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The Latest And Greatest Console Applications?
An anonymous reader writes "While the 'Linux on the desktop' battle has yet to be won, KDE and Gnome are making great progress. There are too many apps to list on the cutting edge of software development for the X environment. But what about those of us stuck with old machines? Or who just want to work with the console? What console-based apps, that are undergoing just as much development as their X counterparts, do you use? Things like instant messengers and bittorrent clients, for example..."
Nethack.
It's a slick little console mp3 player with playlist support. It is quite nice to have when I do something to b0rk X.
that was too easy. was this a trick question?
.sigs are for post^Hers.
I PuTTY tha Fool!
When it comes to IRC gotta love BitchX. :)
This space is not for rent.
Man, how many times has screen saved my butt? Multiplies the usefulness of any console appplication by five.
The version of ls that comes with Fedora Core 2 is 5.2.1. Incredible software! Would use again! A+++++!!!!
nuff said!
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
One of the most under used console app is Screen. http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/ I am not a sys admin but Screen is still pretty handy.
Not exactly under development but a mature and good irc-client. http://www.irssi.org/
I asked this on the Gentoo forum a while ago and never got a straight answer, so I'll ask it again here: why? Why, except in a few rare cases, would you regularly use a command line IM client in favor of a graphical one? It seems terribly inconvenient.
... that I wrote - PQA - runs only from the console. I could write a Ruby/Tk or a WxWidgits GUI for it... but why bother? As it is, I can feed in all the necessary parameters at the command line and not have to click around a GUI.
At the same time, it's best to write the code in such a way that a GUI could be put on top of it... but for me, a console interface is good enough for now.
The Army reading list
naim is a great, free, GPL'd instant messaging client. Very featureful, intuitive, and in my opinion one of the best examples of ncurses programming out there.
Eschew Obfuscation
gnut, a console nutella app which appears to be a dormant project these days, was pretty cool as far as real applications.
Method of processing duck feet
web: links or lynx
ftp: ncftp
media: mplayer, mpg321
And the mighty fdisk & cfdisk pair cure all wounds.
... some folks start X from the command line, soo ...
Well, I do not quite use console, but since switching to ION (http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/ ) I have been much more productive in my dual display environment. I run unclutter to hide my mouse, and use naim for instant messaging, links for some browsing, and mp3blaster for music. Oh, and of course xdaliclock to tell me the time.
I maintain a fedora-based server which of course is much better connected than my home machine. At times I browse remotely with lynx to get to sites that require registration before making downloads.
___
internet, productivity blog
This continues to be my port scanner of choice; although it has a pretty front end, it really doesn't need one.
#!
emacs...What a dork... the one-word answer is (of course) "vi"
NAIM = (AIM for the console and it uses 128bit encrytion too) and of course...the one that EVERYONE knows.....emacs emacs rocks! I do all my coding in emacs.
Red Bull gave me wings and I flew into the ceiling fan.
nmap is the best app for hacking.
Centericq rocks. I use it for icq, and occasional peep at irc channels. No need to stress the mousehand, and it also has a very small footprint. It's apt-gettable, so there's no excuse to not try it :).
One advantage of text based apps is the fact that no window management is required, so minimal keyboard driven window managers like ion and ratpoison can be used optimally.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
My old linux text-only boxes exist do do my bulk downloading for me.
Bittorrent itself is the best client, the btdownloadcurses.py script. Building just the ncurses app without needing the bloat of X to link against was a bit annoying. Thankfully emerge can pull it off with "-qt -gtk -gnome" use flags.
Another good client is called ctorrent, written in C, a console app. It segfaults when the d/l is > 2gigs (I think thats why), and sometimes doesnt redownload failed segments.. I had to drag some downloads to a windows box and finish them up with the real client. Shame about the bugs, it's a very light and fast app, I hope it's finished.
An old P200/MMX, a big hard drive, and all my downloading is done via ssh, and my real computer is never bogged down with such tasks. wget, bittorrent, ncftp, etc..
Also, it makes throttling it easy. At the gateway, I just throw all traffic from my "grunt boxes" IP's into a lower queue. Torrents no more grind my connection to a halt, it's much more effective than trying to mark packets for other reasons (size, etc).
dircproxy is a cool lil app too, I can keep connected to IRC and bounce from machine to machine. It doesn't handle DCC's all that well, it always seems to clip them.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Grep still has my vote
I'm working on a Java plugin, a Flash plugin, and a google bar - as well as a popup blocker and an anti-spyware plugin.
cd, ls, cp, rm, mv, ln, head, tail, tee, grep, find, awk, sed, cat, more, vi, ps, kill
:-)
Gnome is fine to watch pictures or lauch some useful apps like FireFox, Thunderbird and the like but my most useful graphical app is XTerm... lots of XTerm
isn't that what stdin is for ?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Really with suitable macro you can make vi to do all these things like e-mail, IM, bittorrent and web surfing. Really a great editor.
mp3blaster and abcde
using overnet with screen is really good
Fast, clear graphical interface. It's great. It's what all windowed applications should be.
Easy guys, I put my pants on one leg at a time. The difference is after I put on my pants I make gold records!
One of my favorite tools taking care of things when I'm not around! ;-)
There is some very nice console jabber client, it is called EKG2. I'm using it all the time for the jabber communication - instant messaging with friends, news notification (rss), remote systems monitoring and so more. But there is one very annoyind downside - it hasn't been translated to languages other than Polish ;-). Yet.
:wq
I've found console based emule to be very good for getting porn, I mean, fine art.
The only program I really use in console mode has to be vim, purely because in a gui, the menus are cluttersome, and late night hacking requires coloured text on a black screen, not for any practical purpose, but it makes this script kiddy feel 1337 (well, slightly)
I haven't seen a comment mentioning Midnight Commander! And this app is great, show me a Linux geek who hadn't used it at least once. ;).
Nautilus and Konqueror can go away in shame when you start seriously using xterm+MC
(don't take sentence above as flamebait, just kiddin', using Konqueror myself)
Hey - who you calling a Luddite? :-)
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
I've always liked elm and tin for email and news.
Certainly, there are much better products, but these two applications work exactly the way I want them to. What I especially like with console based email applications is that there is no way HTML sites will send a message back to the sender.
The world's premier pr0n-leeching tool.
To be fair, I'm not sure how much development is happening with this tool. How can you improve perfection?
And then use the 101 glories of emacs,
.el files
multiple screens, shell buffers, getris,
web browser, doctor, oh and editing text.
I am not sure what the most worked on emacs extensions are, or where new ones sprout from,
maybe I should just look for new
between releases.
Maybe it is already perfect and complete.
Be Free: Free Software Tuition
how much development there is on it I don't know, but
slrn is very nice newsreader.
Nethack hands down.
is quite good as well with support for icq000, yahoo, aim, irc, msn, gadu-gadu and jabber
CenterICQ
How do you take a screen shot of tty1 !?!
Pardon me, I'm a WordStar cripple from way back in the early '80s. Got my start coding asm in WordStar on a CP/M machine for a while, then cut my teeth on Turbo Pascal and Turbo C.
The main draw of the WordStar keystrokes? Your hands never have to stray far from home row. It's incredibly sane.
Joe's Own Editor (JOE) perpetuates the sanity in the 'nix world.
Cursed GTK count?
Software Freedom Day!.
centericq - nice Im client, does just about every protocol
... to name just a few ...
cdcd - console cd player
aview - ascii image viewer
mp3blaster - media player
mutt - MUA
slrn - newsreader
w3m - web browser (does CSS and tables)
screen
snd
emacs
For P2P, the giFT frontend giFTcurs does the job well. Look, pretty screenshot. All-in-one package for OpenFT, FastTrack, Gnutella and OpenNap.
I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
Umm.. apache?
I imagine there a few database apps and
other servers too. Just a guess.
X is for desktop and workstation stuff.
Things that a user interacts with at the screen.
It gives the option of the console also, so the user tends to loose nothing.
Applications that run on servers and daemons don't need a bunch of clicky buttons, and are often not connected to a monitor.
But, I guess you were asking for console desktop apps. There are a few, but as a user interface,
text only is mildly crippled. The only time I use console desktop stuff is when I bork X or when all I've got is SSH (at least once a day).
Other than that, pork is probably my favorite IM client. It's patterned after ircII.
A quick check through my history, and a look at open terminal windows, tells me that most of what I do with the command line is directly related to what I would consider the Operating System. I see a ton of ls, cd, more, dig, tar, gzip, etc. I also see myself using ssh to do OS-type things on other *nix machines. The second place for frequency, though probably first for amount of time using, goes to all of those vim sessions. Lastly, I see a lot of Perl and gcc.
Essentially, I don't use a lot of newly developed tools - or even, for that matter, tools that are still being heavily developed. I don't use the command line to browse, and I don't use it to check mail (though there are a few pines in there). The core of my user experience still feels like it's commands, but in fact, the mindless things that take most of my time are done in a graphical environment (like typing this post). The only tools I see myself using that aren't older than me are tools used for security work (a wonderful list of which you may find here), and the occasional bout of StreamRipper.
Somehow, after this post, I feel less like a console jockey than I thought I was. A better question might be: what do console users need?
Paper Pusher
Console is different than a terminal.
I regularly use 2 kinds of gui apps, web browsers and the MacOS finder.
I prefer the power of the commandline and I can do the same things with the same commands on just about any OS beit my Mac, Linux, or Solaris.
For torrents I use Bittornado. I have a better question, how do you run a program that is determined to be run from a tty in the background? Bittornado in the background says something like "tty suspended" or somehting when I background it. Please provide any insights into this.
I have burned CDs for years using cdrecord under Linux, Windows, and my Mac. To me its the best way to burn a cd.
Ghesh, I could go on for hours with all of the little terminal apps that I use, including my aliases, shell functions, and scripts.
I'm a linux newbie really, but even I can answer this...
1. I might not have a 256M+ of RAM on my system needed to make the current linux GUIs run well.
2. I might have 256+MB, but since my linux box runs as a webserver, I might not want to bog it down with a GUI.
3. I might just PREFER CLIs.
4. And finally, I am a 1337 h4x0r and don't want to use anything that you n00bs might be able to understand.
I'm being serious so if you were going to mod me funny, don't mod me at all!
I meant to say this link.
I guess you could deduce it, but anyway.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Midnight Commander...
When doing some rough copying stuff or space-cleaning. I intuitively remembered the commands from 'Norton Commander' from many years ago.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
tload. Marvel at it's ascii glory.
vi
I know, I know someone else got modded as flamebait, but its just not right to list emacs without vi.
There are so many countless things you can do with sed when it comes to running jobs and processing files... it gives me a woody.
screen - to keep lots of applications running that i can access from anywhere.
pork - a console aim client
w3m - a sweet console web browser with optional image support
bittorrent - the standard bittorrent client runs on the console
mutt - powerful and configurable email client
giftcurs - command line client for gift which can share files on the kazaa network
mplayer - console/graphical media player that can play anything
ncftp - an ftp client with tons of features
lame is also my favorite for
converting recordings into mp3
lame file.wav file.mp3
Gentoo rules. Say goodbye to dependency hell.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
I always keep a shell window open and no matter how good the editor/IDE I work with, I could not live without grep. Especially as I can pipe output from one grep to the next and refine (-v) the results till I locate some specific result.
And for all my downloading needs I use wget. Besides being way out useful for downloading movies (annoying pages that embed movies and controls that don't allow you to save those movies for later enjoyment), flash animations, PDFs, being able to see the dialog with the server (-S) helped me more than once to figure out what was I doing wrong with my web apps.
__________
Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace!
When it comes to monitoring logfiles, I prefer my own program MultiTail big time. It took quiet a lot of effort to develop it, but I think I included all functionality that I could think off. :)
I use it always and install it everywhere. But then, I might be a little biased
www.vanheusden.com - home of Multitail, HTTPing, CoffeeSaint, EntropyBroker, rsstail, bsod, listener, nagcon, nagi
along the whole "ssh to the home linux box to do things they won't let me do at work", mutella is a kickin' gnutella client. it also has a nice web interface which is a bit easier to use ... perhaps it could use the ncurses treatment, but it still rocks.
speaking of consoles -- i wish Ximian would enable a console-only mode for Evolution, which they say is doable. if they did it would be THE killer app on this list.
I guess vi and some other editors have caught up in the visiting-many-files-at-once game, but I really only have to leave when I want to use a browser. And I don't even have to do that--it's just easier.
Linux console RPN calculator http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~pelzlpj/orpie/
Besides screen, which is one of the most important while underestimated text apps, i really like lftp. Nice features have been added to it in the last month/years. Like an ftp-like access method to http servers.
- pdksh is a superb shell
- screen is a first-rate window manager
- nvi is a fine editor
- lynx is a good browser
- snownews is a decent RSS aggregator
- And
/usr/bin contains most anything else you might require.
I can't see how anyone would need anything more...The greatest console app ever is easy: emacs. Thanks, RMS! Functions as a news reader, email client, game console, lisp compiler, AND back scratcher! Plus, it provides excellent reading material in the form of the emacs help file / GNU manifesto.
I've heard it can do text editing, too, although I'm not sure how commonly people use _that_ functionality.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
try out a website that is done in frames with links then compare that to linx. links has really come far in useability and I am sure learned a bit from linx.
Well not really an 'application', but it should be linux when it comes to the *real* consoles
XBox-Linux
PlayStation2-Linux
Which console do you want to use today?
cd
on the others you mentioned I get some kind of error message:
c:\> Bad command or file name
In no particular order.
1. irssi - really great, Perl-scriptable, user-friendly curses-based IRC client. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
2. vim - The best editor on Earth, hands down.
3. w3m - The best console web browser ever. Firstly, it has advanced capabilities for rendering tables. It doesn't do frames as well but those are really hard to do anyway.
4. pork - An ircII themed AIM client. Great for when you're on the road and only have PuTTY...
And, who can forget (although many may contend that this does not count...)
5. apt and dpkg! Dependency-resolving, self-upgrading, cow-mooing, ass-kicking package management system tag team! This is why I swear by Debian.
is called 'tdl'. Short for to do list. You can get it here
After several attempts to live solely on the console, here are the best apps I've found:
Links: a superior web browser alternative to Lynx that formats things correctly on your screen.
Mutt and Pine: Two great email clients that allow you to work much more quickly than with any graphical client.
Nano: My favorite text editor. I refuse to feel guilty that it's easy to use!
Micq: a very nice ICQ client that works much better than the various AIM console clients that are out there.
Finally, last, and well yes, basically least, Seatris: This is the best -- the best! -- of all the console tetris games. It takes me back to wasting hours in the various UC Santa Cruz computer labs.
Um, Go Banana Slugs! Go Stevenson College! I think that takes care of this year's quota of school spirit.
Check out my blog: My Galaxy is Milky Way Adjacent
emacs
And play...
angband
scthangband
zangband
tome
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
The best command line tool is startx. It gives you all the power of a full graphical environment within the console.
All the console apps are perfect the way they are. There is no possible way to improve them. GUI apps are just now getting the same functions that console apps have had for the last decade. The little improvement that is happening with GUI apps is mainly with the GUI itself. All they've been doing it tweaking the design and look/fell of their apps.
"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use." - Soren Kier
Besides the obvious (and ridiculously awesome) nethack, one of the most important and continuously updated CLI programs I use daily is transcode.
It converts between video formats, and does so quickly and with very good quality. I use it to make XVID backups of my DVDs to play on the road or in my XBOX running MythTV. It's very scriptable, which is why I like it. It also has a great perl-gtk frontend called dvd::rip. You can crop and zoom, as well as browse the various video and audio tracks before you encode. It even supports subtitles.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
ADOM!
"5... 4... 3.. 1... OFFBLAST!"
Or any variation. I use Volkov Commander for DOS/WIN, and Midnight Commander
for linux. It fits on a floppy-based rescue disk. My personal favorite.
Along with Screen, Irssi and Naim, I've come to love Mutt, it's everything I've wanted from a mail client. Bit of a steep learning curve, but so worth it.
I don't know about active development, but these are killer apps that I couldn't live without, even though I seldom use the console:
pine: the ONLY email client I use
vim: the ONLY editor I use
gcc: what else would you compile/link with?
make: truly a killer app! Not to mention autoconf.
wget: the better to fetch you with, my dear.
bittorrent: Best invention since sliced bread
prozilla: Like Download Accelerator
locate: now where did I put that file?
ogrish.com/ogrish-dot-com-kim-sun-il-beheading-vid eo-full.wmv
Or was that a windows app? I can't remember, I stopped playing with non-shell console apps about 10 years ago.
aalib
Not necessarily an app...but love it when X is down.
Being able to manipulate conversations exactly like emacs buffers is extremely powerful.
GET YOUR WEAPONS READY! --DR.LIGHT
Well, it seems like there are quite a few console apps out there.......but does anyone have any screenshots? ;-)
vim
there is something about being able to use the arrow keys and type at the same time.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
But nobody can tell me where I can find a DECENT console calendar app. Eg upto Evolution\Outlooks standards. Closest I found were uncomplete and left for dead projects on sf.net :(
Gnome wasnt built in a day.
make menuconfig
I know it's still svgalib, but it is the best picture viewer ever. zgv rules!
Or you can just use mpd, which supports most popular formats (MP3, OGG, FLAC, AAC/MP4). Use kmp, phpmp, or mpc to control it depending on your mood (and whether or not you have X started).
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Not to mention, it's easier to do through a ssh session and not get busted talking to your wife or doing something useful for the company. Beware corporate keyloggers though. If you are that far into a big dumb company, you probably can't have Putty and you might as well give up.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
But a couple of years ago i got by happily with:
gcc
vi
bitchx
frotz (and a pile of Infocom game files)
lynx
slrn
pine
man
um....
bash
Spent about 5 months in the summer without X even installed. I didn't really miss it, at the time.
do() || do_not();
Simple emacs spreadsheet, ant and maven
integration caught my eye.
Be Free: Free Software Tuition
Hieroglyphics went out thousands of years ago. I can't stand apps with zillions of little icons that I can't memorize, or menus several layers deep which have no logical organization. I can keep my hands in one place, the keyboard.
...
Graphics programs, sure, use a GUI. Programs which represent networks, ok. But if I can do it on the command line, I can do it faster and easier.
To expand upon your naive response
Why, except in a few cases, would anyone want to fire up a bloated, slow to load, screen hogging app, and have to take your hands off the keyboard to push a mouse all over tarnation, to hunt among menus and wait for balloon tips to appear, then click click click, more hunting, click click click, when a couple of dozen keystrokes would do the same job? It really seems like the perfect way to waste time looking busy.
Infuriate left and right
SoX is very useful for sound processing. Try it :)
Well, if you can ssh to your home system (say from work), you can have IM conversations that are private, without the hassle of setting up a terminal.
I also used to check mail via pine remotely for similar reasons.
Please help metamoderate.
I've found snownews to be a great RSS aggregator, and prefer using it to any of the GUI-based aggregators I've tried. Your mileage may vary, but I'd say it's one of the most useful console applications I've recently discovered.
If you have the framebuffer enabled, try links -g -driver fb. Pretty nice for a console app! Remember to start gpm first.
and bitlbee of course
... not too shabby at all
... not perfect (by a long shot) but getting there
and eefje so that I can syslog straight to an irc channel
tail -f comes to mind
mutt (although I'm not entirely satisfied)
vim of course
emacs is also going strong
convert is nice
zsh
konsole (the kde terminal emulator)
I use abcde for CD ripping and mp3cd for CD burning.
These are not just for "old" machines, but also for remote work, and just the apps you use regularly when working primarily with a CLI -- especially an editor.*
'nuff said.
*) Be it emacs or vim. Both also come with GUI's.
for example:0 1-16].jpg
:-)
curl -fO http://www.lesbiansplayroom.com/pgal/016/images/[
(Note: NSFW: not safe for work|wife. And remove slashdot spaces.)
mc gives you eyes in the deep dark console caves...
No explanation needed.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
if we are building things right, the GUI stuff should be building on improved solid console applications.
We run the risk of falling into the same trap our win32 counterparts are in by focusing totally on the GUI. Sure, some things are going to be GUI only, but most things should not be. A well designed application can be driven from the command line just as it can be driven from a GUI wrapper intended to make life easier.
Scripting, low bandwidth access, access for the blind and voice operation are all things the command line facillitates easily. We need to continue to respect that.
Blogging because I can...
http://www.nog.net/~tony/warez/cowsay.shtml
The classics never get old.
kill
killall
init
my favorite ftp client by far is lftp.
Both these scripts take an argument of where your .torrent files are located, and will continually check the directory to add/drop torrents... they both list all the torrents that you're downloading, which is more convenient than opening many windows, IMO...
The usefulness is that I can run one of these scripts from home, ssh to my home machine from work, and download .torrent files directly to the directory, where they'll be picked up by the script...
The btlaunchmany.py script can be set up as a background process so that once you kill your ssh session, the process won't terminate...
My dog ate my sig
Back on topic, my favorite console app is the Mutt E-Mail Client. Who can argue with the powerful searching and flagging, lightning-quick interface, integration with dozens of UNIX editors, encryption tools, and the like, as well as the security and accessibility benefits of a text-based UNIX mailer?
... ok it was a busted HPUX server not a Linux box ... (a production one at that .... )
t
OK, it is actually just an alias, but I can never remember that you use the cryptic 'tar xzvf' to untar a gzipped archive.
/etc/bashrc:
so, the first thing I do when I get my hands on a new linux machine is add the following to
#alias
alias l='ls -la'
alias untar='tar xzvf'
alias scr='screen -D -R'
so, what is the first thing you alias?
slashsearch.org - slashdot search. powered by google.
My favorite calculator program is rpcCalc. It works (and even looks!) just like an old HP-11C RPN calculator. A great little piece of software. Even when I need a calculator in X, I fire up an RXVT and launch rpcCalc.
Raj Against the Machine! http://social-butterfly.appspot.com/
In college a few years back, some friends and I used to stay logged in to our Linux webserver just about anytime we were online. One time, one or our admins had a technical problem and really needed help from another admin. AdminA saw that AdminB was logged in, so he attempted to contact him only to get no response. In spite of being logged in, AdminB had been away from his terminal for several hours. This frustrating experience was AdminA's inspiration to create a terminal locking program called simply away. When you run away, your terminal is locked until you enter your password, and other users logged into the system can see that you are away, as well as any reason you give for it, when they run w.
It is available as a package for Debian, where it is maintained by someone else now, although it hasn't been updated in about a year and a half. Really, though, there's not much that it still needs. It serves its purpose, and while it may not be cutting edge, my friends and I still make good use of it.
I am astonished to see that no one has mentioned Bash...
I have a batch script that runs killall and starts playing the metallica album.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
This little utiliy was found somewhere in 1993-1995 from PC Magazine. This is similar to Midnight Commander, but for DOS. IT'S STILL GREAT!
Just got to love those two.
I have to add my vote for joe and mutt.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
In light of Quake's 8th birthday, sQuake.
feh! The article is clearly slated as to imply that console is something old and stagnant. Just because console apps don't bloat like sponges doesn't mean they couldn't kick ass. They do, and severely. I've even converted some windows-admins to linuxhood by constantly demonstrating how to do things they can only dream of with few lines of shell code or perl. :-P
The example apps, IM and torrents are well taken care of. Bittorrent/bittornado comes with curses clients, which the article submitter must be blind not to notice. Bitlbee handles multi-IM-integration nicely.
Lynx still remains the fastest web browser to the date, albeit Dillo is making a good challenge. SSH and Screen make remote operations easy and secure and even my favorite editor joe had a facelift recently.
Sometimes, the best part of my day, is when I log into my Slackware box.
What about those of us that prefer to use the slide-rule? where are our apps?
What about my old crank start car? where are all of the neat things for that?
What about Morse code applications? where's the TCP/IP over Morse code spec?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Disclosure: I wrote the second two of the three. . .:)
You are not the customer.
I love it. It plays everything. On whatever.
...and I'd hazard a guess that most other who use X nowadays are also doing it from the console of the computer that they're primarily using.
Cheers from the Terminology Liberation Front.
Damnit, do not mod me as funny. I am completely serious.
MC, as it is know to those of us that have known the love of Midnight Commander, is a a tool of incompareable power. From its assorted views, to its many tools and commands, it is a diamond in the muddy rivers of linux console apps.
Plus it uses F-keys, F-Keys are cool.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - BF
I even use it in X Save your mod points - send me a GMail invite instead (duncanatlk@yahoo.com)
Flagrant Self-evangelisation, here.
AA JuggleMaster
For bonus points, it'll even function as a system load monitor.
That way I can call it a utility instead of a toy. Or, uhm. Right.
Gary (-;
first of all I love CLI apps but I always run them in windowed envirement anyway - like remotely in SSH client under Windows or on X under *nices. they usualy integrate nice with other X programs.
s /
n dex.php
...and many others. I've just mentioned new ones - they probably not quite new, but at least new to me. the older ones to mention vim, mc, nano, pine, mutt, slrn, aptitude, linuxconf and so on...
my (recent) favourites:
ekg2 - Jabber and GaduGadu client (propertiary polish IM network, very popular here).
http://dev.null.pl/ekg2/ (in polish)
snownews - RSS/RDF/XML feeds agregator, just does it's job.
http://home.kcore.de/~kiza/software/snownew
aewan - console text editor aimed for creating color ASCI-art.
http://aewan.sourceforge.net
htop - interactive equivalent of top.
http://htop.sourceforge.net/
iftop - network bandwith monitor.
http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pdw/iftop/
smbc - SMB client.
http://www.air.rzeszow.pl/smbc/smbc/en/i
cacaview from cacautils/cacalib - excelent image viewer (yes, in ASCII mode).
http://sam.zoy.org/projects/libcaca/
greed - adictive logical game.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/greed/
It is a fork of links with cleaner code, saner development roadmap (no X11 support as in the recent bloated links versions) and a couple of both advanced and handy features.
Among others, it has
- Frame and table support; table support can be triggered on and off
with a hotkey when surfing a web site.
- Can be scripted (locally, not remotely) with lua or guile; this
allows, for example, to enter & customize "smart addresses" like "gg
+ keyword" for google searches or
"wp" for wikipedia
- browser tabs like in Mozilla, Konqueror etc.
- typeahead jump to links like in Mozilla
- Text area input fields of HTML forms can be edited with $EDITOR; for example, I am
typing this here in vim spawned from elinks (although this is a
little-known feature of classical lynx as well)
- Optional html color(!) support (can be toggled, as all parameters)
- Links can be numbered and accessed by number - as in lynx, but this
can be toggled during runtime
- Support for SSL and form history
- Javascript support (as a compile-time option) is on the way
- High configurability/customizability, including all keyboard
shortcuts, through dialogues within the browser
And the best thing is: Despite all these features, the elinks executable is still smaller than that of lynx (724k vs. 1.1 MB on my machine) and links (902k).-F
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
Cicq is a great instant messenger client, active development team and support mailing list.
Halo is a great console application
oh wait...
twin gives you all the goodness of X, without the X-ness :) ... X-lite ... low-carb X ... or something like that.
It's like diet X
It was covered on slashdot back in 2001, but it's so cool for streamable media.
I guess there's guis for it, but who cares! If it's streamable media (audio/video) then you can take it from anywhere (internet, hard disk, line input, cd player) do anything to it (volume normalization, decoding, encoding, anything you have a plug-in for) and put it anywhere (internet, hard disk, line out).
I can't believe people don't rave about this!
eLinks for a fancy text Web browser (better than Lynx and Links in my opinion) and tin for text newsreader.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Consider binding capslock as an extra escape key, then even after an i or a you can move back to cursor control without taking your hands off homerow.
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
mpg321 -@ riaa.will.sue.the.world.m3u
You need people like me so you can point your fuckin fingers and say, "That's the bad guy." So what that make you? Good?
Use them daily in CLI mode and you'll have to pry em from my cold dead fingers ...
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
And, yes, I've lost quite a few months myself... :-(
On the other hand, real life is for users that can't handle nethack. If it wasn't for another console application that has hooked me, I'd reinstall!
My real favorite console application is Perl.
Both incredible power/expresiveness -- and with the syntax, crazy extensions and humour in the Perl tradition, it's like playing a game! :-)
Yes, yes, Python fans -- my adventure is someone elses horror game. :-)
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
Have anyone ever heard about xmove, kind of cool isn't it? You all thanks me later geeks ;-) I kind of like your kind.
Dios, God, Ala... etc... etc...
snownews is a great console RSS reader.
apache's tomcat is my answer.
Being able to manage critical business web application server systems from a command line is invaluable. Tomcat has a simple directory structure, and simple configuration files, yet works superbly as a server for the JSP and Servlet aspects of J2EE. Its easy to start, stop, deploy code to, and configure, from the command line.
Are any of the CLI newsreaders still around? I really miss those, and they didn't come with RH8. I have yet to find anything nearly as good. Pan is OK, but I still miss trn...
Granted, this is not strictly a console application, but bitlbee is perfect for those of you who like to use various IM accounts along with IRC. It acts as an IRC server relay to Jabber, AIM, MSN, ICQ, etc. What this means is you set up your favorite IRC client (if it's not irssi it should be ;) and connect to the bitlbee server. There's only one channel there, #bitlbee, and @root will help you set your accounts up. Once you've done so, your contacts will join the channel. To talk to them, you /msg them. It's pretty cool.
But what about the schizos like me who use emacs for coding and vim for minor editing or browsing files? I've already remapped capslock to ctrl, what do I do for esc?
There was Cowboy Neal at the wheel of a bus to never-ever land.
BitlBee is the best addition in the last few years, in my opinion. It's an ICQ/MSN/Jabber etc. client, that appears as an IRC server. Thus you can talk with people who insist on using crappy proprietary IM protocols, using your old trusty text mode IRC clients. This beats any text mode ICQ client I've seen by far.
He's missing the point, isn't he?
Staying on homerow rocks. Other great movement keys:
(,) back, forward one sentence
{,} back, forward one paragraph
H, M, L top, middle, bottom of screen
I turned capslock into control to reduce pinky RSI.
I now use ^[ as the escape key so I don't have to leave homerow to hit escape.
Invest the time to learn movement keys. It pays off. Unless you're about 70.
i mostly use kde with gui apps, but i do use terminals for file browsing and such, bittorrent, mplayer sometimes when listening to music..
aaxine is the aalib (Ascii-Art) version of xine. Although not THAT cool on 80x25, it makes quite an impression on a video beamer with 200x100 chars (run in an xterm, of course).
:-)
And there's of course my trusted and heavely customized vim and my beloved perl
Look, this thing is totally safe! Built it myself, you know. You just press that button like this and then turn that lev
Filter bypass
Filter bypass
I really must recommend moosic. It's an easy and effective way to play mp3/ogg/etc, from the command line. It runs as a daemon, with a nice command-line client to control it. There is also a gtk client under development.
ssh a tool for using remote machines zsh a shell vim an editor (emacs coul be an alternative) lynx a webbrowser (links could be an alternative) screen a window manager ncftp a ftp client (lots of others alternatives exists) python a scripting language (ruby, perl, php could be alternatives) cc a c compiler cvs a versioning control system (svn could be an alternative) (La)TeX a typesetting system sudo a tool to avoid root access make ...
"The Almighty tells me he can get me out of this mess, but he's pretty sure you're fucked."
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
The classical pilot-link package includes a utility for converting PalmOS calendars to remind syntax.
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
Still here? Ok, here it goes.
[rant]
Today we are inundated with all sorts of increasing complex technology. Take Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) for an example. A hughly complex bit of technology for sovling the problen of getting data from here to there, or there to here. Of course, there must be filters, authentication, etc. etc etc.
But, haven't we been doing that for years? Why do we need to introduce a level of complexity to the problem when the solution is right before us.
A web server is a web service. It accepts formatted commands and returns a response. It can add authentication and encryption. On the server side there can be all sorts of filters, code, add-ons and none of it is GUI, NONE.
rexec, ssh, rcp and also "web services". They accept a command and return data. They can perform any complex function you want on the server and return some data.
So what happened. GUIs happened. Instead of capturing the data via pipes and applying any other filtering or whatever, we use a GUI. We get back the result and depend upon some GUI to display it. But we have different standards, things are incompatible and you are limited to only what the browser designer intended. Of course there are plugins. Yet that just bloats out the GUI even worse.
[/rant]
[rave]
So, what is the answer. Simplicity is the answer. Instead of building ever increasingly complex GUIs and web services, go back to what made unix great: small but useful parts that can easily be joined via pipes.
So instead of a bloated browser consider:
Ok, bad example. But the idea is that you have a piece that can fetch the HTML from a web server, some other piece that massages it, filters, etc, then pipes to a display. Small pieces that can be pieced together to do a task.[/rave]
I have started a project to investigate this notion at http://sewer.sf.net
Your friend and well-wisher
m0smithslash
http://www.ferociousflirting.com
But can Emacs do footnotes? I've been trying to find a very light-weight word processor, and so far Ted and Siag haven't worked well for me. Is there a console word processor that can do footnotes and change text formatting easily?
Dopewars!
Takes capitalism back to the source...
I'm happy with Gentoo Linux, KDE is nice but far too bloated for my tastes, Gnome's more my minimalist style but I just cannot get on with Nautilus so I'm looking for suggestions for a different WM.
I tried Fluxbox but found it had quite a few display quirks plus it seems difficult to set up a nice clean theme without resorting to a MAC-like Aqua one. (Sorry, Apple-type peeps, it's a nice looking theme but everyone seems to use it. )
I was thinking of trying IceWM with maybe the Rox file manager - anyone got any further suggestions?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
See the title. Need I say more?
Anonymous Cowards Unite
Yes. Emacs (gnu and xemacs) booth have support for
footnote-mode (M-x footnote-mode), if you do this
in Text mode (with adaptive filling) and you
have many word-processor-esq features.
VIM!!!!!! The greatest application in the history of mankind.
The Farewell Tour II
I wasn't trying to be funny
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Fuck emacs. Fuck vi. Fuck pico. It's all about echo.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
'^[', of course. With control in a sane place, that becomes very easy to do. Alternatively, I suppose that you could remap the control key to escape -- although I prefer making mine Mod3 and using it for various window-management bindings.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
autonuts-mutella
uses Soundex algorithm to download unique files using mutella (a command line gnutella client). saves me hours of time.
requires mutella:
Am I dead yet?
No, echo is for wimps. Real gurus use cat.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
A console msn client, gtmess, for all of those friends who you can't convert to jabber ;-)
1.- pine and pico (yes, I know the license issue)
2.- jdkchat (a telnet based chat system)
I'm a pretty text-oriented fella. Here are some tools I use: screen - terminal multiplexer
OMGWTFBBQ, how did I live without this? How many xterms do you have going? Me? 1. But typically 10 terminals. Copy/paste, scrollback, multi-user session sharing, detach/reattach, key remapping, status bar... If you're not using screen you are a LOSER.
vim - editor
Excellent fork of vi. Maintained, well-extended, compatible.
mutt - mail client
Another example of high-quality software. It's correct, it's extensible, it does what I need.
w3m - browser
I use Firefox for most of my browsing, but when I go text I use w3m. It even has this crazy images-in-xterm feature if you need graphics. I remapped many of the uncomfortable-for-me default bindings to be more vi-like. Thankfully, Firefox has a ton of reasonable key-controls. I changed the Google quicksearch to use "g" so to Google I just type "<ctrl-l>g<space>term".
zsh - shell
Again, high quality, correct, fully-featured, compatible, extensible.
less - pager
Less is indeed more. Much more than more. More isn't even more enough to match less's moreness, much less less's... uh, more-than-more-ness. And you don't want to get pwned tailing your Apache logs when you could less them, right?
ssh - remote login
Even if Theo is an ass. Maybe I shouldn't be an ass about his being an ass.
I run screen under ssh-agent. Who likes retyping their 1337 passwords over and over?
I run sawfish for configurability of my wm. I have quite a few things hotkeyed. I rarely move or resize windows, but those functions are configured to alt-button1 and alt-button3 for ease.
Things I'd like:
IM client A good text IM client. I use gaim (maybe just better key controls?). A good text IRC client (maybe integrated into the IM client).
music program I use XMMS. XMMS really should just be a client-server architecture to decouple the interface and enable pure text interfaces and other fanciness. I have sawfish bindings to perform "xmms --forward" etc., but the xmms command line utility is not fully-featured.
When I stop to think about it, I don't really care that it's text. I just care that I can control it from my keyboard. The mouse is for Counter-Strike.
Stupid preview.
Should be "kibitz <username>" and "type 'kibitz -number' to kibitz with <username>".
Is there such a thing? I've been struggling with several servers that have no phpMyAdmin and no ability to use a MySQL front-end like SQLyog over the network. As a result, I'm forced to do a lot of work through the command line. A text-mode GUI client would be very handy.
While some of you are on the conversation of screen, how about adding mutella onto that. I haven't found a better client in BASH and it's searches are really quite good.
The immature mind measures.
How on earth could you forget bitlbee, cplay and mplay!?
That allows you to use your irc console of choise, be it bitchX/irssi to connect to msn/aim/yim/icq/jabber -- I use irssi in a detacheable screen session connected to bitlbee to talk to those few people still on msn, and all my pals on jabber.
Also, what about the nicest console audio player? -- my choice is cplay at the moment, but mplay is getting close.
The advantage of mplay over cplay is that it uses mplayer instead of splay. I did a test, and found out splay takes nearly twice the CPU load as mplayer, so a console player based on mplayer is a clear winner, but it needs some more polish first.
Anyway, shame on you!
I'm a huge fan of iftop, a Curses-based interactive network load monitor.
Similarly, there's also ApacheTop, which does something similar based on monitoring of the Apache HTTP server's logs.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
No, real gurus know that 99% of all uses of cat are GUAC. Real gurus use '>'.
Netris is an ncurses-based tetris game that can be played both single and two-player (over tcp/ip). Despite being text-based, it adheres rather closely in board size and gameplay to the standard original Tetris. During the late 90s, I spent heaps of hours in netris tournaments with my mates. I don't think it's been updated since 1999, tho...
Get a "unix style" keyboard with Esc directly above Tab. Happy Hacking and Sun keyboards are great for this, plus Control is already in the right place.
Many of my computers aren't fast enough to use X, let alone KDE or GNOME. So I settle with the console, and I love it. 7 or so virtual terminals, and I'm set.
I use:
links/elinks - Great web browser, has many improvements over plain lynx
pork - AIM client, better than all the other console ones. It's supposed to be like some IRC clients in interface, but it's done well.
bitchx - I hang out in #debian a lot, and this runs great.
And, natch, bash and vi.
Works out great.
-orange
And whatever other utilities for listing information are joining the new convention of having their names start with "ls". When your system is horked, nothing so important as having ways of seeing why. ps is good too. Rename ps -A to lsp or lsproc? How about dmesg to lsbl or lsbootlog?
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
ls, etc.
In particular, color 'ls' is a must have. "Once you go color, you never go back." My alias for ls looks like this:
alias ls="ls --color -CF"
and the Gnu version of 'ls' (fileutils 4.1) is first in my PATH.
Just wondering, how can you be "stuck" with an old machine these days? I've seen working, name-brand P3/500-class systems sitting by dumpsters at my old apartment complex, a year and more ago. I've got people wanting to give me ~300-400Mhz laptops they have no other use for these days (I have a contact at a South American school which needs all they can get). A friend of mine recently contracted a persistent virus on an Athlon 850 and decided to buy a new Dell rather than call me up to fix it, so he's got a spare he'll probably put out by the curb.
Believe me, I know what it's like not to have any extra cash - but if that's the only reason you're stuck with a computer incapable of running a GUI, then one of us is overlooking something...
Perfectly Normal Industries
Is there a console word processor that can do footnotes and change text formatting easily?
Hmmmmm....... latex......
I lay awake last night wondering where the sun had gone, then it dawned on me.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I just can't live without it.
Oh, and the console version of bittorrent is a must too.
Scientia est Potentia
is this a way to slashdot all goody console app sites ?
I've only found a few websites which are kinda handy to find 'Nix apps:
tucows.com and freshmeat.net
Generally, tucows is out of date and I find freshmeat takes a long time to sort through even though I setup an account to filter results.
Anybody have a useful site(s) to try?
i've wanted this feature for ages. being able to detach an X application from one terminal, travel to some other site, and reattach it at the remote site.
sadly there isnt anything like screen for X yet.
I use btget for bittorrent downloading and giFTcurs for fasttrack and gnutella downloading. giFTcurs is especially fantasic.
TWIN
it's a textmode window environment with many features, worth looking into.
I like pork. It's an AIM client that feels like ircII and has perl scripting.
It's still a valuable tool for system monitoring.
Image Magick is fantastic for anyone who doesn't want to deal with the startup times for windowed graphics programs as well as anyone who wants to set up batch jobs to apply effects to lots of images at once.
THE best console instant messenger
http://konst.org.ua/centericq/
From the site:
Centericq is a text mode menu- and window-driven IM interface that supports the ICQ2000, Yahoo!, AIM, IRC, MSN, Gadu-Gadu and Jabber protocols.
\m/
And you can't have vi and emacs without ED! I actually use it surprisingly often - curses based interfaces are really slow on dialup ssh; line based editors go *much* faster - I'd write locally in vim, upload with scp, and if any changes needed to be done quickly (this being a website), it'd all be done with ed.
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
I have five virtual desktops here at work. Firefox is completely filling #2, and Thunderbird #3. #4 and #5 are empty, awaiting the launching of other GUI tools such as the GIMP or gpdf or rdesktop. But the place the real work gets done is desktop #1, which has four XTerms, slightly overlapping.
/The Eminem Show/ anymore. :) Er. Not much real work happening there, either, I guess.
In the top left, we have an ssh connection to my home workhorse box. In that ssh connection, screen controls irssi, a mail log watching application, nmh, vim, tinyfugue, and wget. Ok, so "real work" doesn't happen in that top left XTerm.
In the top right, squash runs. Squash is an ncurses audio player, whose major drawing card to me is a weighted random playlist. If I hear a song I don't like, I tell squash to skip it - and this decreases the likelihood of squash selecting it for playing again. In short, I never hear "Drips" from
In the bottom left, screen once again saves the day. In this window, I ssh around to the various boxes I develop, test and maintain code on. vim and perl are the mainstays here, though make gets a bit of a workout too.
The bottom right is available for things I want visible while I'm editing in the bottom left, or temporary jobs that I don't feel like disrupting my precious arrangement of screens over.
So:
screen, vim, irssi, squash, tinyfugue, nmh, w3m, wget, man.
GUAC? Is that something you eat with nachos?
For IRC, I use irssi. It's neat, small, fast, and does what I need it to. Also, I haven't had the need to change any of its stock options yet - I like it the way it is. Other candidates are BitchX (annoying autoaway etc.), ircII (too much configuring, maybe?), or CenterICQ (don't like the interface for IRC).
CenterICQ is my app of choice for IM. It's quirky sometimes, and once segfaulted, but other than that, I have had 0 problems with it. Also, it supports a variety of protocols.
For web-browsing, I use links. I've tried lynx and w3m, but links just "does it" I guess :). It's got support for more stuff. Also, I find the -g option nice, something the other two don't have IIRC.
I've tried Emacs, Pico, Nano, ed, etc. etc. etc., but so far, nothing has replaced my addiction to Vim. Maybe I'm a masochist, I don't know.
When I'm at home in console mode, I usually use Alt+Fx to switch between different apps, and use screen to keep irssi and centericq running. When over ssh, I use screen. Sometimes, I run out of VTs, so I use screen to group things inside the VTs. When in X, I just keep things in separate rxvt windows.
For entertainment, I have either NetHack, fortune -o, or bash.org (aww shit, slashdotted them, they're down enough as it is!) in links. :)
-- Chris
I'M NOT ANGRY!
For simple dictionary use, I swear by dict.
giFT is the best p2p network connection daemon. And giFTcurs is a great curses frontend for it.
I am a genius; therefore, you suck.
I think a lot of people who use console apps don't realize that you can get high resolution text consoles using the framebuffer support, and that it is even possible to get high resolution, accelerated graphics modes without using X.
I find the framebuffer console to be the ultimate interface, period. I am especially fond of the 160x64 character mode, and sometimes use higher resolutions than that. However, in recent kernels, that is, since 2.5 and all through 2.6, the framebuffer support has been very broken for all three video devices where I need it, Radeon 8500LE, Trident Cyberblade/A1, and NForce2.
On some of these, I can compromise and still use vesafb, but not on the NForce. The kernel developers do not seem concerned at all with this problem, and 2.6.x kernels continue to be released with broken framebuffer console drives marked as stable.
I think too many people think of 80 column screens when they think of the console, and that I am very much in the minority in that I greatly prefer the native console in linux, together with fbconsole for wider screens, to ANY X terminal solution.
Nevertheless, I don't understand how such a significant feature makes it into a stable kernel without being marked as experimental, when it is clearly broken.
In particular, the device for the Radeon really bothers me, because it worked perfectly in 2.4, and then broke for 2.6, and remains broken despite my persistent reports.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I haven't really had the chance to read through the comments, but I wanted to post my little list.
.. often times running ipconfig /flushdns will fix everything right as rain.
At work, we sometimes use non-gui applications for troubleshooting systems. We launch them from a command prompt though, not a console (whatever that is). Anyway, here's my list!
ping
----
We use this one A LOT. I don't know how it works exactly, but we use it to see if a system is up and running.
net view
--------
If a test with ping is successful, we use this to see if the disks are all okay.
ipconfig
--------
This has something to do with how we connect to the Internet
edit
----
We can only use this program on certain systems. But it's good for viewing configuration files. I guess that makes it a text editor, like vim or something.
Well, that's all I can think of for now. My first post on Slashdot!!!
David Boies
System Administrator
McBride & Co. Accounting
OK, here's a very serious question. I swear, this is not flamebait. My question is, what really is attractive about the console over using a mouse and a GUI? I mean, I understand there's repeatablility in scripting and such, and in some cases typing a command is faster than clicking an icon, but isn't almost everything else more tedious and difficult? I'm talking things like looking at the contents of multiple windows at once. Drag n Drop. The ability to move the cursor anywhere in a document with a click rather than a series of keystrokes. I mean, even the super-popular editors like emacs and such just imitate a window using ASCII art. So for serious. Why do so many of us insist on using console apps wherever possible?
When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi *and* Emacs are just too damn slow. They print useless messages like, 'C-h for help' and '"foo" File is read only'. So I use the editor that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time.
/bin/ed /usr/ucb/vi /usr/bin/emacs
l o?
Ed, man! !man ed
ED(1) UNIX Programmer's Manual ED(1)
NAME
ed - text editor
SYNOPSIS
ed [ - ] [ -x ] [ name ]
DESCRIPTION
Ed is the standard text editor.
-----
Computer Scientists love ed, not just because it comes first alphabetically, but because it's the standard. Everyone else loves ed because it's ED!
"Ed is the standard text editor."
And ed doesn't waste space on my Timex Sinclair. Just look:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 24 Oct 29 1929
-rwxr-xr-t 4 root 1310720 Jan 1 1970
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 5.89824e37 Oct 22 1990
Of course, on the system *I* administrate, vi is symlinked to ed. Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K; and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!
"Ed is the standard text editor."
Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed:
golem> ed
?
help
?
?
?
quit
?
exit
?
bye
?
hel
?
eat flaming death
?
^C
?
^C
?
^D
?
---
Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity.
"Ed is the standard text editor."
Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all.
ED IS THE TRUE PATH TO NIRVANA! ED HAS BEEN THE CHOICE OF EDUCATED AND IGNORANT ALIKE FOR CENTURIES! ED WILL NOT CORRUPT YOUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS!! ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR! ED MAKES THE SUN SHINE AND THE BIRDS SING AND THE GRASS GREEN!!
When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a "viitor". Not a "emacsitor". Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED! ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR.
When IBM, in its ever-present omnipotence, needed to base their "edlin" on a UNIX standard, did they mimic vi? No. Emacs? Surely you jest. They chose the most karmic editor of all. The standard.
Ed is for those who can *remember* what they are working on. If you are an idiot, you should use Emacs. If you are an Emacs, you should not be vi. If you use ED, you are on THE PATH TO REDEMPTION. THE SO-CALLED "VISUAL" EDITORS HAVE BEEN PLACED HERE BY ED TO TEMPT THE FAITHLESS. DO NOT GIVE IN!!! THE MIGHTY ED HAS SPOKEN!!!
GNU Screen is an awesome terminal application. It can let you log in, run screen, run a program, detach screen from the session, log out, and the program will still be running.
I like to think of it as "Make Your Own Daemon."
MOUNT TAPE U1439 ON B3, NO RING
More flexible than Wget, and for way more purposes than fetching stuffs.
Pizza Party
http://www.beigerecords.com/cory/pizza_party/
I am in X all the time, but I still use abcde for ripping/compressing CDs. It has the sane-est defaults of any ripper I've yet seen, and is eaiser to use than grip.
What's good for the syndicate is good for the country. --Milo Minderbinder
Definitely the top newsreader. Default commands map to the space bar so you can read Usenet while using your elbows to scroll, both hands on your burrito for lunch.
C'mon!
I just type 'startx' and there's a whole heap of apps just waiting to go...
Cogito, ergo sig.
I have gotten into it from the console and it appears to have the same categories and commands as the X Windows version.
The obvious question is of course is ..
I windows ready for the command line yet?
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
First, most GUI apps annoy me visually. They bring their own ideas of colors and fonts, usually white background and Microsoft-like look, and if I want to change them I have to figure out how they're configured. I've already wrestled xterm and rxvt into submission, so everything else should run inside those, where the colors and fonts will be harmonious. For what it's worth, during the day I use light colored, randomly selected background and black text, with Jim Knoble's neep-14 font. In the evening I sometimes use black-background terminals with a different color mapping via XResources.
Gaim doesn't support the readline keystrokes, which I'm very accustomed to using. Especially ^u to kill the line I started typing. Almost everything else I use does.
Gaim has lots of cute icons, menus and other space-wasters which I don't use and don't have time to learn how to shut off. Icons irritate me. Pixels are precious.
GUI apps seem to always have something broken in the interface. I'm looking at Gaim right now and there's overlapping text in the lower right corner - it's some kind of button, illegible.
I use Gaim despite all this because it works, and last time I investigated console-mode AIM clients I ran out of time before finding one as reliable as Gaim.
Freshmeat had an article on The Antidesktop a while back that was a good read.
The greatest single app to have under X11! Gives you colors and fonts and images (in XEmacs) with the following:
1) TnT for AIM
2) ZenIRC for IRC
3) Gnus for e-mail/news
4) w3m-mode for w3m browser
5) BBDB for address book
6) Calendar/ToDo
etc!
I'm an AC cause I'm too lazy to go log in on this computer, but anyway thought I'd mention here --current UCSC student(at Crown)
and, to be on topic too! I am currently working on a summer project; make a console shell that doesn't use the CLI, but uses only hotkeys ala Pine/Pico/Nano. Apps are run with the help of metadata, so instead of having to memorize all the options for each program, you see them as soon as you select the program, press the ones you want, fill in any data with text boxes(later a browser too) and you're off.
Kind of amazing that nobody's tried a project like this yet, but oh well.
I think this is a more interesting question. I startx mostly for watching TV (fbtv and vcr don't do it for me), but there are a few other apps that keep me there: spreadsheet software and personal finance software being the top two. What else do you miss if you're on the console?
I swear by IceWM. I just reinstalled most of the stuff on my system (FC1 -> Gentoo) and I use IceWM + Infadel2 theme for everyday GUI stuff.
:-)
I don't use a file manager. REAL users don't need no stinkin' file manager! (xemacs dired works too
For GUI apps: aterm, xemacs, firefox, xpdf, vmware.
And back on topic...
My favorite console apps are:
- mutt (I even use it in X)
- screen
- irssi
- zsh
- xemacs -nw
- nasm, yasm, gcc, make, cvs
and of course...
- emerge
-- Josh
As a webmaster, cvs is very useful, even if it is only used with a local repository. Esp. useful if one puts RCS version tags inside comments so one can view source and determine what template is being viewed.
pico is a good editor for newbies (I use vim).
Got my nigger in the mail and he was dead! Buyer Beware! GNAA ships dead niggers; and they were goatse.cx'd beyond recognition! B+++++++++
The subject says it all.
mc for messing around with files.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
I use Irssi, ncftp, abcde, screen and nano. Mybe one or two apps I've forgotten.
I live in text mode. Here's a selection of my preferred apps. Most of these are still in active development (though some are more active than others).
screen. Simply indispensable. It slices and dices console sessions. Pretty much everything I do, I do in screen. I've a page elsewhere that describes everything screen does for me.
zsh. My shell of choice. Think of all the good features of bash, ksh, and tcsh rolled together. (Without much of the ickiness, particularly the csh heritage.) Personally, the killer application of zsh was that fact that not only did it have context-sensitive completion but (unlike tcsh) it shipped with hordes of completion definitions right out of the box. Type 'dpkg -L fo<tab>' and zsh will autocomplete on the Debian packages currently installed on your system. With an ssh-agent running, type 'scp otherhost:fo<tab>' and zsh will ssh to the other system and autocomplete on the files available on that host.
irssi. The best IRC client I've come across, certainly beating out IrcII, BitchX, and even epic. Multiple windows, extensible, tons of plugins available.
bitlbee. This is actually an IRC-to-Instant-Messaging gateway. It allows me to use irssi and the IRC environment with which I am so familiar to also deal with those of my friends and family who insist on using the various IM services.
snownews. curses-based RSS aggregator. I shopped around a bit before finding an aggregator that I liked. snownews does everything I need.
mutt. Possibly the best mail client around, GUI or not. While pine is okay (and simpler to use), mutt is much more customizable and scales better to large volumes of email.
procmail. Again, not exactly command line, but essential to my email usage.
Emacs. My text-mode editor of choice. Feel free to substitute XEmacs or vi (preferably vim) at your own preference. I prefer emacs to vi, though I know a decent amount of vi, as any sysadmin should. I actually like XEmacs a little better than GNU Emacs, but GNU Emacs has better UTF-8 support.
w3m. There's also links; I'm not tremendously familiar with it because w3m fills all of my needs and it used to be the case that w3m had better HTML support than links, but I don't believe this is any longer the case. Of note is the fact that w3m can do tabbed browsing, though it's not multithreaded, so you can't read one tab while another is loading. Also, if you run w3m with a valid $DISPLAY, it can even show images in the pages it displays.
moosic. This is a music jukebox. The features that distinguish it from other such programs are twofold. First, it runs as a standalone server; you interact with it via a command line client. (In theory, a curses or GUI client could be written, but to my knowledge none yet has.) Second, it's customizable with regards to how it plays music. It has a config file where you tell it what programs to use to play various music formats (it does come with reasonable defaults). Someone elsewhere in this article pointed out mpd; I'll have to look at that, but it at least doesn't appear to support the various MOD formats.
mplayer. It does more or less require some graphical output (X, framebuffer, whatever), but it's run and displays it status in text mod
355/113 -- Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible simulation!
Is there some kind of X client that can mimic the X environment on a text screen -- kind of like ASCII art is to imagery?
First, I don't know if it exists, but would be interested in hearing what other people have to say. Secondly, I don't think this is necessarily a good idea, however I do find the concept interesting.
mutt - for email
tin - for newsgroups
pork - for AIM
irssi - for IRC
links/elinks - for www
lynx - also for www, when I need to use the mouse to copy and paste
vim - text editor
jpilot-dump - to see what's in my PalmPilot (they really need an ncurses frontend)
screen
SVGAlib apps
zgv - to view images
svp - to view Postscript and PDF files
That ed rant never gets old. Really.
li>cmatrix - text-mode screensaver
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
Why would anyone need an editor other than vi - I mean, it does TAGS, what more do you want?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
...in that it will work as a normal interactive client, but it can also download ftp and http URLs directly.
I don't know if the code is portable to other architectures.
OK, I'm not too proud to ask a stupid question on slashdot. I started playing with screen once. I t really looks to be handy. But I use emacs. I can get by w/ vi, but I know emacs upside down. So how do people handle the keybinding conflicts?
I really didn't look into this much. Like I said, a stupid question. I think it was Ctrl-A that was the big hangup.
The trouble with screen is the name. Try to google for 'screen' sometime. (Random brain fart: I wonder if google will, over time, affect language, as it biases towards useage of words with very particular meanings.)
If Ctr+[ is too tough you can use Ctr+Space. In my opinion, that is easier than hitting the ~/` key.
TeXmacs and LyX might be a little more helpful in this situation.
tought i've met originaly the norton commander for dos
i have found, you can find,happiness in slavery!
A great CD player
l
:: dog : cat
http://www.mcmilk.de/projects/mcdp/
And of course realplayer for the terminal
(unfortunately not yet been updated to helix)
http://www.linux-speakup.org/trplayer.htm
less : more
http://jl.photodex.com/dog/
Were that I say, pancakes?
> While the 'Linux on the desktop' battle has yet
> to be won, KDE and Gnome are making great
> progress. There are too many apps to list on
> the cutting edge of software development for
> the X environment.
Well, I want moan a bit. Neither Gtk or Qt are
really X toolkits (Qt is especially egregious
in this area). Both toolkits are available
to create and run programs under X but neither
toolkit makes use of the X framework as
originally designed. Neither makes use of Xt
or resource management. Neither make much of
an attempt to preserve X cut and paste semantics
or drag-n-drop. In some ways both of these
toolkits are very "un" X. It is for these
reasons that I don't like either toolkit and
look forward to a new open-source toolkit that
really does provide X apps.
Games - NetHack and TOME are both GREAT. irc - irssi all the way baby. IM - centericq is the best console client I've tried - supports AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, LiveJournal, RSS feeds, and more! text - pico me I pico you! bittorent - Python ain't just for desktops - I use bittorrentf to leave a folder of torrents running overnight!!
I've been working on a simple AOL Instant Messenger client called BSFlite for the past year. It's similar to micq, that is line-based without curses or anything fancy. I like it because once your fingers get used to it, it's a gazillion times faster than using a mouse. You can get it here. It's a lot more efficient with system resources, so if your machine is too slow for all those fancy naim effects (sliding windows and such), this may be right up your alley. Works well with screen and the like.
Not a console app per-se, but a great shell environment. Press Enter on the keypad and have the current selection or line executed by the shell with stdout and stderr going to the editor window. This plus on-the-fly macro recording makes system administration a breeze.
Best strictly console apps: vi, wget, bash, grep, sed, awk, screen
Accept Eris as your Fnord and personally sate her
Damn, missed this post (we're still sleeping in UK when this was posted) - anyway, I wonder if anyone knows any good console pop3/imap email client ?
I've looked around, and quite surprised to find that most console email apps requires some sort of MTA installed.
Angband.
Man, you've not met ed. Ed is the standard editor.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
As far as console apps go i would have to say that ettercap has to be one of the most versittile network analizers, not only is it good to sniff for any unknown traffic, but you can go ahead and watch other's AIM conversations
grammar-lesson free since 1999. (rescinded - 2005)
In FreeBSD, here are my favorite console apps:
cvsup-nogui - keep my source tree CURRENT
portupgrade - Keeps me on the bleeding edge in my ports!
ftp - Luke Mewburn's FTP (Debian fans can find it packaged as lukemftp) is the best command line FTP client around. Its the default ftp installed on Net, Open, and FreeBSD (it originated in NetBSD.) No goofy curses interfaces to get in the way, just enough extra trimmings to let you get the job done, when you're not sure where you want to be (otherwise, wget!)
screen - of course, this is the first thing I install on a clean system. Any serious console buff (as you've probably seen from the other threads) swears by this, on any unix-like system. I rather wish it were included as part of base system.
irssi - I used to use BitchX, but I tried it and this puppy on a 486 I used to know, and irssi is way faster, with equivalent feature set. I've never looked back.
centericq - konst makes bearable and intuitive curses interfaces, and centericq is no exception. Its the only console IM client I know to support all the major protocols, still in development.
joe - Joe's Own Editor is the greatest thing for those of us who used to use WordStar or Q-Edit (aka The Semware Editor) in PC DOS. It also has jpico and jemacs modes, for those who's fingers have different reflex action.
fetch - fetch is a rather good non-interactive file grabber, and is smaller than wget in footprint, but not as smart. If you're in a REALLY constrained environment (rescue floppy), fetch will serve you well enough.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned in other posts is news readers. There, I find that slrn is the winner. Though tin is good, too.
vim mutt apt ;)
a script made by me to burn mp3 to audio CD's (mpg321,cdrecord)
a script made by me to transorm divx/xvid/mpeg to DVD (mencoder, transcode...)
prc-tools to compile two apps I made for my Palm
gcc
python
Regards
I use mc 95% of the time I'm on console. And mcedit is one of the better console editors out there, now with syntax highliting. I still miss some things like custom viewers/editors for different file types from DOS/nc/vc world (especially hacker's view), but mc does a decent job.
There is absolutely no better way to manage files than 2 panel file managers.
--Coder
Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed:
l o
:)
golem> ed
?
help
?
?
?
quit
?
exit
?
bye
?
hel
?
?
eat flaming death
?
^C
?
^C
?
^D
?
---
The full mind-blowing reasoning on why to choose ed "Ed is the standard text editor." available from http://gammatron.novarese.net/txt/ed.html
Have fun.
http://codeandlife.com
Seriously, if you want to bring out the biggest nerds of them all, ask what the best linux console applications are.
Not insulting (I'm a nerd), just stating a truism.
the console programs I use on a regular basis I would have to say are: screen (and occasionally twin) not to mention irssi. irssi plus bitlbee(a server with msn/icq/aim/yahoo support for irc). gamp for mp3's and giFTcurs links with svgalib is also another great program. it is rare I ever startup X.. I can do just about everything without (and no loss in productivity IMO)
Ecasound is the best recording application you can get, and it's all console, baby. Wow. ;)
Like what I said? You might like my music
Trusted Computing FAQ | Free Dawit Isaak!
Frakter
"While the 'Linux on the desktop' battle has yet to be won..."
or lost.
Exercise caution when modding this message up: the author acts like a jerk when his karma is excellent.
cplay
Simple, clean, no frills. Why eyecandy when you can only listen to music?
Well, this isn't really a 'console'-specific question ... or actually, it really is ... but what about apps that can do graphics straight to the framebuffer?
... maybe Sweetcode has it ... lessee ...
I don't remember what its called, but a few years ago there was a Terminal app that you could 'cat *.jpg' to and it would display those jpegs inline, with the text console, integrated like. I really liked that.
Then there was another "XMLTerm" app, (was that its name, actually?) that could handle HTML and XML docs, displaying stuff in the console/text buffer using SVGALib and such. That had promise.
I remember the hard-core terminal days - hazeltine 1500's baby! - that could do graphics as well as text 'in' the console. I always liked that - like you could do a graph just by 'catting' the raw file straight to your terminal. X came along, and made all that redundant, but it seems to me that in this day of 1024x768 Framebuffer support, it could make for some truly interesting 'hollywood' style graphics systems... if only there was interest in all that again.
Personally, I don't need a window manager (though I'm happy to use one if its available). Think I'm gonna go and see if I can find that XMLTerm thing
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Hmm, why not just use links and use the mouse to copy and paste? Works quite nicely here, although having to press shift whenever copying. Same goes for vim in
- Voice of Ambience -
What I hate is Sourceforge's prdownload stuff that has you getting through all that then doing a redirect to force a browser-based download. I wish they wouldn't do that.
there's a way around this problem. I once wrote an auto-update feature for my sourceforge hosted project that relied on wget.
the trick is to preselect their local server, OSDL.dl:
http://osdn.dl.sourceforge.net/[your files]
visit ffpf.sf.net and click on "download latest" for a proof of concept.
By the way, I posted this hack to the sourceforge feature request list, but they never got back to me.
I recently stumbled across a Multiplayer network/internet Nethack variant called Mangband - details see www.mangband.org- play Nethack with/against other people (Playerkilling is possible by default)
Very few players online at the moment, but running your own server on Linux is very simple, and the UI is all text based.
It ain't Everquest, but fun nonetheless - no longer alone in the dungeon.
Not confused enough? http://translate.google.com/translate?u=www.slashdot.jp&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=ja&tl=en
To the people who work on *X systems know that the text is the power of the user. If you want to do something, you will probably do with your current apps with pipes and complex combinations. You don't need a new application for that.
That's one of the problems that windows has, they reinvent all the time the fire.
Further more, the text apps are faster and more stable. The text apps have more options and can do more complex operations. This graphical interfaces are only a simplistic way of see the computers.
I think that could be useful to make frontends for complex apps, but always must exists the main app in text.
Yeah, just as i mean it : why not SSH ?
is that Mozilla is much more usable on many sites with the keyboard alone, than links and elinks. Find-as-you-type and, for example, the ability to open links in new tabs using Ctrl+Enter (must be set in prefs) can make life with the keyboard so much easier and faster.
I love C++
I luv BitchX irc client.Pretty good one based on ncurses.
fifteen jugglers, five believers
It's been a (long) while, but that sounds distinctly like another game, Omega....
I realise that OpenNap is probably no longer fashionable, but I still occasionally browse it using the Linux Napster Client (nap). It has to be kept up to date though, as various OpenNap changes seem to break it with some frequency (the last was the disappearance of Napigator).
/
rlwrap is a great program for adding history and editing to braindead database vendors' command line clients (e.g. DB2, Sybase).
The nice thing about w3m is it works so well as a HTML viewer for mutt and snownews. In fact, even on my X11 desktop I keep a w3m window open next to Mozilla for quick lookups.
Ade_
Big Bubbles (no troubles) - what sucks, who sucks and you suck
Can't even send the output to a different file than ~/nohup.out. I prefer using a redirect and disown -h.
I love C++
Let's start with the shell--zsh is by far the best one I've used. It has everything.
/. or something.
Moving on, Links (web browser) and Naim (AIM/ICQ/IRC client) rock. The only issue with the former is that Links doesn't support cookies, so I have Lynx in case I want to post on
I don't have a console mail client on my machine--I have other methods of getting my email. For accessing my email account with my uni, I ssh into my uni's shell account and use pine from there or I use Links to access the Squirrelmail setup on my web server (over HTTPS, of course). To access my fastmail.fm account, I just use Links to access their web interface (they support both web and IMAP access for free).
For downloading stuff, I use giFTcurs, the btdownloadcurses.py BitTorrent client, and the venerable wget, depending on what I'm looking for and where I'm downloading from.
And, for the part that will generate the most flamage, my text editor of choice: Joe! Its interface is just as simple as nano, but with more features, such as find/replace and decent copy/paste, using text selection. On a related note, I use most as my pager--coloured man pages are good.
And, finally, who could forget NetHack?
Hmm...now I have an urge to find out how to make live CDs, so I can make a ``CLI survival kit'' live CD. Well, maybe not, as I'm too bloody lazy, but it's an idea...
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Midnight Commander (or one of its many clones.)
I find it essential for working with large amounts of files in a casual manner and for navigating large directory structures.
I find it very useful to be able to navigate a deep directory structure in a efficient manner and then drop back to command line seamlessly.
What about cli word processing? I mean, viM w/ :
...really doesn't cut it. Does anyone know of a good rich-text word processor for the command-line?
set showbreak=>>
set textwidth=72
set linebreak
set wrap
"This above all, to thine own self be true"
ncftp - best FTP client EVAR.
wget - awesome HTTP/HTTPS/FTP download tool (need to mirror a site? wget's got you covered).
lftp - best sftp client EVAR.
zip and unzip - so very useful (and I used to maintain several of the OS ports).
I was going to include bash, but it hasn't actually been updated since 2002.
Cygwin isn't really an application per-se, but it's always the second or third thing (after Firefox) that I install on a new Windows box... having a real shell and tools on Windows is a real sanity-saver.
- chrish
I run the following in one screen:
* Irssi + Bitlbee (IRC, ICQ, etc)
* Mutt1
* Mutt2
* SSH and Telnet sessions (no, Telnet is fine over LAN and fine on MIPS as well. Go away.)
And if i were to use IM in X i'd have to lose the connection when i were on some other computer, when my desktop reboots, and it wouldn't run in my IRC client or in my Screen.
It has to be said that Bitlbee is a marvelous application which fits in extremely well in this very purpose. I don't have to care which network i'm on, i just do nickname: hello as if i'm on IRC and the person receives my message. Woohoo!
So yes, having all the chat stuff in one place is extremely convenient for me. YMMV.
Yeah, this is a shameless plug.
Errrr, you've been reading your feedback on eBay again haven't you?
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
As you bothered to point it out, I imagine you are interested in what I think.
I think it's pure bullshit and I doubt that it happened at all. I'll take a moment here to answer some of the astroturfer's points for those who might be deluded enough to think an AC troll ever posted anything honest.
Twitter is not responsible for bad management or bad manners. While Microsoft is evil and their behavior is outrageous, I doubt that my posts could drive anyone to "frothing at the mouth". Simply reading Slashdot's story history is enough to convince anyone that Microsoft is evil and dangerous. I like to point back to them when I see people forget or lie about Microsoft's bad behavior. Other people's manners are not my responsibility. Nor am I responsible for managerial incompetence at other people's companies. Anyone dumb enough to let the passions of their subordinates cloud their own judgement of facts is a poor manager.
I do recommend complete removal of Microsoft from any company and house. The sooner people move the more heartache and money they save themselves. Every company has examples of screw Microsoft screw arounds that have cost them money and trouble. The way to transition depends on the company or household itself.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Fuck you and your silly rules of annoyance.
M$ is as dead as it's stock options pyramid is stupid. When they are gone, you will be too.
The other reason is that next to my main desktop at home, I have a nice little text-based LCD terminal (actually a partially disassembled 486 laptop) that I IM on -- saves screen real estate and I don't have to get offline when I'm doing stuff like kernel driver debugging that requires me to shut down X...
I have a laptop sitting on my desk next to my computer, where I run AIM and Winamp and other such things while I'm working on my desktop. I also use Synergy to share one mouse and keyboard between them when my desktop is working. It's like having a separate monitor when I need one, and a separate computer when I need that too. Best of both worlds. =)
All console aplications are wrapped inside GNU Screen
- shell: bash
- editor: vim
- email: mutt
- audio playback: cplay front-end
- mixer: aumix
- irc & im: irssi
- im/irc gateway: bitlbee
- web browser: w3m
- p2p:
- client:giFTcurs
- daemon:giFT
- news aggregator: raggle
Why did I ever begin? The list could go on forever. grep, ssh, scp, ncftp, perl, sed, wget,you already promissed to post your shit twice. Do you want to work four times as hard? Teh Twit will be honored.
bc is a great calc program, I still use it to do my checkbook in an xterm. Just turn on the Num-Lock and away you go...
Aside from being the world's easiest checkbook balancer, has some meat behind it. You can make small programs, do iterative calculations, lots of goodies.
Clickety Click
Surely, you mean vim -- the kick-ass vi.
say they quadruple your storage. they now need 4x the amount of disks on their servers. assuming they're doing it properly, with SCSI RAID, then this isn't trivial - they may already have the max size disks that'll fit internally in their servers. Going bigger than this might involve migrating to a SAN or similar, which is not cheap/easy/risk-free enough to be worth doing unless your users really *need* more storage. Do a scan of a company network's file/print servers and see what proportion of the files are actually *business related* (as opposed to MP3s and other tat) and chances are it'd be even harder to justify the resources.