I know a reasonable number of present-day developers who use a setup not much more complex than that: emacs or vim in a console. Not very practical for webdev, but you can do scientific-computing or embedded dev that way. For scientific computing you'd probably want a beefier CPU to run tests, but those are often run remotely on a computing cluster anyway.
On the contrary! I spend most of my working day using vim in a terminal (with tmux) to do web development. It's just text generation, after all.
I'd go so far as to say that if you're doing test-driven web development, it should be possible to build a system entirely within a terminal, and that's what I aspire to. It's only the front-end styling (CSS etc.) that actually needs anything more than a terminal.
And yes, I find this efficient: far more efficient than hacking and pressing F5. I think there are other benefits to this way of working: it tends to make progressive enhancement and accessibility the path of least resistance.
Yup. For embedded dev I use Vim in a console. It's convenient to have a big screen so I can have multiple terminals and reference materials open at the same time, but using a tiny computer like that is not out of the realm of possibility.
