# Your favorite text based application



## bsddaemon (Nov 17, 2008)

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
> 
> ...


----------



## Daemony (Nov 17, 2008)

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


----------



## bsddaemon (Nov 17, 2008)

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



			
				Daemony said:
			
		

> 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 (Nov 17, 2008)

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



			
				bsddaemon said:
			
		

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



me too.


----------



## MG (Nov 17, 2008)

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


----------



## anomie (Nov 17, 2008)

net-p2p/transmission-cli (BT client)


----------



## mfaridi (Nov 17, 2008)

/net-p2p/rtorrent and rtgui


----------



## richardpl (Nov 17, 2008)

Nobody mentioned elinks and nc


----------



## SirDice (Nov 17, 2008)

Screen rules  sysutils/screen


----------



## calande (Nov 17, 2008)

(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 (Nov 17, 2008)

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

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


----------



## s-tlk (Nov 17, 2008)

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 (Nov 17, 2008)

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 (Nov 17, 2008)

fortune


----------



## stargazer (Nov 17, 2008)

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


----------



## oliverh (Nov 17, 2008)

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 (Nov 17, 2008)

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.


----------



## SaveTheRbtz (Nov 17, 2008)

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

PS may be place screen in base? =)


----------



## steinex (Nov 18, 2008)

tad1214 said:
			
		

> 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).



			
				SaveTheRbtz said:
			
		

> 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 (Nov 18, 2008)

steinex said:
			
		

> 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*


----------



## marcrosoft (Nov 18, 2008)

Vim /thread


----------



## Alt (Nov 18, 2008)

grep ))


----------



## Vye (Nov 18, 2008)

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 (Nov 19, 2008)

I noticed a lot of people mentioning screen, so I thought I would throw in tmux, which is like screen, except has a BSD-license and is slightly less straining on your resources.


----------



## tuck (Nov 19, 2008)

"links http://goosh.org/"


----------



## Oko (Nov 19, 2008)

Some of my favorite text based applications on the workstation



> OpenSSH
> OpenSSL
> window (console manager)
> nvi (New vi editor)
> ...


----------



## hedwards (Nov 19, 2008)

snes-addict said:
			
		

> 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:
> 
> ...


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 (Nov 19, 2008)

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

Speaking of pipeline 


> *Master Foo and the Ten Thousand Lines*
> 
> Master Foo once said to a visiting programmer: â€œThere is more Unix-nature in one line of shell script than there is in ten thousand lines of Câ€.
> 
> ...



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


----------



## Ico (Nov 19, 2008)

nano
nmap
links
locate
cat
grep


----------



## DemoDoG (Nov 19, 2008)

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?


----------



## bsddaemon (Nov 19, 2008)

Have you tried *finch*?


----------



## jvdb (Nov 19, 2008)

Some of my favorites:

rtorrent
hellanzb
minicom
esniper
snownews


----------



## DrJ (Nov 19, 2008)

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


----------



## givanov (Nov 19, 2008)

emacs , TeX


----------



## Gabe_G23 (Nov 19, 2008)

DemoDoG said:
			
		

> 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?





			
				bsddaemon said:
			
		

> 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 (Nov 20, 2008)

ah yeah forgot about bit.chX


----------



## bsddaemon (Nov 20, 2008)

I should have mentioned *cron*, simple, yet powerful


----------



## susanth (Nov 21, 2008)

Wow! Nice list


----------



## rliegh (Nov 22, 2008)

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

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 (Nov 22, 2008)

irssi :r


----------



## bsddaemon (Nov 22, 2008)

rliegh said:
			
		

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



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


----------



## Oko (Nov 22, 2008)

rliegh said:
			
		

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





			
				bsddaemon said:
			
		

> 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 (Nov 22, 2008)

Oko said:
			
		

> 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 (Nov 23, 2008)

*Two more cents...*

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 (Nov 25, 2008)

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 (Nov 25, 2008)

fonz said:
			
		

> Kinda old school perhaps, but hey:
> 
> mpg123
> aumix
> ...



mp3blaster is quite nice also


----------



## bell (Jul 6, 2009)

thanks


----------



## roddierod (Jul 6, 2009)

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


----------



## graudeejs (Jul 6, 2009)

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 (Jul 6, 2009)

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 (Jul 7, 2009)

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


----------



## aragon (Jul 7, 2009)

DemoDoG said:
			
		

> 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 (Jul 7, 2009)

The Aircrack-ng suite! ï¿½e


----------



## aragon (Jul 7, 2009)

digitalsedition said:
			
		

> The Aircrack-ng suite!


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


----------



## digitalsedition (Jul 7, 2009)

aragon said:
			
		

> 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 (Jul 7, 2009)

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


----------



## aragon (Jul 8, 2009)

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


----------



## iic2 (Jul 8, 2009)

xpad

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


----------



## graudeejs (Jul 9, 2009)

killasmurf86 said:
			
		

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




Forget it, calendar(1) works just as good


----------



## lindaginnpeg (Jul 10, 2009)

aragon said:
			
		

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



Good call.


----------



## lme@ (Jul 10, 2009)

cal


----------



## unicyclist (Jul 10, 2009)

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


----------



## mrbytes (Aug 7, 2010)

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 (Aug 8, 2010)

Using herrie for music in the console now instead of cmus. Herrie is a project of FreeBSD developer Ed Schouten.


----------



## bes (Aug 8, 2010)

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 (Aug 9, 2010)

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 windowingâ€”switched right away, and it works great!

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


----------



## mrbytes (Aug 9, 2010)

oliverh said:
			
		

> Using herrie 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 (Aug 9, 2010)

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


----------



## camelia (Aug 9, 2010)

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


----------



## ckester (Aug 9, 2010)

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
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 (Aug 9, 2010)

ckester said:
			
		

> 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 (Aug 9, 2010)

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

CurseTheWeather


----------



## UNIXgod (Aug 9, 2010)

ckester said:
			
		

> 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 (Aug 9, 2010)

Wow, original one supports unicode and lisp editing.


----------



## fronclynne (Aug 10, 2010)

Gabe_G23 said:
			
		

> 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 Ã†nglisc 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 (Aug 10, 2010)

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 (Aug 10, 2010)

kpedersen said:
			
		

> The visual highlight seems an absolute must in vim.


What highlighting are you talking about? syntax or selection?


			
				kpedersen said:
			
		

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


Either turn line numbers`$ echo 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 (Aug 10, 2010)

kpedersen said:
			
		

> 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 (Aug 10, 2010)

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 (Aug 10, 2010)

ckester said:
			
		

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



Usually I'm using pymetar for this purpose.


----------



## kpedersen (Aug 11, 2010)

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


----------



## camelia (Aug 11, 2010)

UNIXgod said:
			
		

> The real question is why hasn't nvi been replaced with the real thing


Let me guess, because libuxre (from heirloom) that vi(1) depends on is under *LGPLv2+*? While there is editors/2bsd-vi for some time I don't see anyone trying to replace vi(1) in base. Here is my rough attempt - contrib_ex-vi.diff.


----------



## nekoexmachina (Aug 12, 2010)

what the hell
vim is the best one (e.g. my favorite)




also i love mutt and irssi.


----------



## sossego (Aug 12, 2010)

Vi/vim, lynx, elinks, wget, nmap, traceroute, ping, etc.


----------



## warudemaru (Aug 17, 2010)

native PostGRE's client psql is the best command line database tool in the world albeit it's strictly dependent of the database all others might learn from it


----------



## sirinon (Aug 19, 2010)

lynx is by far my favourite , I use it to read the funnies in the morning while evryone who isnt 
a *nix user at my work just thinks im doing " IT stuff "


----------



## mechanic (Aug 19, 2010)

Alpine.


----------



## Anonymous (Aug 19, 2010)

vim. of course.
rsync
ssh
xmms2
shell-fm
pacpl
lynx only for reading html-docus.
screen.


----------

