How Many Of You Still Are Using Text Mode?

[Radek]

Hi,

I like graphics but sometimes a plain text console in Linux is much better, faster and easier for eyes then X-windows. I like to use elinks, vim, read the documentation via man or info. I like to download files using the wget. I like to write small but smart bash scripts and for some task more complicated (and much smarter too) Python ones. The grep, awk and sed are great friends too and how many times they saved me lots of time even when facing need of some html parsing for an example. The pipelines, the jobs and virtual consoles are making using a computer so much quicker... It's almost a magic sometimes when a bash one liner is doing very tedious job in a seconds when otherwise I would had to spend tens of minutes.

This is why unix like enviroment is so great. Not that I'm oldtimer with it - I just started less than 3 years ago. It was hard at begining but I learned much. Not that I hadn't been using text based consoles before but the DOS, the various systems of 8 bit era are just crappy ones compared to unix based ones.

So my question is - what are yours best and usefull text mode aplications?

Mine are vim and elinks.

 

[ratx]

screen and irssi also rtorrent is a great console torrent app.

 

[paeryn]

So my question is - what are yours best and usefull text mode aplications?

Mine are vim and elinks.

​

I'd have to say emacs. Can't get much more useful than that ;-)

 

[aapje89]

nmap.

 

[RiX0R]

So my question is - what are yours best and usefull text mode aplications?

​

ls B)

 

[Squidge]

So my question is - what are yours best and usefull text mode aplications?

​

ls B)

​

Well, you can't really do a lot without 'ls', so I've got agree here

(Ok, so you could use 'echo *' and the like, but it doesn't give you quite as much info as 'ls' does)

 

[aapje89]

So my question is - what are yours best and usefull text mode aplications?

​

ls B)

​

yeah, i didnt think about that one.

 

[Ferentix]

I've only had a Linux box for a short time (low spec old comp basically to play around with it) and haven't used it too much, but...

Nano- simple but useful text editor
Cfdisk- best (and only) partitioning tool I've ever used And I've had to use it a lot after installing about 3 different distros in the course of about a month on that box (some multiple times due to cock ups)

and of course all the "standard" tools like ls, cd, cp, mv... where would you be without 'em?

And I have to say that sometimes it is nicer to use the command line for some reason. I'm not entirely sure as to the exact reason(s) for me, but I think the sense of control and power has something to do with it, and the simple block colours of text mode (or just monochrome) are sometimes quite soothing. On the other hand, graphical interfaces are definitely better for some things- I can't imagine a text mode image manipulation program of the sort of usefulness of the GIMP for example