Slashdot Mirror
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.
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!!!!
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
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.
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 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!