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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..."
It's a slick little console mp3 player with playlist support. It is quite nice to have when I do something to b0rk X.
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.
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
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.
This continues to be my port scanner of choice; although it has a pretty front end, it really doesn't need one.
#!
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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!
I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
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
For web browsing, I find that I really like w3m, it handles most basic formatting and does a pretty good job of displaying the page correctly (although a _large_ text terminal is reccomended for some sites). My only complaint is that it does not support Javascript, which makes it unusable on many sites.
:)
For text editing, how can you forget vim? It's the ultimate text editor.
Because I switch between console and raster modes, I like LICQ as my ICQ client. You can use the qt_gui plugin when you're in raster mode, and the console plugin on the console. This way your contact lists (and more importantly, your history) are saved in the same place. My only complaint is that you have to hack the console plugin because it assumes you have terminals with a black background.
I read the internet for the articles.
mc gives you eyes in the deep dark console caves...
I use the btlaunchmanycurses.py script. It's wonderful. I log into the console on my server (using watch -W /dev/ttyv0), then twiddle the resolution up to 80x50, then start btlaunchmanycurses.py torrents. Now it will automatically download any torrents I drop in the "torrents" directory. If I'm curious how far along a download is, all I have to do is log into the box, watch the v0 terminal, and hit ^L. Once a torrent is done and I've uploaded at least as much as I downloaded, I can stop the torrent by just rming the .torrent file.
The only minor problem is that if you try to download more torrents than you have screen space for, btlaunchmanycurses will flip out and die. This has generally not been a problem for me.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
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!
You've been modded as "Funny." I would have modded you as "Insightful," because yes, that is exactly what stdin is for.
In fact, if you look at the code and it's doing anything more than running stdin I'd say the programer didn't understand the console enviroment.
One of the possible negative results of more people raised in a graphical enviroment finding the joys and power of the console shell is that they'll expect to use the console shell in the same manner that they used the graphical shell and we'll see more "feeping creaturitus" in console apps.
KFG
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 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.
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?
Heh. I remember people waiting in login queues to get onto UCSCB to play tetris. And there was an addict flag, IIRC, which would cause the game to log you off when it terminated.
I never got that into it, for some reason. Too busy "talk"-ing and "finger"-ing people, maybe.
Did you ever play mtrek? I remember the chalkboard slogans: "Mtrek is better than sex." And people would have raucous, epic battles. Sometimes large groups of people would be together in the same computer room, and the other players wouldn't necessarily know they were collaborating with each other.
Thanks for reminding me about all that stuff.
MM
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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