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..."
One word . . . (Score:5, Informative)
Re:One word . . . (Score:5, Funny)
As they say on the site;
Parent is NOT "funny" (Score:5, Funny)
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. :-)
Re:One word . . . (Score:5, Informative)
Try ToME [t-o-m-e.net]. It's an Angband variant that features a world map with multiple dungeons, quests, a skill system, a huge set of available races and character classes (and variants thereof) and, best of all, a Lua interpreter so you can write new items, spells, and whole new variants.
Nethack is fun, but it gets dull just going down and down and down. In ToME you can recall to town (Bree, say, or Lothlorien), sell treasure you've found, buy some new equipment with the money, and return to the dungeon to continue exploring.
(No, I'm not one of the developers or anything. I just play it a lot.)
Re:One word . . . (Score:4, Funny)
For when you're not playing games... (Score:5, Informative)
Links [mff.cuni.cz]: a superior web browser alternative to Lynx that formats things correctly on your screen.
Mutt [mutt.org] and Pine [washington.edu]: Two great email clients that allow you to work much more quickly than with any graphical client.
Nano [nano-editor.org]: My favorite text editor. I refuse to feel guilty that it's easy to use!
Micq [micq.org]: 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 [earth.li]: 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.
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.
Re:For when you're not playing games... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:For when you're not playing games... (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, and the best damn console app ever is screen [gnu.org]. It's a window manager for the console, and it simply rules...
Re:For when you're not playing games... (Score:4, Informative)
I disagree with that a bit. There are things that mutt is faster at than Evolution (I use these two as examples because I use them both), but other things that Evolution is much faster at.
Most of the things that Evolution is faster at are a result of the graphical mode of interaction. For example, selecting the last 1/3rd of the messages in a folder can be eye-balled in Evolution, but you have to think about what the numbers involved are in mutt (assuming you have large folders to start with).
Mutt's pride and joy is the vi-like "motions". I have to say, there's just nothing like "~hautolearn=no;|sa-learn --spam", though as user-interfaces go it lacks something, it's certainly powerful.
Evolution's virtual mailboxes (a concept from VM, the Emacs-based mailer and to some extent MH as well) are similar in many ways, but have some strengths and weaknesses that don't map exactly onto mutt.
I find them both quite powerful, and often comparably fast. Evolution takes longer to start, but once it's running, there's nothing quite like being able to select all of your spam from 6 IMAP-based accounts on different servers as fast as you can click on the virtual folder for your spam and press control-a! You can problably guess what the next key usually is
Re:For when you're not playing games... (Score:4, Informative)
BitTorrent and Shad0w's client (does BitTornado still have this mode?) have console modes.
irssi, best console-based IRC client evar.
nano, my choice of text editor *ducks*.
ncftp for ftp.
mplayer to play mp3 and ogg files, it works at teh console too.
I really only use X for running xterms, xmms and xchat, and all of what I do, I don't really need X for at all. XD;
Moll.
Re:For when you're not playing games... (Score:3, Informative)
centericq's another good one; nice multi-protocol console IM client.
Re:For when you're not playing games... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:One word . . . (Score:3, Funny)
mp3blaster. (Score:5, Interesting)
playlists, sounds over complicated (Score:5, Funny)
Re:playlists, sounds over complicated (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:mp3blaster. (Score:5, Interesting)
mpd (Score:4, Informative)
fortune! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:fortune! (Score:5, Funny)
--
Any spare gmail invites could do better than ending up at rjw16@st-and.ac.uk
Re:fortune! (Score:3, Funny)
* games-misc/fortune-mod-dubya
Latest version available: 20040527
Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
Size of downloaded files: 24 kB
Homepage: http://dubya.seiler.us/
Description: Quotes from George W. Bush
License: as-is
BitchX (Score:5, Informative)
Re:BitchX (Score:5, Informative)
Re:BitchX (Score:3, Informative)
Re:BitchX (Score:4, Interesting)
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:BitchX (Score:3, Funny)
Everytime I check the updates for my distro it seems that there is another vulnerability for BitchX.
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 w
Screen. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Screen. (Score:5, Informative)
Vim [vim.org] to edit text
Mutt [mutt.org] for email
elinks [elinks.or.cz] to browse the web
MPlayer [mplayerhq.hu] to play any media file (even videos in text mode [mplayerhq.hu])
mICQ [micq.org] for ICQ (also centericq [thekonst.net] for a multi-protocol IM client)
BitchX [bitchx.org] for IRC
lftp [lftp.yar.ru] for ftp
You forgot one! (Score:4, Insightful)
mc [ibiblio.org] for messing around with files.
Re:VTs with gpm (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:VTs with gpm (Score:4, Informative)
you run anything, screen will allow you to handle disconnects (intentional and
otherwise) gracefully.
SealBeater
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:Screen. (Score:5, Informative)
Bleeding Edge (Score:5, Funny)
Screen.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Screen.... (Score:5, Informative)
Extremely useful for collaboration on the command line.
D'oh (Score:3, Insightful)
Should be "kibitz <username>" and "type 'kibitz -number' to kibitz with <username>".
Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
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]
Sorry, broken link, correction. (Score:3, Informative)
I guess you could deduce it, but anyway.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Funny)
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:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
The other reason is that next to my main desktop at home, I have a nice little text-based LCD terminal (actually a partially disassembled 486 laptop) that I IM on -- saves screen real estate and I don't have to get offline when I'm doing stuff like kernel driver debugging that requires me to shut down X...
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:screen for X (Score:4, Informative)
Then what are xmove and xNest? Both work fine, for single apps or a screen like virtual terminal you can move around.
--
Evan "I don't use either, but I do seriously use screen... several of my scripts [ "$TERM" == "screen" ] && do things"
Re:Why? (Score:3, Informative)
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 minut
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!
Re:Why? (Score:3, Funny)
That is to say, yes.
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)
centericq (Score:3, Informative)
CenterICQ [konst.org.ua]
How do you take a screen shot of tty1 !?!
screen (Score:4, Informative)
gnut, a console nutella app which appears to be a dormant project these days, was pretty cool as far as real applications.
Console never dies! (Score:3, Informative)
ftp: ncftp
media: mplayer, mpg321
And the mighty fdisk & cfdisk pair cure all wounds.
Well ... (Score:5, Funny)
Lynx (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Lynx (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, I don't like bringing up those picture-intensive porno sites on my GUI desktop at work, either.
Nmap (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Bittorrent clients (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Bittorrent clients (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Bittorrent clients (Score:3, Interesting)
plugins for lynx... (Score:5, Funny)
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
Lynx (Score:3, Funny)
Hey - who you calling a Luddite? :-)
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:wget (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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.
giFTcurs (Score:4, Interesting)
Some of the Apps I use... (Score:4, Informative)
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
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.
EMACS (Score:3)
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.
startx (Score:5, Funny)
Transcode (Score:4, Informative)
It converts between video formats, and does so quickly and with very good quality. I use it to make XVID [xvid.org] backups of my DVDs to play on the road or in my XBOX running MythTV. It's very scriptable, which is why I like it. It also has a great perl-gtk frontend called dvd::rip [exit1.org]. You can crop and zoom, as well as browse the various video and audio tracks before you encode. It even supports subtitles.
Snownews (Score:5, Informative)
I'd say mc... (Score:3, Interesting)
kill (Score:3, Funny)
The classics never get old.
kill
killall
init
Killemall (Score:4, Funny)
Re:kill (Score:3, Funny)
exit
I find it makes life a lot more worthwhile.
Midnight Commander (Score:4, Informative)
MC, as it is know to those of us that have known the love of Midnight Commander, is a a tool of incompareable power. From its assorted views, to its many tools and commands, it is a diamond in the muddy rivers of linux console apps.
Plus it uses F-keys, F-Keys are cool.
Twin (Score:3, Informative)
It's like diet X
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!
Bitlbee (Score:5, Informative)
iftop, apachetop (Score:3, Informative)
I'm a huge fan of iftop [ex-parrot.com], a Curses-based interactive network load monitor.
Similarly, there's also ApacheTop [shagged.org], which does something similar based on monitoring of the Apache HTTP server's logs.
"Stuck with" old machines? (Score:4, Informative)
Believe me, I know what it's like not to have any extra cash - but if that's the only reason you're stuck with a computer incapable of running a GUI, then one of us is overlooking something...
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.
console advantage? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:console advantage? (Score:3, Informative)
Our new system is entirely linux based. Our old system is entirely Windows based.
I can be on the road on my way out of town, dial into our console server (Cyclades rocks) and power off servers, restart Websphere, run db2 queries and anything else that needs to be done via my laptop connected to a cell phone. One of my first thoughts in building our new datacenter is "What do I need to do so I never have to come here again except to install a new machine?"
It's that
Use the CLI to get food (Score:3, Funny)
http://www.beigerecords.com/cory/pizza_party/
The Antidesktop (Score:5, Informative)
Personal Choices (Score:5, Informative)
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 [gnu.org]. 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 [aperiodic.net].
zsh [zsh.org]. 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 [irssi.org]. The best IRC client I've come across, certainly beating out IrcII, BitchX, and even epic. Multiple windows, extensible, tons of plugins available.
bitlbee [bitlbee.org]. 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 [kcore.de]. curses-based RSS aggregator. I shopped around a bit before finding an aggregator that I liked. snownews does everything I need.
mutt [mutt.org]. 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 [procmail.org]. Again, not exactly command line, but essential to my email usage.
Emacs [gnu.org]. My text-mode editor of choice. Feel free to substitute XEmacs [xemacs.org] or vi (preferably vim [vim.org]) 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 [sourceforge.net]. There's also links [sourceforge.net]; 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 [nanoo.org]. 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 [musicpd.org]; I'll have to look at that, but it at least doesn't appear to support the various MOD formats.
mplayer [mplayerhq.hu]. It does more or less require some graphical output (X, framebuffer, whatever), but it's run and displays it status in text mod
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.
Re:One Word: (Score:3, Funny)