So, it's been about a month since I'd migrated to tiling window manager called awesome. I've learned a lot of tricks, and got used to the kinda-text environment. (I'll share them with you in a few days.)
Meanwhile, my desktop almost made it to 25 days of uninterrupted uptime, but I had to power it down to fit it with anohter ethernet interface. So I went on to tinker with it after booting it again. It's the good ol' KDEmod... but something's weird...
It's not just the larger monitor (19" compared to 14" on laptop), but it's the whole idea of the GUI interface that's making me a bit dizzy. Of course I can use it. It's not like I'm unable to get any shit done on it. But I'm now so used to the idea of typing commands and specifying all the options in one line of text, that I keep missing some cofigs here and there. Just now I'm burning the whole set of 6 discs of FreeBSD 7.0 (yes, I like completeness), and out of 6 discs, I burned 3 at max burner speed. That's totally not me. I always burn at half the declared speed of the medium, and quarter when it's something important. But I totally missed 3 discs.
I guess I got used to the whole "wodim speed=16 image.iso" type of interaction... The only thing still GUI in my head is the web browser. Hm, and yeah, a PDF reader. But that's only two. Everything else, and I mean every last thing I do on my PC has a text interface. Not all of them behave like a CLI tool (for example, mcabber is totally GUI-ish). But stuff like lftp, aria, mutt, vim, they all have the distinctive odor of the CLI. I must admit I'm getting addicted to it.
Now I can completely understand how it feels to be a CLI guy, and why some people thing graphical desktops generally aren't too efficient. It's like a jungle. A huge jungle with millions of species of bugs and all sorts of critters. Down near your feet, around you, above you, wherever you look, your brain is assaulted by megapixels of unnecessary distractions that people call eye candy.
I still wonder why people like to put up with such cognitive load. Actually, it's not that far in the past that I was actually using a graphical desktop environment. But it's like going into mountains to meditate. You come back, and you're shocked. It's just that calm in the CLI world.
