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

mp3blaster.

[Slayk]

It's a slick little console mp3 player with playlist support. It is quite nice to have when I do something to b0rk X.

Screen....

[deadmongrel]

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.

Re:Screen....

[FullyIonized]

And one of the most underutilized features of screen is multi-user sessions. I have used this to do XP-style programming with a colleague who was working 900 miles away

The way I did it:
Start up screen with a temporary screenrc file that contains:
multiuser on
addacl other_username
detach

Note that I have the screen session detach. Type "screen -ls" to get the screen session name (for the other person), then type "screen -r" to reattach. The other person ssh'd into my machine and typed "screen -x session_name". It is possible to script all of this to make it easier.

We then talked over the phone (headphones highly recommended) while we could simultaneously edit in a vi session. It was hilarious because we'd start yelling at each other "No,no, let ME type." Still, these sessions are always among my most productive programming sessions because we catch each others mistakes and program the parts of the program that we have expertise in.

Naim

[primal39]

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.

Nmap

[sharp-bang]

This continues to be my port scanner of choice; although it has a pretty front end, it really doesn't need one.

Hey, JOE

[robslimo]

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.

Because....

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Why?

[_xeno_]

Anyone else think this isn't so much a strength with the command-line app but a weakness with X?

I really would like to see that feature added to X. You can (sorta) do it with VNC or Remote Desktop in Windows (sorta means "entire desktop only, not a single app") - it would be really nice if you could take a GUI-based program running on some other computer and "forward" it to your own computer, without restarting the application.

IMO, that's a weakness of X - something that X should do, and not a strength of the console. They both should do it. As I'm sure everyone knows, screen is incredibly useful. Something like it for X would be really nice, too.