I accidentally found out that mpv can play videos from the TTY, meaning I don’t have to log in to a graphical session. It even has a scaled OSD, unlike anything I’ve seen in a terminal UI.
Obviously there are plenty of terminal applications that work in a TTY, (edit) intext-mode or using ncurses (/edit), but are there any others like mpv that aren’t strictly terminal apps but don’t require a display server (maybe because they do the job themselves)?
That’s a great list, thanks. But what I mean is applications that aren’t limited to the terminal / ASCII / ncurses. I’ve updated my question to clarify that.