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..."

Comments

centericq

[ultrabot]

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.

Re:Why?

[ultrabot]

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.

By command-line I assume you mean text-based (curses/whatever)...

Text based interface can be much more usable, even if it os often less learnable. learnability != uasbility. There is certain amount of "control" in simple text interfaces that you don't have with GUI's which pop subwindows everywhere, have annoying MDI interfaces etc.

Text interfaces also have a distinct technical advantage - they can be detached from the controlling terminal (see 'screen', 'dtach').

Also check out this :-)

wget

[NeoFunk]

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?

Re:Why?

[keesh]

Because command-line clients can be screened. X apps can't.

Re:One Word:

[JWW]

vi

I know, I know someone else got modded as flamebait, but its just not right to list emacs without vi.

and to hide what you were doing

[twitter]

its easier to pretend a text based client is real work...

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.

Re:VTs with gpm

[bmwm3nut]

the best part of 'screen' is that it's detachable from the physical console (or virtual terminal). here are two good uses for screen:

1: i start a large calculation at work in screen, detach it from the terminal, then when i go home i re-attach it to the terminal on my home computer to check the status.

2: my friend only has a weak wireless connection at home, it's not stable enough for him to keep a terminal open for a while. so he runs screen, and starts his work there, if anything craps out on him, he can just re attach and go on as if nothing were different.

both cases are nice for us computational chemists who just write quick and dirty programs that do hard number crunching. most of our programs are tied to the terminal and if the terminal closes, we can easily lose days of computation. i know there are ways around it, but it's just easier to use screen and put all our effort into the chemistry part of the programming.

Re:playlists, sounds over complicated

[conway]

Well, even if you don't have stdin supported by the player, you can easily add playlist functionality to an mp3 playing program like mpg123 (which just plays a given file) with a simple shell script :

while read FILE; do
mpg123 $FILE
done

Thats why console apps are great - its extremely simple to add any functionality you want.

You forgot one!

[Mr2cents]

mc for messing around with files.