Richard,

Well that is insteresting!
I have no excuse for not putting emacs on my "to explore" list.

thanks Richard

Solarfields,
No, your point is well made and taken in the positive spirit in which it is offered.

I gladly resort to a very nice little xfce environment every day, use firefox for writing things and reading things at linuxquestions; and checking my mail.

It is simply a medium-term goal of mine to get to the level of competence so as to be able to spend the afternoon at the consul without having to resort to a graphic interface, so as to be able to work uninterruptedly at a task in the event of something breaking in the GUI.

Thanks for "being that guy" Solar

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Then you can try this little exercise next time you do a clean install of Slackware: install the system and try to configure everything from the console before logging into X. This includes things like switching to the generic kernel and making your own initrd.gz in /boot, reinstalling lilo (keep your huge kernel entry in it, it can spare you a lot of headaches later), install any proprietary video drivers if you have to. Somewhere above people mentioned the text browser lynx. Well if you want to exercise -- you can use it to download the latest ATI or nVidia drivers (if you have such hardware and need these, of course). And in the end, when the whole system is nicely configured -- go to XFCE.

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Solarfields,
Excellent idea!

I'm sure that is the logic of where I am heading ..
though still making baby steps, which is fine, since my interest in SW is purely personal, without any work or other pressures supervening on what is pure joy and play!

thanks again (your suggestion filed close by for when the time arrives)