In the Digg pile today was a link to todo.txt, a simple yet sophisticated To Do list organizer based around a single text file and a handful of shell scripts. There’s a pretty cool movie file showing the system in use here.

As many people will tell you, it’s entirely possible to live your life at the shell. Alas, I think I’m too trained in the way of the mouse and maybe this highlights my youth: My first “serious” computer as a child was an Atari ST, so I was pushing around a mouse before I even knew what MS-DOS was, never mind sh or CP/M. Old habits die hard. But one day I might try booting to a text console and seeing what happens.

Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products and User Experience at Google, knows what I’m talking about. She uses the Pine shell-based email client, as she explains in a CNN Money article on productivity:

I use Gmail for my personal e-mail—15 to 20 e-mails a day—but on my work e-mail I get as many as 700 to 800 a day, so I need something really fast. I use an e-mail application called Pine, a Linux-based utility I started using in college. It’s a very simple text-based mailer in a crunchy little terminal window with Courier fonts. I do marathon e-mail catch-up sessions, sometimes on a Saturday or Sunday. I’ll just sit down and do e-mail for ten to 14 hours straight.

You can learn more about Pine here, where there are a number of screenshots. Pine runs on all Linuxes, Unixes and even Windows. It’s free of charge although not GPL.