The Latest And Greatest Console Applications? 618
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..."
centericq (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Grep (Score:1, Insightful)
One application to rule them all: (Score:2, Insightful)
Really with suitable macro you can make vi to do all these things like e-mail, IM, bittorrent and web surfing. Really a great editor.
Re:Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
All my gruntwork, downloading, bittorrents, etc, run on that old box, never to bother my good machine.
Taking the time to type 'screen btorrent blahblah.iso.torrent' is more convenient than having my main machine slow to a crawl after torrent opens 9 billion connections.
Re:Why? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [ratpoisonsourceforge.net]
wget (Score:3, Insightful)
To be fair, I'm not sure how much development is happening with this tool. How can you improve perfection?
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Console is ruled by OS, editors, and code (Score:2, Insightful)
Essentially, I don't use a lot of newly developed tools - or even, for that matter, tools that are still being heavily developed. I don't use the command line to browse, and I don't use it to check mail (though there are a few pines in there). The core of my user experience still feels like it's commands, but in fact, the mindless things that take most of my time are done in a graphical environment (like typing this post). The only tools I see myself using that aren't older than me are tools used for security work (a wonderful list of which you may find here [insecure.org]), and the occasional bout of StreamRipper [sourceforge.net].
Somehow, after this post, I feel less like a console jockey than I thought I was. A better question might be: what do console users need?
mc (Score:2, Insightful)
When doing some rough copying stuff or space-cleaning. I intuitively remembered the commands from 'Norton Commander' from many years ago.
Re:One Word: (Score:3, Insightful)
I know, I know someone else got modded as flamebait, but its just not right to list emacs without vi.
You cannot improve the console... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Instant Messaging is text-based, right? Why WOULDN'T you use a console app over a more bloated graphical one?
and to hide what you were doing (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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:For when you're not playing games... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:playlists, sounds over complicated (Score:4, Insightful)
D'oh (Score:3, Insightful)
Should be "kibitz <username>" and "type 'kibitz -number' to kibitz with <username>".
Re:BitchX (Score:3, Insightful)
the writers of that app are tard monkeys. use irssi. at least it wasn't written by ScRiPt kiddies.
Re:What about USENET??? (Score:3, Insightful)
You can still get it, at least as source code, from here [sourceforge.net]. I still use it and it works reasonably well.
It has a nice, friendly Configure script that'll get it to build on modern Linux systems without any fuss.
The main problems with it are that the Q00L new features are poorly documented, as is how to turn them off, and the that the source code is terrifying. Remember, this was the program that Larry Wall was going to rewrite just before he got distracted by Perl, after which it switched maintainers before finally being (apparently) abandoned.
Still, for all its problems, I haven't found a better news reader. I considered XEmacs GNUS for a while but configuring it is harder to do than just writing your own news reader.
You forgot one! (Score:4, Insightful)
mc [ibiblio.org] for messing around with files.
Re:One word . . . (Score:2, Insightful)
I've never ascended either, and I've been playing for more than 7 years now.
And your game doesn't sound very appealing to Nethack players.
Maxing stats and worrying about how much attack damage is not what Nethack is about.
And 'recalling' back to town to 'sell treasure' sounds way too much like an MMOG than Nethack.
Nethack simply isn't for you. It's not for everyone.
Anyone who stops playing Nethack for good, well, it isn't for them