>0 eyayah @ 2025/05/20 01:05
what are you guys' favorite random/novelty cli and tui programs in general? i'll share some of my favorites too. maybe someone else will get a kick out of them. all can be found on github! - jrnl (command line journal/note tool) - dooit (tui task manager) - botany (simple virtual pet plant) - glow (markdown viewer/formatter)
>1 scarecat @ 2025/05/20 22:59
i don't know how obvious some of these might be but: - ncdu (tui to analyze disk usage) - translate-shell (cli google translate tool, uses really nice syntax ex. 'trans en:de Hello' - jq (CLI json parser, very nice for scripts, esp. when parsing http requests) - magick (CLI image editing / converting tool) (very useful for converting from one format to another: 'magick convert file.jpeg file.png') - yt-dlp (download videos from a ton of different websites) - nnn / vifm (CLI file managers, i don't really use them but they could be nice for someone) - obviously tmux, vim, fzf, rg are a must
>2 anthk @ 2025/05/31 11:01
>>OP
- mutt as a mail client
- lynx/sacc for gopher
- gopher://magical.fish as a huge Gopher portal
- mcabber for Jabber, or profanity
- mocp for music
- sxiv for images
- mpv for videos
- yt-dlp for mpv
- slrn for news
- catgirl for irc
- not TUI, but herbe works for a light vm such as cwm
to show up notifications for catgirl
- mosh for SSH, it uses far less bandwidth against
your tildeverse
- entr. It watches for files and directories, it something
changes, it can spawn anything.
- gnuplot for plots
- basic AWK for sums on rows/columns
- nvi for edits
- iomenu instead of fzf, it's far lighter.
A 'holes' shell function:
holes() { cat ~/gopher_sites.txt | iomenu | xargs sacc ; }
content within ~/gopher_sites.txt:
gopher:/sdf.org
gopher://magical.fish
gopher://hoi.st
gopher://gopher.icu
>3 eyayah @ 2025/06/01 01:22
these are some really good suggestions, thank you both!
>4 nosheep @ 2025/06/02 12:41
Do you know calcurse? https://www.calcurse.org/
>5 say @ 2025/06/07 01:13
Maybe not "nice" but I just realised you can paste a list of mp4 urls into a file, then run mpv $(cat file) and it will loop and play all the files from the URL. I'm doing it with recent war videos that are about 8 seconds long each.
>6 shrubbery @ 2025/06/10 19:21
termshark https://github.com/gcla/termshark is super useful if you are troubleshooting you also get cool shark effects when it's idle
>7 rdlmda @ 2025/07/12 03:15
CLI: - ffmpeg is love, ffmpeg is life. TUI: - Spotify-tui: disregarding the fact that Spotify is a propreitary, DRM-ridden platform, this tui utility is quite impressive. (https://github.com/Rigellute/spotify-tui)
>8 proxaimonk @ 2025/07/13 04:54
>>OP sox (it has multiple uses but I motly use for the spectrogram image creation for analyzing audio quality)
>9 sika @ 2025/07/14 13:26
- Soft-Serve - Minimal Git server with TUI https://github.com/charmbracelet/soft-serve - btop - A better top/htop https://github.com/aristocratos/btop - ranger - File manager https://github.com/ranger/ranger - aerc - Email client https://aerc-mail.org/
>10 mindhunter @ 2025/07/15 14:31
>>9 I recently also discovered a command line music player called rmpc with kitty image support. Works pretty well in most cases and even supports an audio visualizer. https://github.com/mierak/rmpc
>11 eyayah @ 2025/07/21 14:35
just a quick thank-you to everyone so for who has posted replies! these are some really cool tools that i likely would not have found otherwise ^^
>12 proxaimonk @ 2025/07/22 03:47
>>10 oooh ty for this rec!
>13 ant @ 2025/07/22 21:25
The Traditional Vi,
descending directly form Bill Joy's work at Berkeley:
>14 ant @ 2025/08/03 15:54
par -- an ingenious paragraph formatter:
>15 fenris @ 2025/08/03 16:26
If I didn't overlooked it, 'mc'. It's tui file manager.
>16 ant @ 2025/08/03 17:08
>>15 Yes, mc, or Midnight Commander. My major problem with it is that many of its very useful keybindings are by default not working on the Linux kernel console, so I have to rebind them in /home/ant/.config/mc/mc.keymap : [filemanager] Find = alt-/ SplitEqual = SplitMore = SplitLess = ViewFiltered = PutCurrentPath = alt-a PutOtherPath = ctrl-alt-a PutCurrentSelected = ctrl-n PutCurrentFullSelected = ctrl-f History = ctrl-y EditorViewerHistory = alt-h [panel] # Make room for cntr-n: Down = down; ctrl+j Up = up ; ctrl+k CdParent = ctrl-p History = ctrl-alt-y [editor] History = alt-h
>17 fenris @ 2025/08/03 17:39
>>16 True, the default keybindings do not work very well. But I don't use mc anyway. And if invoked by accident, I always have to exit it with 'exit', since F10 is bound to "volume +" on my machine. Just wanted to put 'mc' on the tui list.
>18 ant @ 2025/08/03 19:01
>>17 Oh, but such global breckage of the Fn keys is a grave disgrace! Did you intentioally configure them that way, or are you tolerating (Gibson forbid enjohing!) this default, niche, and multimedia-prioritising configuration? I am sure the operation of the Fn keys can be restored to their original general-purpose glory by UEFI/BIOS and (or) termina/X11 configuration.
>19 fenris @ 2025/08/03 19:43
>>18 Intentionally. I needed volume-, volume+ and both Fn9 and Fn10 were spare. Plus Fn12 is mute. I don't use the Fn keys much besides of 'Ctl-Alt Fn1' going to the console, and there Alt-Fn[2-10] to switch them. Everything works smooth on the keyboard whithin X.
>20 ant @ 2025/08/03 22:17
>>19 I see. And what do you have in a real terminal, without any X? Oh, observe that you seem to be posting in classic hard-wrapped text, whereas BBJ loves long-lines, that is one loooong line per paragraph. I don't like it, but comply.
>21 fenris @ 2025/08/03 23:04
Nowadays I dont have to do anything on terminals. Back in the days I had to fight with vt100s connected to Sun or AIX machines, having no vi but line editors only. Fortunately these days are gone.
>22 ant @ 2025/08/04 21:27
>>21 Don't you fire up ed from time to time to feel like a man :-?
>23 rdlmda @ 2025/08/31 23:33
>>OP I just remembered this: awesome-TUIs list https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis/
>24 yalla @ 2025/09/02 09:46
>>23 Ohhhh, now now I do have a *lot* to read! <3
>25 singletona082 @ 2025/09/02 20:48
>>OP Micro https://micro-editor.github.io/ Still haven't figured out Vi, but Micro does what I want. NewsBoat https://newsboat.org/ I don't RSS like I feel I should, but it's on my short list of stuff I use when i do CLI TMUX https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki Whenever i connect to any of the tilde servers, I use this. Especially for the tilde I connect to IRC from. Speaking of IRC WeeChat https://weechat.org/ For some reason I find this easier to understand than IRSSI. Couldn't give a good explanation on why. I sadly have less fondness for trying actual web browsing over CLI.
>26 swordofstabbing @ 2025/09/08 04:00
I can definitely second a few of these. NewsBoat is a good RSS reader. I've used weechat as my client for a bit. Oh and I like vim a lot. But for vim I really recommend: vimwiki as a note-taking tool. If you use vim it's very intuitive and has support for markdown and mediawiki in addition to its own thing. It makes it easy to format lists (unordered, ordered, and to-do) It uses md or wiki style links that make it easy to connect text files together. And it has a feature for making daily diaries. I'll check out some of the other stuff in this list.