This small project is tribute to awesome-tuis developers who make things like spotify player using just a fraction of RAM compared to official GUI client. Running those on my primary machine was nice, but obviously not a necessity so I looked around and took a spare Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W.

Initially I thought I will be limited to linux console without any X display system. First install of x server was total failure. I started to polish what I could with raw terminal, Terminus font, adjusting colors to have gruvbox like theme, tmux for layout and copy mode. Unfortunately despite those TUI apps are doing great in terms of resource usage they are designed for modern terminals using glyphs, emojis etc. That setup felt inferior.

So I though maybe Wayland with cage (kiosk mode with terminal app only) would work. I tried and it worked without any signifcant impact on resource usage. The more you have, the more you want, tmux wasn't my thing so I tried Sway.

That was a bit surprise. The system is very responsive, obviously multitasking is almost impossible, listening to spotify music on bluetooth headset + more CPU intensive operations make one or the other stuck.

On the other hand, when those limitations are accepted, I can use rcloud to sync my s3/dropbox files, use micro editor to review and edit my notes. Useful ;)

The setup on the screen:

- Wayland + Sway from official repository

- Foot terminal from official repository with gruvbox theme

- Fira Code Nerd Font for emojis

- spotify_player - needs building on virtualized Raspoberry Pi OS to use correct SSL library and support sixel images

- w3m browser from official repository, needs flags to support images

- superfile manager binary from GitHub

I think I will set that as my desktop background on Mac OS ;)

Cheers!