The Flow of Consciousness

Sean posted some excellent Linux productivity applications a few days ago. However, these apps are all graphical, and I fancy myself a command-line jockey.

So, here’s a list of some bodacious console productivity applications similar to those Sean listed.

1. screen – Screen allows a console user to launch a command in a virtual window. The user can then “detach” from the window and “reattach” later if the command hasn’t exited yet. This command is excellent for any console application that will run for a long time or has its own text-based interface. In the early days of BitTorrent, I used to use only btdownloadheadless.py to access torrents (nowadays I use various graphical clients). Read man screen for instructions on how to use screen.
2. Finch – Finch is the text-based version of Pidgin, a multi-protocol IM client. Combine Finch with screen and the result is a windowed IM client. Finch could replace naim in Zack‘s AIM answering machine, and the multi-protocol handling of Finch would enable an answering machine for just about any IM network. The Pidgin wiki has a great article on how to use Finch.
3. GNUplot – GNUplot is an excellent graphing and plotting application. It just needs a little bit of input and can produce excellent visuals for a web site or presentation. It’s got a bit of a learning curve, but after a while, it gets quite easy. See the GNUplot FAQ for a HOWTO, or hit up man gnuplot.
4. mp3blaster – mp3blaster is console mp3 and ogg player. Most people use either of those formats, and the mp3blaster interface is pretty neat.
5. vi – vi, or specifically vim is a great text editor with syntax highlighting for just about every known language. I prefer its mode switching (command/edit) to emacs‘s ctrl+(whatever) tomfoolery.
6. alpine – alpine is a replacement for pine, a console email application. It can access pop and imap servers, as well as local mail in mbox format. The only negative thing is about alpine is that it is very young. It’s based on pine, which is ancient, but alpine is a complete rewrite, afaik.
7. alias – OK, so alias isn’t an app, persay, but it is certainly a neat function in bash, the shell most distros use. Open up .bashrc or .bash_profile and you’ll see how alias can be used. Zack has aliases set up so that he can connect via SSH to any of his computers with a single word.

Got more suggestions? Let me know!