A while ago as an experiment I set up a new system and decided to see just how much I could get done without installing a graphical environment. Most of my work happens in Neovim and there are plenty of applications that will do things like play video directly to a framebuffer so it should be pretty straightforward right? Turns out not really. Neovim will run in a kernel VT, but it’ll be … messy. The kernel virtual terminal is only designed to be good enough to use to install a desktop manager or repair your configuration. It’s not meant to be used full time. It only supports 16 colors which breaks just about every color scheme out there. It also only supports specially converted pixel fonts, meaning your choices of font size are somewhat restricted, ligatures are a complete no go, you can pretty much forget about nerdfonts (unless you wanna do a lot of work) and the only way to change fonts or font sizes is to use the setfont command which only works if run directly in the terminal as opposed to inside e.g. tmux.

It’s usable in a pinch, but I do not recommend.