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..."
mp3blaster. (Score:5, Interesting)
Screen.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
A small SQL analysis app... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Naim (Score:5, Interesting)
naim + mp3blaster + links (Score:2, Interesting)
Nmap (Score:5, Interesting)
favorite console programs... (Score:1, Interesting)
Somme little utilities I can't live without... (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:mp3blaster. (Score:5, Interesting)
Hey, JOE (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
Its much more convenient than GUI stuff when you switch computers a lot during the day. I can leave naim and irssi running in screen while I drive home from work and people can still IM me if they need to for those 30 minutes.
giFTcurs (Score:4, Interesting)
Because.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
Grep and wget (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Screen.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:BitchX (Score:4, Interesting)
Here are my picks... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Great console app I stumbled across... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:For when you're not playing games... (Score:4, Interesting)
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'd say mc... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Bittorrent clients (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
This article is a troll! (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:Why? (Score:1, Interesting)
F'ing GStreamer! (Score:3, Interesting)
It was covered [slashdot.org] 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!
Re:Why? (Score:2, Interesting)
Why, except in a few rare cases, would you use a graphical enviroment for text based applications on a text cell based machine?
It seems terribly inconvenient.
Similarly, as a console user, I jumped into this thread expecting to be able to contribute, but have hit a snag. It seems that most console apps (if we except abandonware) are either under development or are considered done and are merely in maintenence mode.
Most of the work that goes into developing graphical enviroments is because they are graphical enviroments and must anticipate every possible use, and until they have provided a means for dealing with every possible use they are not "done."
A console application need only provide a means for the user to define his own use and the shell provides a means for combining those uses in an infinite number of ways.
"Convenience" is a relative term and can only be defined by your own needs and desires. If your WP has a button on it to make text bold you may well find that more convenient than typing a couple of tags (I, as it happens, do not. I can type tags while touch typing and not removing my fingers from "home". I consider that the very definition of convenience while dealing with text, which finally provides a direct answer to your actual question. If I rambled long enough it was bound to happen I guess).
If your WP does not provide such a button it may well be very inconvenient to wait for your application's publisher to provide you with one.
If you are working at the console it may then be convenient to have to write your own script to do what you desire, and the shell, Perl, C, etc. are provided for you at shell level so you can do that. This often applies even if the app is propriatary because ASCII is not. This is the benefit of open standards as opposed to open source.
Thus most console apps could be considered to be in heavy development all the time, not at the application level, but at the extension level, because people are free to extend them at will, and do. See CPAN.
Just as ideas of developing and distributing propriatary code may be logically absurd when applied to open source, ideas of graphical applications may be logically absurd when applied to a console application.
KFG
Re:playlists, sounds over complicated (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Damn it, what are you guys smoking! (Score:2, Interesting)
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!
Re:Why? (Score:2, Interesting)
Framebuffer Console (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Screen.... (Score:2, Interesting)
in german, when you "bell", you are "barking".
console advantage? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:For when you're not playing games... (Score:3, Interesting)
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
--
Ecasound (Score:3, Interesting)
Ecasound [www.eca.cx] is the best recording application you can get, and it's all console, baby. Wow. ;)