That quote has always made me laugh. Astute, and appropriate, both to the times we live in and the distribution we use. Being a very conservative (though atheist) and "old-fashioned" thirty-something year old, I feel a certain kinship to it. One of my favorite sigs, indeed.

Back on topic, sort of: textillis, I know you did not specifically ask for other kinds of command line tools, but if you have not already done so, you will probably want to learn midnight commander eventually. It's a classic console file browser that every command line enthusiast should know. Of course, you do need to be comfortable with just cd and ls first.

Blooming,
Actually I'm all ears to news and info about command line tools.
MC is currently something I'm exploring and yes, I'm pretty good with the basics of CLI navigation.

Vim is a must-have.

Again, a word of advice. Use the built-in interactive tutorial. From the command-line, simply do this:

Follow the tutorial. Don't try to memorize things. Like the Nike ad says: just do it. And like we say here: il faut laisser le temps au temps.

Another solution is w3m in the mailcap file:

A handy trick is to define a separate mailcap just for mutt, on my own system in .muttrc:

Andrew:
noted!

Thanks kindly,

If I have understood the French properly: experience can't be manufactured, hurried or wished for; experience and knowledge need the thickening effect of time.

Your reminder regarding Vim is salutary and timely: when I first rushed through that tutorial, I was doing 10 new things at once, trying to read 20 man-pages and get 15 programs up ... all utterly new and outside my habitual cognitive inscape, if I can put it like that.

So, henceforth I resolve to look up everything I'd like to do -but currently avoid because I don't know how- so as to daily extend, ingrain and consolidate my practical grasp of vim.

(Because, in the words -paraphrased- of Saint-Exupery: "Pour faire un ami de quelqu'un, il faut d'abord l'apprivoiser")

For web browsing from a terminal I prefer ELinks. Although its color theme is a bit bland, I like the fact that it feels a bit like working with a gui browser - less awkward than links/lynx. You can grab it from SlackBuilds.org.

As saulgoode said, KMandla's articles are a great resource for console or lightweight gui applications. Here are a couple of articles about Elinks, and if you really like "life in the console", check out her/his new blog called Inconsolation.

As far as text editors, I used to use vim/gvim exclusively, with elaborate configs, plugins and whatnot. Nowadays I go with nano for basic editing from a terminal, and Sublime Text for everything else. Sublime is not free, but you can practically use it as long as you want without buying a license. There's a SlackBuild for that too. If I "had" to code in a console, I'd use vim.

Don't get me wrong, console is fine and sometimes either you don't need X, or you can use it to troubleshoot X related issues. But generally I find a graphical environment to be a more convenient way to do work, access the Internet, read mail, watch videos etc. so I boot straight to X, and when I need a command line I just open a terminal emulator.

Kabamaru,
I'm at a different place on the learning curve: more like at the beginning.
I want to surround myselk with the console environment as much as possible, so that
most of my computer time is time during which I will be forced to confront head on:

1. -what is in my computer and what do those things do
2. -how do I change those things and how they do what they do
3. -how far can I push my learning in the direction of freedom from someone else's choices,
   choices made before I came on the scene

All of which I'm sure you can sympathize with, given that you seem to have travelled such a trajectory yourself...

Thanks heaps for the references!

In that case you chose the perfect distro: simple, stable, batteries included :-)

Absolutely.

I started learning Linux in 2001, on Henry White's excellent - and now defunct - basiclinux.net mailing list. The course was distribution agnostic, but most folks used either Slackware 7.1 or Debian Potato (and mostly both in a double-boot scenario). One very precious advice Henry gave me at the beginning: only slay one dragon at a time.

Nicki,

Thanks for this: it reminds me of a precisous piece of advice I have carried with me all my life without always
following it: il faut accepter les hommes comme ils sont, y compris soi-meme.

Which implies recognizing and accepting and taking as one's marching orders the limitations which we are all living within; unlike in the Oprah-sphere, where everyone can do anything, in reality, we can't all be maths geniuses, nor can we all run like gazelles, nor can we all code like daemons.

So, following the advice of your friend, and in mind of what your friend's advice has reawoken in me: I gird myself to do daily battle at the lair of Vim, Naz-gul of the text editors, until I learn to mount him and stride the winds atop his neck, like a Vim-wizard :) (well, maybe I let my Tolkein-lore run away with me a little there)

Cheers

For working in a console environment? Nothing better.

You can run multiple shells within it as well as read email. Web browsing is a little weak, however.

thanks Richard, but I've already come to the emacs/vim fork in the road, and come down the vim-track too far to go back now,
not while I'm still making baby steps and painfully forging the neural-networks of my new baby slacker's brain

:)

Ah, but there is a vi-mode in emacs so that you don't have to re-train your fingers. :-)

I don't want to be that guy, but... are you sure you are not unnecessarily complicating your life, by doing things the hard way just for the sake of it?