Top 10 Linux Console Applications

Oleo

I was frustrated with the Oleo spreadsheet application on more than one occasion. Some of that frustration was due to my own ignorance, as the key sequences are Emacs-based. As a Lotus, Excel, Gnumeric, and OpenOffice.org Calc user I had expected Oleo to be more intuitive, but I needed multiple sessions with the info file before I could use it proficiently. Even cell reference syntax was not what I had expected. As I became more familiar with it, however, I found a lot to recommend about this application. Oleo does not support the display of more than one file at a time, but Screen gives you a nice workaround for that limitation. It does support multiple windows of the same spreadsheet. It also supports macro programming, plotting through GNU plotutils (under X only) ASCII and PostScript output, and MySQL queries. A Motif GUI interface is available under X. Although it does not yet support most spreadsheet file formats, it works well on its own. If you are setting up a console office suite, it’s an application that’s well worth having.

TPP

The Text Presentation Tool (or Text PowerPoint) is an impressively flexible console-based application. It supports execution of external programs, background and text colors, ASCII text borders, and automatic page numbering and date display. Special effects such as fly in, fly out, slide in from right/left, and, to some extent, variable font sizes are also available. Each presentation comprises a plain ASCII text file consisting of text and simple commands. TPP also supports TeX conversion for printing. Even if you don’t need it to round out your console office suite, you should try TPP as a means of annoying anyone who’s ever sent you a 24MB PowerPoint file.

MySQL

MySQL ships with many versions and flavors of Linux. Although many X and HTML front ends are available for MySQL, it’s just as easy to create and maintain a database from the command line. You can script commands and queries and call them with mysql < scriptname. This makes it easy to automate operations such as data imports and report generation. MySQL supports multilevel queries, output sorting and grouping, arithmetic operations, and much more. If you haven’t used MySQL, you’ve overlooked one of the most powerful applications on your system.

Midnight Commander

Midnight Commander is a file manager and FTP client that looks and works much like Norton Commander for DOS. The two-panel interface can display two local directories, a local and remote FTP directory, a directory and file specifications, or a directory and file preview. File attributes and permissions are color-coded, and you can change them through Midnight Commander. In addition, MC supports file undeletion on ext2 filesystems. Although MC is not my personal favorite for file management at the command line interface, it is probably the most powerful.

ZGV

ZGV is an image viewer. Strictly speaking it is not console-based, as attempts to run it through an SSH session will display only on the remote system. In addition it requires the SVGA libraries, and does not work well with Screen, as it tends to take over the entire shell. As a standalone application, however, it is handy and powerful. It supports auto zoom, thumbnails, and slideshows. For work in the CLI it’s possibly the best image viewer you can find. When exiting ZGV, however, the virtual terminal will sometimes stop responding. In these cases I’ve been able to fix the shell by switching to another virtual terminal and back.

Nethack

Nethack is a single-player multi-level dungeon exploration game. You must make your way through an enormous maze of enemies and monsters to find the Amulet of Yendor. It’s possible to play for several hours a day for at least a week without completing this quest. You arrive in the dungeon as one of 13 characters with a faithful animal companion that will help you fight orcs, were-rats, and hundreds of other creatures. If you lose your companion, it may become feral and kill you later. Although there are hundreds of dungeon-crawl adventure games, Nethack is one of the best. It is possibly the most fun you can have without a graphics card, and its use of the vi key bindings make it an excellent training resource for vi and Vim.

Other programs

These applications are enough to get you started on your CLI-based system. If you enjoy the experience, here are a few more applications to try:

X-Chat-text — IRC client
Tethereral — front end for TCPdump
GNU Chess — a chess game
Vlock — a clock for the CLI
Halibut — converts text to manpage, PDF, PostScript, and other formats
Cmatrix — a screen saver
vifm — my favorite file manager
ncftp — FTP client
antiword — converts Word .DOC files to text

Source: http://www.linux.com/articles/44366

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