More progress made on converting my single-core Atom NUC (which is incapable, for example, of running even a single-tab instance of Firefox) into a useful machine.

The majority of the CLI & ncurses applications I have installed are a pleasure to use, once one gets used to how to wrangle them. Increasingly, you cannot install applications through your distribution package management system, for instance: so you end up doing things like wrangling a bunch of Python virtualenvs, one-per-app, and installing junk through pip. This seems unsustainable in the long run.

Hooray if you think this means Snap/Flatpak/AppImage will solve all the world's problems. What it will undoubtedly do, however, is isolate users on desert islands where they are never sure what the right way to install something is (and if there's a security update? forget about it).

So that's problem #0. Problem #1 is a bit different, which is that no two ncurses applications seem to use the save set of keybinding conventions / command shortcuts — not the same as each other, and not the same as the GUI world. This, too, makes them less useable in the long run,

An example: The ncurses audio player Cmus, which uses the "C" key to pause and resume playback, and the numerals 1–7 to switch between different views on the audio library. There is literally no reason playback should not be started/paused with the spacebar, as is done in every modern audio/video app.