Just because I use twm, doesn’t mean I don’t want user-space mounting. So I use gnome-mount without invoking the whole gnome desktop environment. It appears impenetrable from the shell (though its man page is somewhat more useful).
The key is in the ‘-t -v’ options, which enable verbose console output rather than the useless X dialogs.
A simple mounting example:
$ gnome-mount -tv -d /dev/sdb1 [-m mountlabel]
where /dev/sdb1 is your device to mount, and mountlabel will be a subdirectory of /media (often ‘disk’ by default).
gnome-umount works in the same way:
$ gnome-umount -tv -m mountlabel
There’s plenty more configuration to be had, but sometimes you just want to look at a disk.