Around 10 years ago after the radeon xorg driver broke for the nth time on my arch install, I decided to just ditch Xorg altogether. I used screen for multiplexing, mutt for mail, irssi and some other messanger and w3m with (framebuffer support for images) for browsing the interwebs. I also had a videoplayer. I think it was mplayer. I rocked that setup for almost a year during college. Fun times.