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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.
It's a slick little console mp3 player with playlist support. It is quite nice to have when I do something to b0rk X.
that was too easy. was this a trick question?
.sigs are for post^Hers.
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.
The version of ls that comes with Fedora Core 2 is 5.2.1. Incredible software! Would use again! A+++++!!!!
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.
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
... some folks start X from the command line, soo ...
This continues to be my port scanner of choice; although it has a pretty front end, it really doesn't need one.
#!
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.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
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!!!!
I'm working on a Java plugin, a Flash plugin, and a google bar - as well as a popup blocker and an anti-spyware plugin.
isn't that what stdin is for ?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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.
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!
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
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!
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
The best command line tool is startx. It gives you all the power of a full graphical environment within the console.
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.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
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.
And, yes, I've lost quite a few months myself... :-(
On the other hand, real life is for users that can't handle nethack. If it wasn't for another console application that has hooked me, I'd reinstall!
My real favorite console application is Perl.
Both incredible power/expresiveness -- and with the syntax, crazy extensions and humour in the Perl tradition, it's like playing a game! :-)
Yes, yes, Python fans -- my adventure is someone elses horror game. :-)
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
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 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?
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
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