Your favorite text based application [Archive]

bsddaemon

November 17th, 2008, 13:13

If there is no kind of rich media content over internet, I would run my workstation with all text based application all the time. Hard not to love the plain and simplicity of plain text. My web browser (Opera) is the one and the only reason I need to run GUI.

Most of my frequently and favorite text based application can be run as non-interactive. Cron and script gotta love it.

===> curl: An excellent tool for manipulating http stream connection.

===> cmus: My music player of choice

===> growisofs: create and burn iso file to DVD.

===> httptunnel: create TCP/IP tunnel and stream it as http connection.

===> Lame: she is not lame, especially in audio encoding tasks

===> mplayer: Ah, just love it!

===> nmap: extremely powerful and configurable port scanner, a bit too noisy, though

===> tcpdump

===> rsync: we all know about her ;)

===> zsh: the shell with advanced auto complete feature, you never have to type too much :P

===> ImageMagick: the guy behind the screen. His job is image manipulation.

===> Classic UNIX ulilities: tr, grep, sed and awk.

===> dump and restore: oldies buddies, hope I dont have to see them so often :p

===> w3m: web browser

===> synergy: a tool to share mouse and keyboard via TCP/IP. You will be a bit confused at the first place, then you will love it. This could be used for making fun with other people :D

===> telnet: one of my favorite network debug ultilities all the time :)

===> man: "...then the God created man..." as per my signature ;)

===> Last but not least, vim and ssh

Daemony

November 17th, 2008, 13:22

Nice list. But when gui unavailable Opera is unavailable too.
links - is a lucky. Lightweight :e and no needs any GUI.

bsddaemon

November 17th, 2008, 13:50

Agrrh, how could I forget sed, grep, awk, tr. Added to the 1st post.

Nice list. But when gui unavailable Opera is unavailable too.
links - is a lucky. Lightweight :e and no needs any GUI.

You havent tried w3m, have you? I dont run text based so often, only in server. I have been using lynx, link, elinks and w3m, IMHO, elinks is nicer than link (table rendering?), and w3m is even better ;)

Daemony

November 17th, 2008, 14:05

w3m? Hm... /usr/ports/www/w3m ?
Thanks for hint. :) I'll try it.

I dont run text based so often, only in server.

me too.

November 17th, 2008, 16:56

How about tmsnc, the text-based MSN-client?
And ee, the default userland text-editor?

anomie

November 17th, 2008, 17:11

net-p2p/transmission-cli (BT client)

mfaridi

November 17th, 2008, 17:25

/net-p2p/rtorrent and rtgui

richardpl

November 17th, 2008, 18:20

Nobody mentioned elinks and nc

SirDice

November 17th, 2008, 18:27

Screen rules :) sysutils/screen

calande

November 17th, 2008, 18:50

(I'm an Opera fan too!)
I'm not a great fan of text-based applications, but I like using the shell and the MySQL client.

bsddaemon

November 17th, 2008, 19:12

*forehead slap*. I know I am missing something: telnet (telnet as in telnet client, not server :D)

And also added some more tools: synergy, dump and restore...

s-tlk

November 17th, 2008, 19:19

In my opinion screen + irssi (irc client) + mcabber (jabber client) are the ultimate combination for chatting.

Mutt for mails is nice, too. :)

And I can't live without vim + ctags for programming. ^^

Yamagi

November 17th, 2008, 19:30

I like ctorrent. A small, lightweight torrentclient. Tin, a easy to learn newsreader and of course the the only mailclient that sucks less. Mutt:)

tad1214

November 17th, 2008, 19:35

fortune

stargazer

November 17th, 2008, 20:35

I can't imagine my life without mc ^_^

oliverh

November 17th, 2008, 20:50

Mutt of course, my wife uses (Al)pine (mail) instead, newsbeuter (http://www.newsbeuter.org/) a really handy rssfeed-reader, mcabber for XMPP, sometimes lynx, ttyload, rtorrent and so on. There are a lot of tiny helpers I'm using regularly.

snes-addict

November 17th, 2008, 21:15

SaveTheRbtz

November 18th, 2008, 00:29

Hey! So much screen and only one irsii is toooo boooring =) let's chat =)

PS may be place screen in base? =)

steinex

November 18th, 2008, 02:00

fortune
How true. I could spend hours with beer and fortunes. ;-)

But, like for the most, main applications on console are screen, irssi and mutt (with vv/nntp-patch).

PS may be place screen in base? =)
If you ask me, screen is not needed in base. And not to forget, it's GPL. screen lives well in ports.

bsddaemon

November 18th, 2008, 06:49

And not to forget, it's GPL.

Is it the same reason for curl and rsync? I would not be suprised if I find them in the base one day :e

Also I would add find and locate :D

marcrosoft

November 18th, 2008, 18:53

Vim /thread :P

Alt

November 18th, 2008, 19:07

grep ))

Vye

November 18th, 2008, 22:54

My favorites are:

screen
vim
irssi
bmon/iftop
rtorrent
praudit/auditreduce
ncftp
nmap
etc...

I just enjoy all the CLI application as opposed to gui applications for sysadmin tasks. Well, maybe not just sysadmin tasks. I remember when I was in high school doing my homework in vim.

Gabe_G23

November 19th, 2008, 03:50

I noticed a lot of people mentioning screen, so I thought I would throw in tmux (http://sourceforge.net/projects/tmux/), which is like screen, except has a BSD-license and is slightly less straining on your resources.

tuck

November 19th, 2008, 04:24

"links http://goosh.org/" :D

Oko

November 19th, 2008, 05:35

Some of my favorite text based applications on the workstation

OpenSSH
OpenSSL
window (console manager)
nvi (New vi editor)
Heirloom mailx (nail) my favorite email client
lynx (excellent web-browser and fantastic ftp client)
cdio (CD burning and playing tool)
madplay (MP3 decoder and player)
ffmpeg (converter with built in video player ffplay)
dvd+rw-tools
deco (file manager)
pjsua (SIP client)
SIAG spreadsheets (has GUI mode as well)
sic (250 lines IRC client)
antiword

hedwards

November 19th, 2008, 05:48

I'm a fan of (t)csh, lynx, screen, mplayer (no video, though, since I can't use svgalib), emacs, vi, and ftp.

And of course, the standard shell syntax:
% cat file1 | grep statement > file2
...is extremely helpful.
That's a bit of a bad habit, you can just go:
% grep statement file1 > file2
Grep can read files on it's own.

bsddaemon

November 19th, 2008, 07:21

I saw someone used that kind of command with sed, too. A bit overuse of pipe :D

Speaking of pipeline :D

Master Foo and the Ten Thousand Lines

Master Foo once said to a visiting programmer: “There is more Unix-nature in one line of shell script than there is in ten thousand lines of C”.

The programmer, who was very proud of his mastery of C, said: “How can this be? C is the language in which the very kernel of Unix is implemented!”

Master Foo replied: “That is so. Nevertheless, there is more Unix-nature in one line of shell script than there is in ten thousand lines of C”.

The programmer grew distressed. “But through the C language we experience the enlightenment of the Patriarch Ritchie! We become as one with the operating system and the machine, reaping matchless performance!”

Master Foo replied: “All that you say is true. But there is still more Unix-nature in one line of shell script than there is in ten thousand lines of C”.

The programmer scoffed at Master Foo and rose to depart. But Master Foo nodded to his student Nubi, who wrote a line of shell script on a nearby whiteboard, and said: “Master programmer, consider this pipeline. Implemented in pure C, would it not span ten thousand lines?”

The programmer muttered through his beard, contemplating what Nubi had written. Finally he agreed that it was so.

“And how many hours would you require to implement and debug that C program?” asked Nubi.

“Many”, admitted the visiting programmer. “But only a fool would spend the time to do that when so many more worthy tasks await him”.

“And who better understands the Unix-nature?” Master Foo asked. “Is it he who writes the ten thousand lines, or he who, perceiving the emptiness of the task, gains merit by not coding?”

Upon hearing this, the programmer was enlightened.

http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ten-thousand.html

Ico

November 19th, 2008, 09:14

nano
nmap
links
locate
cat
grep ;)

DemoDoG

November 19th, 2008, 09:29

bsddaemon

November 19th, 2008, 11:35

Have you tried finch?

jvdb

November 19th, 2008, 19:51

Some of my favorites:

rtorrent
hellanzb
minicom
esniper
snownews

DrJ

November 19th, 2008, 20:49

groff (+preprocessors) and TeX. With vi, of course.

givanov

November 19th, 2008, 21:00

emacs , TeX

Gabe_G23

November 19th, 2008, 22:07

I used to use a nice textbased MSN client called Pebrot. But it was annoying that if I wrote to someone and they answer some time later it opened a new window and you got lots of windows and it was hard to follow conversations. Has anyone used this program and perhaps got rid of this problem? Or anyone using another good MSN text based client still being developed?

Have you tried finch?

I'm in agreement with bsddaemon, if you want to Instant Message via Command-Line, Finch is the way to go.

I love irssi or Bitc*X for IRC though. :) [can't say the word or else: *beep**beep**beep**beep**beep*]

Ico

November 20th, 2008, 02:01

ah yeah forgot about bit.chX :D

bsddaemon

November 20th, 2008, 12:44

I should have mentioned cron, simple, yet powerful :)

susanth

November 21st, 2008, 10:47

Wow! Nice list

rliegh

November 22nd, 2008, 13:09

Using vim on a *bsd box is just sick and wrong, imo. nvi for life! :D

I'm using the cli less and less as time goes on -this is mostly because lynx is increasingly less able to handle what the web has become and I've never liked any of the ircII-based clients (bx, epic, etc).

Actually, my favorite cli app would probably be the game dopewars. It's been too long since I've played that.

sinn3r

November 22nd, 2008, 13:19

irssi :r

bsddaemon

November 22nd, 2008, 14:03

Using vim on a *bsd box is just sick and wrong, imo. nvi for life! :D

Hmm, but one of crucial features of vim is to able to handle multiple undo buffers

Oko

November 22nd, 2008, 16:42

Using vim on a *bsd box is just sick and wrong, imo. nvi for life! :D

Hmm, but one of crucial features of vim is to able to handle multiple undo buffers

Using vim on a *bsd box is just sick and wrong:)
There is even a hospital here in California that cure people from VIM ;)
Last time I checked Nvi supports multiple buffers and infinite undo. The only thing that Nvi doesn't support is syntax highlighting. Bearing in mind that 25% of humans are color blind
at least for some colors that is not such a big deal. I wish Keith Bostic just kept syntax highlighting from Elvis (bold font instead of color). As you know nvi was coded in 1992 starting from Elvis as nvi was of those famous three files that had to be removed from BSD 4.4 light since they belonged to AT&T.

And please do not tell me anything about tabs. You can split the window even in the original vi with

:N secondfilename

bsddaemon

November 22nd, 2008, 17:05

There is even a hospital here in California that cure people from VIM ;)

Haha, thank for the laugh

Last time I checked Nvi supports multiple buffers and infinite undo.

Sounds good, I will check it out.

fonz

November 23rd, 2008, 14:16

Kinda old school perhaps, but hey:

mpg123
aumix
foobox (*)

Plus of course the obvious, such as lynx, mutt, vim, slrn etc.

Fonz

Ad (*): an ncurses-based mp3 jukebox proggy I wrote years ago

DemoDoG

November 25th, 2008, 13:55

Is it possible to link a terminalbased torrentclient like rtorrent to firefox so it can be started by simply clicking on the link in firefox?

foldingstock

November 25th, 2008, 16:16

Kinda old school perhaps, but hey:

mpg123
aumix
foobox (*)

Plus of course the obvious, such as lynx, mutt, vim, slrn etc.

Fonz

Ad (*): an ncurses-based mp3 jukebox proggy I wrote years ago

mp3blaster is quite nice also ;)

bell

July 6th, 2009, 14:56

thanks

roddierod

July 6th, 2009, 15:32

Everything I like has been said except midnight commander(mc).

graudeejs

July 6th, 2009, 17:50

vim, elinks, tmux, mksh, mplayer/playd, irssi, TeX/LaTeX, sh, perl, transmission-daemon, burncd, mkisofs, ImageMagick, SciLab, MathOmatic, ssh, sudo....

base unix utilities, especially man

rxvt-unicode

jb_fvwm2

July 6th, 2009, 21:09

lookat ($PAGER, I can read man pages way easier)
mmv (cp -iv single file sub)
hgrep (highlighted grep)
zsh ( .zshrc on the web, functions, HISTSIZE, others
........^^^ someone else did all the work......
mutt ( tho used primarily to persue usenet threads )

aragon

July 7th, 2009, 01:36

Very nice list, everyone. All I can add is lftp - a very nice ftp client.

aragon

July 7th, 2009, 01:54

Is it possible to link a terminalbased torrentclient like rtorrent to firefox so it can be started by simply clicking on the link in firefox?
Don't know about rtorrent, but that should be possible with transmission (daemon).

digitalsedition

July 7th, 2009, 02:44

The Aircrack-ng suite! �e

aragon

July 7th, 2009, 02:49

The Aircrack-ng suite!
Ah, reminds me of: http://xkcd.com/416/

:)

digitalsedition

July 7th, 2009, 07:38

Ah, reminds me of: http://xkcd.com/416/

:)

That's great! I've never seen these comics before, I have read a bunch, pretty funny.

Thanks for the link. :e

graudeejs

July 7th, 2009, 23:12

I just tried deskutils/when, and I totally love it, especially when I added

echo '============================='
[ `which when` ] && when w

to my ~/.profile

It's nice even reminder app written in perl :D

aragon

July 8th, 2009, 00:59

Slightly OT, but worth mentioning. I just started using evilvte and quite like it. Nice, very lite VTE based terminal emulator.

iic2

July 8th, 2009, 08:34

xpad

http://www.freebsdsoftware.org/deskutils/

graudeejs

July 9th, 2009, 22:58

I just tried deskutils/when, and I totally love it

Forget it, calendar works just as good :D

lindaginnpeg

July 10th, 2009, 04:53

Very nice list, everyone. All I can add is lftp - a very nice ftp client.

Good call.

lme@

July 10th, 2009, 09:13

cal :)

unicyclist

July 10th, 2009, 18:05

Since I use mutt, I have to add fetchmail or getmail and msmtp. Easier than sendmail ;)

mrbytes

August 7th, 2010, 21:19

I feel obligated to point out that the program moc (package) mocp (program) is the best way to play music on the console whenever I get support in my kernel.

oliverh

August 8th, 2010, 11:05

Using herrie (http://herrie.info/) for music in the console now instead of cmus. Herrie is a project of FreeBSD developer Ed Schouten.

bes

August 8th, 2010, 13:45

sometimes, scr2png may be useful
pkg_descr:
scr2png takes a syscons screenshot generated by "vidcontrol -p" and
converts it in to a PNG image.
man scr2png:
...
EXAMPLES
The command sequence:

vidcontrol -p < /dev/ttyv0 > shot.scr
scr2png < shot.scr > shot.png

will capture the contents of the first virtual terminal, and redirect the
output to the shot.scr file. scr2png then processes this file, and
writes the output to shot.png. Of course this could be rewritten as

vidcontrol -p < /dev/ttyv0 | scr2png > shot.png
...

Bentley

August 9th, 2010, 05:34

ImageMagick is nice, although I only use it for thumbnails:
mogrify -resize 25% *.jpg

ii is a nifty IRC client that makes two text files for each channel, one that you edit to send messages and one that you read from to see channel output. I discovered it right as I was wishing that Irssi could use vi for input and tmux for windowing—switched right away, and it works great!

nmh is a mail client that works without a curses interface, so you can easily pipe commands. It’s great for the shell. And OpenSMTPD lets me relay everything to GMail for sending.

mrbytes

August 9th, 2010, 08:37

Using herrie (http://herrie.info/) for music in the console now instead of cmus. Herrie is a project of FreeBSD developer Ed Schouten.
I used Herrie but it didn't play very nice, as my resources were rather limited on that pc, the only thing I could get to play reasonable well and being in console was mocp.
But then I began to use it and fell in love :-), so now that is my preferred music app - unless I am sitting at a windows box (which should be banished I feel so bad about those computers, but thats another story)
mocp ftw.

oliverh

August 9th, 2010, 14:18

I don't have any performance related problems with herrie on an Intel Atom or even AMD Geode with just 800MHz.

camelia

August 9th, 2010, 17:48

sysutils/jfbterm, if you starve for hot babe on your background when you don't have X11 installed

ckester

August 9th, 2010, 19:30

Some of my favorite (i.e., frequently-used) textmode applications that I don't think have been mentioned in this thread:

audio/mpg123
audio/mcplay
audio/rexima
deskutils/calcurse
ftp/axel
sysutils/dvtm
math/wcalc
misc/vifm
multimedia/cclive
news/rawdog
sysutils/ncdu
sysutils/htop
sysutils/detox
textproc/colordiff

And some that are not in ports (yet):

pyradio (http://www.coderholic.com/pyradio)
chronicle (http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle)

I admit, I'm a vim user. But I'm curious to learn why some people think it's better to use nvi on BSD.

Beastie

August 9th, 2010, 19:52

I admit, I'm a vim user. But I'm curious to learn why some people think it's better to use nvi on BSD.
Fundamentalism :h

ckester

August 9th, 2010, 20:52

Add one more to my list of often-used apps not yet in ports:

CurseTheWeather (http://opensource.hld.ca/trac.cgi/wiki/CurseTheWeather)

UNIXgod

August 9th, 2010, 20:57

I admit, I'm a vim user. But I'm curious to learn why some people think it's better to use nvi on BSD.

The real question is why hasn't nvi been replaced with the real thing at this point:

http://ex-vi.sourceforge.net/

camelia

August 9th, 2010, 21:53

Wow, original one supports unicode and lisp editing.

fronclynne

August 10th, 2010, 01:01

I'm in agreement with bsddaemon, if you want to Instant Message via Command-Line, Finch is the way to go.

I love irssi or Bitc*X for IRC though. :) [can't say the word or else: *beep**beep**beep**beep**beep*]

Rampant anti-Saxonism on the moderator community. After 1066 all the the old Ænglisc terms become verboten & we had to suffer with using Latin to talk about filthy things like genitalia & excrement.

Oh, that painfully off topic. Umm . . .

I like net/tinyfugue & net/tintin++-devel.

Also, for writing, editors/joe is a fine fine thing.

kpedersen

August 10th, 2010, 01:51

The visual highlight seems an absolute must in vim.

What do nvi users do? Guess at the amount of letters that they want to copy/cut?

One command line (kinda) app that I love is bitlbee (http://www.bitlbee.org)
Since I don'r really like finch (console pidgin) bitlbee allows me to create an irc server with a bot that allows me to connect to many chat protocols (msn typically) using just an irc client such as irssi or *beep**beep**beep**beep**beep*x (b1tchX).

It takes a bit of getting used to but it is really awesome.

If you aren't limited to a terminal, what *really* tops it off is to use the Microsoft comic chat IRC client (in wine) rather than irssi etc :)

camelia

August 10th, 2010, 19:58

The visual highlight seems an absolute must in vim.What highlighting are you talking about? syntax or selection?
What do nvi users do? Guess at the amount of letters that they want to copy/cut?Either turn line numbersecho set nu >>~/.exrc
or user marks, e.g. set cursor to a place foo, mark it with m command, move cursor to a place bar, delete region between foo and bar by d`<foo_mark> command. Is this not a visual way to do things?

Well, I prefer mg/emacs over vi, anyway. Mostly because it has a nice integrated mail/news client called gnus.

UNIXgod

August 10th, 2010, 20:36

What do nvi users do? Guess at the amount of letters that they want to copy/cut?

Todays word is POSIX! It's almost like a bash user complaining that sh is on the system which ain't as pimpin as bash.

Feel free to look up yank and put. They work well in both vi and vim. With that sed Be happy you don't have to deal with `ed`.

camelia

August 10th, 2010, 21:00

Scrap POSIX, it exists only to facilitate porting but not really usable without extensions. And most bash users are dumb, they usually write scripts that run on an ash descendant or even POSIX shell with minor modifications. Besides, it's easy to write a sh-script that runs on ash but fails on bash, e.g.#! /bin/sh
echo $(case $* in
*) echo $*
esac)

Edit:

Bogus example of bash fail. I forgot that bash on my box is a symlink to zsh. Here is right example - http://pastebin.com/WvQ1qCTM

oliverh

August 10th, 2010, 22:26

Add one more to my list of often-used apps not yet in ports:

CurseTheWeather (http://opensource.hld.ca/trac.cgi/wiki/CurseTheWeather)

Usually I'm using pymetar (http://www.freshports.org/astro/py-metar/) for this purpose.

kpedersen

August 11th, 2010, 00:00

Hmm interesting,

For *ages* I have been looking for a way to visually select text to delete within a line in vi.

i.e in vim use: 'v', move cursor to somewhere else, and then press 'd'.

This thread inspired me to find out how to do it in vi.

in vi use: 'mk' to set a mark (assigned to k), move cursor to somewhere else and 'd`k' to delete from current position to mark stored in k.

This info was seriously hard to find without knowing to use the 'mark' keyword!

Thanks :)

Edit:
This is what camelia suggested, though since these forums changed the backticks, it kinda threw me off :p

camelia

August 11th, 2010, 22:44

The real question is why hasn't nvi been replaced with the real thingLet me guess, because libuxre (from heirloom (http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/)) that vi depends on is under LGPLv2+? While there is editors/2bsd-vi for some time I don't see anyone trying to replace vi in base. Here is my rough attempt - contrib_ex-vi.diff (ftp://ftp.lissyara.su/users/Guest/contrib_ex-vi.diff).