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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.
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.
Not exactly under development but a mature and good irc-client. http://www.irssi.org/
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.
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
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!!!!
One of my favorite tools taking care of things when I'm not around! ;-)
I use naim a lot for one reason: I can run it inside screen, detach from one computer and re-attach on another without ever going offline (or missing messages while I'm walking somewhere else). If I'm moving around a lot, screen also lets me have multiple connections to the same session, so I can read & reply from wherever I happen to be at the moment.
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...
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 !?!
I meant to say this link.
I guess you could deduce it, but anyway.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Among the teenager crowd, and I'd imagine even more so outside of the US, old laptops are pretty common (think Pentium 100 w/ 16 megs of ram). X does not run extremely quickly on them (although its not too bad), so console apps are convenient.
You can mod your friends, you can mod your nose, but you can't mod your friend's nose.
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
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.
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
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."
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
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.
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
You can detach a process, logout, login again, and the process is still running as you left it. This is handy when doing a long compile over ssh.
I use wget all the time, even when I'm working with an X11 browser.
If I'm ever downloading something, be it music from Magnatune, source code for some handy utility that Debian hasn't already got packaged, images from someone's website that look useful, I constantly find myself firing up an xterm, cding into the appropriate directory, creating any subdirectories (this is all so much faster on the command line than pissing about in GUI file selectors), typing "wget ", right click-copy on the link in the browser and paste into the xterm. Than back to browsing. No irritating download managers putting files where you don't want them and that sort if inane stuff.
You can even emulate a "download manager" but just appending a whole list of stuff to download on the wget command line.
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.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Lftp is the uncrowned king of ftp clients! Lots of features, RFC-compliant and rock solid; in its property of being text-based it's very easy for the operator to use in a quick and easy way. Using lftp with FISH is damn cool, no more tricky "ssh-combined-with-sftp". Other nice features include FXP, mirror/reverse mirror, scripting, parallel downloading, "Copying of files between two servers, e.g. between FTP and HTTP." etc. More features to be found here.
Truly a prerequisite for a breeze in FTP-land.
"The only clear view is from atop the mountain of our dead selves." - Peter Carroll
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
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/
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
snownews is a great console RSS reader.
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.
I meh at you VNC-using neophytes. Real men xmove.
Kibitz does the same thing (it comes with expect), but it's tons easier to get a newbie into the session - when you type "kibitz ", they get a message in their console that says "type 'kibitz -number' to kibitz with ".
Extremely useful for collaboration on the command line.
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
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
- VTs don't work over ssh
- VTs don't work in XTerms
- VTs don't save history between switches
- VTs cannot be detached
- ... and therefore cannot be multiply reattached (screen -x!)
- ssh-agent screen
- VTs don't run on Mac OSX
How's that for a starting list?Yes, nohup works, but you have to know that you are planning to detach before
you run anything, screen will allow you to handle disconnects (intentional and
otherwise) gracefully.
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
For me, remote administration and speed.
Our new system is entirely linux based. Our old system is entirely Windows based.
I can be on the road on my way out of town, dial into our console server (Cyclades rocks) and power off servers, restart Websphere, run db2 queries and anything else that needs to be done via my laptop connected to a cell phone. One of my first thoughts in building our new datacenter is "What do I need to do so I never have to come here again except to install a new machine?"
It's that simple. I can manage EVERY part of our infrastructure (CUPS,DB2,WAS and Tivoli) from my car on the side of the road. Think about how much stress that takes off! I can actually LEAVE the house when I'm on call!
I still feel for our Data warehouse guys. They chose Informatica and short of stopping and starting the Informatica processes, nothing else can be done from the command line.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
erm ?
mpg123 *.mp3 is perfectly ok.
As well as mpg123 -@ playlist
Also for scrollback. What was that error message 1500 lines above?
:)
.screenrc. Also attaching to the same screen from multiple machines is great.
^a[?ERROR
Oh there it is
I use 'defscrollback 3000' by default on my
I have a screen running irssi on one window and mutt on the other all the time. If I'm at home or at work, it's the same.
You can't say enough good things about screen. As one friend once said 'I think screen is the first application that doesn't suck'
Freshmeat had an article on The Antidesktop a while back that was a good read.
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 $DISPLAY, it can even show images in the pages it displays.
moosic. This is a music jukebox. The features that distinguish it from other such programs are twofold. First, it runs as a standalone server; you interact with it via a command line client. (In theory, a curses or GUI client could be written, but to my knowledge none yet has.) Second, it's customizable with regards to how it plays music. It has a config file where you tell it what programs to use to play various music formats (it does come with reasonable defaults). Someone elsewhere in this article pointed out mpd; I'll have to look at that, but it at least doesn't appear to support the various MOD formats.
mplayer. It does more or less require some graphical output (X, framebuffer, whatever), but it's run and displays it status in text mod
355/113 -- Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible simulation!
Then what are xmove and xNest? Both work fine, for single apps or a screen like virtual terminal you can move around.
--
Evan "I don't use either, but I do seriously use screen... several of my scripts [ "$TERM" == "screen" ] && do things"
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Look up xmove.
You need to install an RTFM interface.
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
I use wget all the time, even when I'm working with an X11 browser.
I use wget all the time, even though I mainly use Windows. It's a great as a quick and simple downloader. No dealing with clunky GUIs or "download accelerators". Just open a console and "wget url", or "wget -c url" to continue a file. You can get it as part of Windows ports for Unix utilities package.
xmove is buggy and crashes on even simple things like xclock. the fact it hasnt been updated since 1996 probably contributes to that. it doesnt know how to handle any of the newer x11 protocols.
also, it doesnt work _at all_ if your display depth doesnt match.
you can't redirect xnest, nor detach/reattach. you _can_ use xnest to run 'tiny' xservers resized to your application's window and then vnc to them, but that's not quite the same thing.
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,