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In this article I'll briefly review ten of my favourite CLI (command-line interface), not necessarily the most popular or most powerful of them. So if you don't find your personal favourite, (e.g. Midnight Commander or mp3blaster), it's because the article includes the tools I use more often. So here it goes:
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In this article I'll briefly review ten of my favourite CLI (command-line interface), not necessarily the most popular or most powerful of them. So if you don't find your personal favourite, (e.g. Midnight Commander or mp3blaster), it's because the article includes the tools I use more often. So here it goes:
Irssi This is definitely one of my top 10 favourites. Irssi is a powerful IRC client with a user-friendly interface and support for Perl scripting. Irssi can be customised in any way I like and documentation on the official website helps to learn it at a fast pace.
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Emacs Although Emacs is far more than a text editor and IDE, I only use it for programming from time to time. Emacs can look a little bloated and act slow on an old CPU, but on modern processors this is no longer an issue. It has syntax highlighting for many languages, good indentation and once you've learned the shortcuts, it's very fast to use.
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cmus My personal favourite for listening to music while in command-line, cmus is a ncurses-based audio player which supports Ogg Vorbis, MP3, FLAC, WAV, WMA and several more. It allows commands to be typed after the : character, so in some ways those used to Vim may find it easy to use. It also has a Last.fm patch available for it, but you'll have to apply the patch first and compile cmus again in order for it to work.
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Nano I think Nano is the most user-friendly text editor and also most used when it comes to editing quickly some configuration file as root. I always appreciated the fact that Nano is lightweight and it shows the basic keyboard shortcuts without the need to read any help file or documentation.
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w3m w3m is one of the most popular CLI web browsers on the Linux platform, together maybe with Lynx and links. w3m recognises HTML tables and frames, it's included by default in distributions like Ubuntu and can also be used as a pager for reading local text files.
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ogg123 This is a basic Ogg Vorbis player with its output similar with the one mpg123 has. I prefer it sometimes because my entire music collection is in Ogg Vorbis.
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cdparanoia cdparanoia is a powerful and very popular command-line tool for ripping audio CDs to WAVs. Once you get to learn it, cdparanoia will do its job faster than a GUI frontend. Just put the audio CD in the drive and run cdparanoia -B, and all the tracks will be ripped to WAV files in the current working directory.
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oggenc This is the official Ogg Vorbis encoder from Xiph.org, capable to encode FLAC or WAV files into Vorbis at a specified quality factor or bitrate. Since I consider myself an audiophile and I always like to manage my music collection, oggenc is a tool I use very often.
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ffmpeg2theora ffmpeg2theora comes in handy to encode various video formats into Theora video. I use it sometimes to convert DVD VOB files to Theora.
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Wget Wget is a powerful tool for downloading files over the Internet, supporting both HTTP and FTP protocols.
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