IT-Box

Useful lightweight terminal applications

Apr 08th 2008 | Posted by Kadir Pekel as General, gnu / linux

Here’ s a list of some useful lightweight terminal applications which i use mostly on my linux distro.

htop

Htop is young and beautiful sister of top on gnu/linux. It views your processes on your system with resources they use in a more visual way that top does. Htop provides fully customizable pretty colored widgets like gauges that display total system resource usage.

Mutt

A superior e-mail, newsgroup client that works on terminal with a simple configuration and setup. If you love to work on terminal and want to access your incoming mails rapidly on terminal then you can easily adopt to Mutt

Finch

Finch is a terminal clone of famous IM client Pidgin and is developed again by Pidgin developers. It has almost the same visual apperance as Pidgin on X but this time on terminal. It uses ncurses libraries and worths to give it a try.

SnowNews

SnowNews is a simple feed reader that supports all versions of RSS and OPML. It uses libxml2 and ncurses libraries and has many smart features like cookie handling, auto http redirection, caching and colored customization.

Mpd - Ncmpc

Mpd is a music player daemon which publishes your music directory to a local port or to a shoutcast server. You can use it as a remote access point for your own music box on public or private network. It uses a special protocol implemeted by mpd developers. The client which i should suggest is ncmpc which plays your music box in your terminal enviroment with a simple nice looking interface. It has a sweet looking digital clock too.

Midnight Commander

Famous file manager for terminal environment which gets easy your file system operations, also you can login to ssh or ftp server to manage your remote files.

ccze

if you get blind in long logs, try them to colourize with ccze. It simply represents your logs in fancy colours to you. If you monitor your syslogs, apache logs or etc… so much, try this and don’t get lost in log hell.

BitchX

The most stable, commonly used, robust irc client in the world that sits on terminal. Also i want to share a quote from bitchX website :),

BitchX is the most popular IRC client among Unix systems. You can also use it on Windows, but if you had a Picasso painting, would you put it in the bathroom?

LoL…

screen

Probably you already have screen in your os if you use unix or unix like system and again probably you already know what screen is but i want to add it to this list for whom who doesn’t meet it if any. Screen is terminal multiplexer which means that you could have more than one interactive shell session in the same terminal screen. ıt’s very useful espacially when you open a remote shell session (ssh connection).

XMonad

It’s a fantastic X window manager for unix like systems which organizes windows in useful tiling algorithms. Windows will not float until you want and you’ll never miss a gnome - KDE like enviroment when you adopt this. I strongly suggest if you work in terminal emulator too much.

Finally,

So, i will add any application to this list if i remember or meet a new one. Feel free to share any if you think it must be in the list.