find ways to profit from it at the expense of the community, and it almost always results in a poorer product.

Yes, hard to argue with this. Or indeed anything else you just said. I agree that for any project it’s crucial that there be a wide variety of stakeholders.

Believe it or not, I’m being gradually won over by the arguments deployed in this discussion! Incredible but true.