>>15 Give it a go. I ran a machine like that, ages ago.
I spent a while just using a Pi Zero purely in the framebuffer terminal. This was admittedly more of an attempt to keep it from simply being stuffed in a drawer than any attempt to go all-in on text-only use, but it was fun. tmux is a wonderful piece of software. links is also a wonderful piece of software. I have never been super-particular about text editors, so I would simply do any text editing in nano.
I did have a handful of concessions for non-text content. I found a script to convert images to colored ascii art, mostly for a handful of things where I absolutely needed to see a picture since it's not really useful enough to use outside of desperation. There were certainly ways to just blit the image to the framebuffer, but I considered that cheating. I naturally was still able to listen to music, since the Zero was plugged into my TV and thus I could get sound over HDMI PDF files were a pain. I had a script that would strip out the text from most, but things weren't ideal at the best of times. I don't think I really encountered .doc/.docx/.odt/.abw/whatever word processor files, so that wasn't an issue. There was probably an easy way to grab the text out of them, anyway.
Web browsing via Links wasn't so bad back when I did it. This was maybe like 2016, 2017? Websites didn't have straight up JS access gates like Anubis, and websites had way less JS for key features in general. Lots of stuff was broken, yes, but only a few sites were outright useless with JS off. I was able to use Links relatively often on ordinary pages, even if less and less of the web was useful from it over time, and sites still made concessions to particularly bad mobile browsers, so I usually still had options.
Eventually, I did just install X and used it as a (still weak) desktop, then moved to faster Pi models since I ended up using the machine as an actual computer.
tl;dr: try it lol, I had fun; the modern web might be your biggest hurdle doing it in the current day
Give it a go. I ran a machine like that, ages ago.
I spent a while just using a Pi Zero purely in the framebuffer terminal.
This was admittedly more of an attempt to keep it from simply being stuffed in a drawer than any attempt to go all-in on text-only use, but it was fun.
tmux is a wonderful piece of software. links is also a wonderful piece of software.
I have never been super-particular about text editors, so I would simply do any text editing in nano.
I did have a handful of concessions for non-text content.
I found a script to convert images to colored ascii art, mostly for a handful of things where I absolutely needed to see a picture since it's not really useful enough to use outside of desperation. There were certainly ways to just blit the image to the framebuffer, but I considered that cheating.
I naturally was still able to listen to music, since the Zero was plugged into my TV and thus I could get sound over HDMI
PDF files were a pain. I had a script that would strip out the text from most, but things weren't ideal at the best of times.
I don't think I really encountered .doc/.docx/.odt/.abw/whatever word processor files, so that wasn't an issue. There was probably an easy way to grab the text out of them, anyway.
Web browsing via Links wasn't so bad back when I did it. This was maybe like 2016, 2017?
Websites didn't have straight up JS access gates like Anubis, and websites had way less JS for key features in general. Lots of stuff was broken, yes, but only a few sites were outright useless with JS off.
I was able to use Links relatively often on ordinary pages, even if less and less of the web was useful from it over time, and sites still made concessions to particularly bad mobile browsers, so I usually still had options.
Eventually, I did just install X and used it as a (still weak) desktop, then moved to faster Pi models since I ended up using the machine as an actual computer.
tl;dr: try it lol, I had fun; the modern web might be your biggest hurdle doing it in the current day