Subscribe
Mar
6
Let’s for the moment remember the days of old when the Linux Desktop sucked and you did all your work on the console. Some of us still think the Desktop sucks and so here we list 10 apps that we think you should be using.
1) Lynx
A simple, straightforward text based Web browser. Lots of Linux/BSD distros install this by default. It doesn’t support frames or ActiveX or flash or pop up ads, just nice plain text.
2) Pine
The guys at the University of Washington in Seattle created a winner with this one. Pine - a Program for Internet News & Email - a tool for reading, sending, and managing email. Once you get to learn the keystroke based navigation, you’re golden.
3) Zed
So you never learned Vi. As the maintainers of Zed say, “If you cannot stand VI, this is the editor for you.” Indeed, Zed is a very simple text editor. You can navigate with the arrow keys, it has auto wordwrap, column blocks with insert & overwrite among other things.
5) Screen
Sure you have virtual terminals, but that doesn’t work when you’re logged in remotely. So here we have Screen which is a full-screen window manager that allows you to spawn new shells on demand. You can start with one and have dozens of shells. Among the nice features are the ability to detach from the spawned shell and then reattach to them.
6) Antiword
So you received a Word .Doc file and you need to read it? Your answer is Antiword. It’s a free MS Word reader for Linux, it can convert the binary files from Word 2, 6, 7, 97, 2000, 2002, 2003 to plain text and to Postscript.
7) TPP
TPP stands for Text Presentation Program and it’s an ncurses based presentation tool. Basically, a replacement for PowerPoint ;-). The presentation can be written with your favorite editor in a simple description format and then shown on any text terminal that is supported by ncurses - ranging from an old VT100 to the Linux framebuffer to an xterm.
Oleo is a light-weight spreadsheet that’ll work in almost any environment. It’s a fast and dirty way to produce a spreadsheet from your character based console. There’s an upcoming 2.0 release that will support MySQL database access.
9) MySQL
The most popular open source database has lots of web and X based front end interfaces, but you may also script commands and queries and call them with mysql < script. Makes your life easier when you have to automate data imports/exports, report generation, mass updates. You may use msyqladmin and it’s other builtin tools to create useraccounts, databases, table and more.
10) Halibut
Halibut reads a documentation source like an ascii file and output to a slew of different formats such as HTML, PDF, PostScript, Unix man pages, Unix info format, Windows HTML Help (.CHM) and Windows WinHelp (old-style .HLP). Cool right?
Comments
4 Comments so far
Antiword and Halibut sounds interesting. I will try them out. Thanks!
Plus, Midnight Commander (mc).
For console text editing I’m a fan of Nano, but I’ll give Zed a try to see what I’m missing. Nano has the advantage that there is a Windows port, so I can use it when I’m forced to use Windows.
What about mc?
screen definitely rocks. Here are my notes:
http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/screen/