More console apps, for future reference

I’ve been scraping the Internets again, looking for more fun little things to do at the console, and I found quite a few, thanks to some of the links I mentioned over the past week. I wish I could say I found a few more jewels, but most of what I’m finding now are esoteric, out-of-development or only vaguely useful in certain circumstances.

I have a few notes I’ll transfer to here, rather than keep them on my computer, where they are at risk of any number of perils. And that’s what this blog is for, really: To hold my notes, for future reference.

• abcde
  CD ripper. This works well, although it is really just a command-line program, and nothing with an interface at all. There might be an interface for it out there, but I haven’t run across it yet. Worth keeping.
• bashblogger
  Console blog client. I saw this elsewhere and I was vaguely curious, but I am hooked on Charm, and not likely to switch soon. I didn’t see this in Ubuntu’s repos, or in any other distro that I use regularly, either.
• bwm-ng
  Network monitor. Simple and clean, not complicated. It’s shallower (depth-wise) than most other network monitors, which means it would be kind of cool running in a four-line-deep terminal emulator on a desktop, or something like that.
• cadubi
  Graphics program (?). This needs p5-term-readkey, if you’re using Crux. Let’s you draw on the console screen with different colors and “pens,” and then output them in such a way that you can display them, like pictures. Great alongside something like tpp. I need to put together a port for this; it’s a very good application to have, under certain circumstances.
• cdf
  A graphical version of the df command. Nothing fancy, but does the job. (There’s something else out there that shows disk usage with solid bars, but I don’t know what it is. … 😦 )
• cdrecord
  By itself, it’s probably the best idea for a burner. I wouldn’t call it user-friendly, but everything else more or less relies on it, so it must be doing something right.
• cdw
  CD burner. The Ubuntu version of this was promising, and I plan on converting the AUR PKGBUILD for it to Crux, just to see if it will work. I have some doubt though; it requires a lot — cdrecord, mysql, etc. — and the more dependencies I face, the more likely my port will implode. All the same, it’s a great UI for a CD burner, if it works right. 🙄
• figlet
  Figlet is fun to play with. Spice up your e-mails with giant-size text. Flood chat channels with giant-size text. Cram giant-sized text into cadubi and spill the entire business into tpp. Fun for the whole family.
• freecell
  Freecell for the console. I like this, but I find the controls a little obtrusive. It would be much easier to have arrows guide the game, rather than Battleship-style coordinates. Either way, it’s a good diversion for the console, isn’t violent and will distract you for an hour or so.
• giftcurs
  This is some kind of front-end for a file-sharing system, but I’m not really sure what it is, or what to do with it.
• jnettop
  Network monitor. Shows the applications and what they’re accessing, so in that sense, it handles the concept a little differently. Not my favorite, but it does work.
• lftp
  I never really liked lftp, but I can’t deny that it works. I’d love to see a console FTP client that had a more intuitive interface — maybe something akin to Midnight Commander — but to the best of my knowledge, no such animal exists.
• mplay
  If I understand this correctly, it’s a terminal front-end for mplayer. It wouldn’t work for me, and spat out endless error messages when I ran it. I think you could probably get away with the same idea, as a bash script.
• mybashburn
  I had less success with this than with cdw, but I do like that it is primarily dialog-driven. It shows how much you can do with dialog, that is.
• ncftp
  If find ncftp to be only a little less boring than lftp, but not so much an improvement. They both do the job.
• saidar
  An excellent system monitor that comes with the libstatgrab library. If you want something other than htop or top or iftop or … it is a good system profile.
• sc
  A very fundamental spreadsheet program, and a lot easier to use than Oleo. Included in most distros, for what I can see.
• slrn
  I don’t have much use for newsreaders, but this one, apparently, is the cat’s meow.
• slsc
  An improvement of sorts over the sc spreadsheet program, but apparently doesn’t play nice with newer versions of slang. Which means you get to play that backpedaling game, looking for the right combination of outdated libraries that will make your kernel, your hardware and your application happy. Have fun with that. … 🙄
• sntop
  Not so much a traffic monitor as a site checker; this is one of those programs that are a godsend to a certain group of people, and completely uninteresting to me. See if it is useful to you.
• speedometer
  Judging by the screenshots, it should be some sort of a network monitor. However, the only output I was getting from the package didn’t resemble the screenshots at all. Needs urwid to get started.
• teapot
  One more console-based spreadsheet, featuring an unusual approach to the traditional column-row-cell design. I like it; you might too.
• wcalc
  A console calculator. Useful, just by its nature.

There are some more out there; I omitted programs that were just completely useless to me — like terminal lockers or USB automounters. In any case, you can hunt down and find the application you need better than I can pitch it to you. If you find something you like though, please share.