What are the best Terminal programs and why

[Omnios]

What are your favorite Terminal and Terminal programs such as Nala alternative to Apt and why. I really want to get into Linux terminal usage and programs. Also how does MPV work?



EDIT: I was thinking more on the lines of applications that run in the terminal not just Terminal programs. I have played with a few before such as the Tintin ++ text based Mud client. Read there is a web browser for the terminal and a video program to watch videos. Also read about Nola Command line Frontend For APT which is prettier than APT. These are things I would be interested in learning.

[TheFu]

xterm. small. lite, supports utf8. does the job. What do you want from a terminal? More code mean more bugs. xterms have been around 30 yrs.
Don't confuse a terminal with a shell or a CLI program. They are each different.

1 question per thread please.

[VMC]

Terminal = bash. When I want to edit a file, I use 'vi'... because of my 30yr on Unix.

[him610]

The one I use is xfce4-terminal that comes with Xubuntu. I have tried others, but the XFCE Terminal Emulator does everything I need it too. I do a little scripting now and then, but no heavy coding.

[Tadaen_Sylvermane]

One I wrote for myself. It makes searching for packages in repositories much less cumbersome by eliminating need to pipe through different commands to find only what I want. Breaks down to package name only and saves me time in particular when I'm searching for -doc packages. It's dumb, but it makes my life easier.

https://gitlab.com/jmgibson1981/apt-sort

[Omnios]

One I wrote for myself. It makes searching for packages in repositories much less cumbersome by eliminating need to pipe through different commands to find only what I want. Breaks down to package name only and saves me time in particular when I'm searching for -doc packages. It's dumb, but it makes my life easier.

https://gitlab.com/jmgibson1981/apt-sort

Not dumb but sounds like fun. I am trying to learn Python to do similar fun stuff. Thinking a lot about getting into Terminal stuff.

[TheFu]

Not dumb but sounds like fun. I am trying to learn Python to do similar fun stuff. Thinking a lot about getting into Terminal stuff.

You mean CLI and shell stuff, I think.

A terminal is just a program that emulates a popular type of hardware device to display text. For decades, a vt-102 was the standard terminal to be emulated, so nearly all "terminal programs" we see in Unix and Linux default to that emulation.

Being technically correct is important. As you can see, sloppy terms resulted in many different interpretations of the question.
If you want to learn the command line - CLI - then start here: https://www.linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php It is best to learn things in an order that builds on previously presented knowledge rather than hunt for answers as you need them. At least having some background before assuming that point-n-click is the best way to start anything would be helpful. That link goes to a free PDF that you can download, probably in your native language, or go to any bookstore and buy an outdated version. Fortunately, at the CLI, very few things become outdated too quickly. Anyway, start from chapter 1 of that book and work through everything for about the first 250 pages to get the background for how things actually work and learn why the CLI and a good shell program are much more efficient than most GUIs. Of course, there are a few tasks where the GUI is actually faster/better, but often, people who don't know their shell very well will assume the GUI **is** the most efficient way because they don't know any better or don't want to be bothered to learn a different way to accomplish things.

OTOH, GUIs change drastically every 2 yrs, so if you learn only 1 GUI, you'll always be learning a new one because distros and programmers often confuse "new" with "better", which is seldom actually true.

I say these things so often, I feel like a broken record. Doing things the UNIX way is something that needs to be learned. Usually, it requires unlearning the way those other, proprietary, OSes have forced people to work. People who know their shell program well get really frustrated when forced to use other OSes that don't have anything as useful/similar.

[Omnios]

Edited fist post as : I was thinking more on the lines of applications that run in the terminal not just Terminal programs. I have played with a few before such as the Tintin ++ text based Mud client. Read there is a web browser for the terminal and a video program to watch videos. Also read about Nola Command line Frontend For APT which is prettier than APT. These are things I would be interested in learning.

[TheFu]

Edited fist post as : I was thinking more on the lines of applications that run in the terminal not just Terminal programs. I have played with a few before such as the Tintin ++ text based Mud client. Read there is a web browser for the terminal and a video program to watch videos. Also read about Nola Command line Frontend For APT which is prettier than APT. These are things I would be interested in learning.

If you want to be employed doing Linux, you should stick with things that are installed by default on the system, or at least in the core repos provided from Canonical (i.e. NOT the Universe Repo). Many employers prohibit installing software outside the core repos.

If this is for home use only. Go crazy.

CLI web browser is links or lynx. Think both exist. No images. No javascript. Sometimes that's all you want - just the text. Also check out pandoc to pull webpages local and convert them into formats you prefer.

CLI video player is mpv. But it requires a GUI. There are others, but mpv is 1000x better than the others.

CLI programs I can't live without - vim, qmv, let me check my history ...

• tsp - Task Spooler
• bash and many of the built-in features of the shell.
• yt-dlp
• du/df
• lsblk
• inxi
• egrep
• locate
• recoll

Most of the other things in my history are scripts I've created to do more complex things like searching specific file systems, play back audio playlists on remote systems, rename files using specific patterns,

For example, sometimes I don't want to wait for Linux to clear buffers. I know all the large files I've been working with won't be needed, so I tell the OS to clear them.
$ more ~/bin/free-drop-disk-buffers

#!/bin/bash

free -h && sync 
echo 3 |sudo /usr/bin/tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches 
free -h

Simple and after I have this script, I don't need to recall exactly how it works anymore. When run,

$ free-drop-disk-buffers 
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           30Gi       6.7Gi       263Mi       137Mi        23Gi        23Gi
Swap:         4.1Gi       1.2Gi       2.9Gi
3
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           30Gi       6.8Gi        23Gi       137Mi       707Mi        23Gi
Swap:         4.1Gi       1.2Gi       2.9Gi

See the difference?

Some others,

• cal
• ansible
• and all ssh stuff - ssh, sftp, scp, rsync ...
• Plus cron and at for batch processing at specific times.

Sometimes I need to count the lines in a file, wc -l.

I could list hundreds and hundreds of CLI tools. I'll often put them into a file where the output from 1 tool is read as the input to another to accomplish more complex tasks. If a script is over 1 screen in length, it is usually too complicated for bash, so I'll switch to some other language with better data structures. Perl is generally my choice, but I'll use Ruby sometimes. Others would use python, which is a great language for general use needs and easy to learn with lots of Python groups in most cities and colleges to help.

[currentshaft]

for the terminal emulator, st from suckless. no bs and easy to understand code.

for the shell, zsh and customize it with an rc file.

for programs, a minimum of tmux, vim, ssh, and cmus is all I need, lol.