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Finch and Other Internet Applications For Command Line Junkies 12

Posted by andry
on Sunday, September 30

In the beginning there was command line.
Neal Stephenson

Coming from heavy enterprise-class IDE (e.g IntelliJ IDEA, VS.NET, Oracle Apps, etc) where everything is very-well integrated, command line is the least thing I would utilize. However, soon after start writing Ruby scripts about a year ago, I realize that command line is all I ever need.

(Okay. Netbeans’ support for Ruby is awesome, but it still can’t’ beat irb + fastri + script\console, yes?)

Another reason why I love command line application because, well, I had to. 4 months ago I set up a 1 Gigs Debian VPS as my sandbox/development servers. On ssh, vi is the only editor I got. There are ed and joe. But they’re not as ‘powerful’ as vi.

From love of vi, I start to use mutt for POP3 emails. Thunderbird and monstrosity of Evolution are no longer installed. I remove gftp, and start using ncftp, which is surprisingly, from my POV, is far more powerful than gftp.

I also start using wget and ncftp on daily basis, replacing gwget and FileZilla respectively. For web-browser, however, I still use Firefox while lynx sometime comes handy too for light activity surfing.

And last week I just realize that Pidgin, previously Gaim, include a command line chat client: finch. It does eveything Pidgin does, except Finch does it on command line. Ubber-cool!

finch

Finch works only for *nix edition of Pidgin. Some distros, like LinuxMint, already include Pidgin. If you’re happens to be an Ubuntu user, this handy guide might be useful as installation instruction.

Last, but not least, my favorite console internet application is raggle. It is a simple lightweight console application feed reader. And it’s written in Ruby.

raggle

I think that’s all my favourite console internet application. I’m still looking good alternatives for bittorrent and X-Chat (mirc client). If you do know such console applications, please do tell.

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  1. aldi – October 01, 2007 @ 04:24 AM
    finch juga bisa buat irc bukan?
  2. imtheface – October 01, 2007 @ 05:13 AM
    Tuk irc client? Pake irssi donk bos! :D
  3. dental – October 01, 2007 @ 02:26 PM
    ngomongin apaan sih?
  4. rifie – October 01, 2007 @ 03:07 PM
    pake deluge dong buat torrent. http://deluge-torrent.org/
  5. Dimas – October 01, 2007 @ 10:24 PM
    What about image viewer and media player? Are there any console application of those?
  6. toni – October 02, 2007 @ 07:31 PM
    irssi sudah dimunculin, jadi gk ditulis lagi (meski saya ndak tau gimana cara pakenya dengan optimal). Untuk ftp, alih2 ncftp (I like it), kita juga bisa pake lftp. lftp mendukung tidak hanya regular ftp tapi juga secure ftp via fish://. Further more, it has lazy connect feature. Noo, you don't need to actually initiate login etc unless you're issuing a command requiring login..
  7. aditya – October 04, 2007 @ 02:21 PM
    i think you should give elinks a try, it's great text based browser which be able to render tables, frames very well http://elinks.or.cz/ btw, i don't know if pidgin have command line tool such as finch, hmm i think, i should try it *search finch on macport
  8. kus – October 04, 2007 @ 07:05 PM
    jamannya beryl masih aja suka console :) wa ha ha ha geek tenannan.
  9. rofiq – October 10, 2007 @ 03:10 PM
    Kalo torrent pake standar client aslinya si bram cohen aja. Di paketnya ada launchmany-console, kalo execute pake nohup jadi deh background torrent downloader, file torrent drop aja di folder, wis tinggal turu ae :-)
  10. Rachmad – October 19, 2007 @ 11:04 AM
    cak, iki dudu dalam rangka arep pindah kerjoan kan? peace!
  11. wazeen – October 19, 2007 @ 10:01 PM
    salam kenal mas dan sampai jumpa di pesta blogger 2007
  12. John Harrison – October 31, 2007 @ 06:30 PM
    You said: "I’m still looking good alternatives for bittorrent and X-Chat (mirc client). If you do know such console applications, please do tell." For bittorrent - try btdownloadcurses - if you've got bittorrent installed you'll probably find it's installed with it. I have usually prefered to use bittornado than the standard bittorrent client in the past, although I haven't tried the console version of bittorrent lately - and I see the new GUI version of the official bittorrent is VERY much more full-featured than the earlier ones that btdownloadcurses was equivalent to. btdownloadcurses just lets you do one file at a time, but what I do is run screen ( ) and have different files running at the same time in different 'screen' windows - bittornado's btdownloadcurses plays very nicely with screen. There are also other text mode tools to use with bittorrent, try typing bt and pressing <tab> twice to see what you have installed on your Linux box. You'll probably find btdownloadheadless as well. This is what I get: $ bt btcompletedir btmakemetafile btcompletedir.bittornado btmakemetafile.bittornado btcopyannounce btreannounce btdownloadcurses btreannounce.bittornado btdownloadcurses.bittornado btrename btdownloadheadless btrename.bittornado btdownloadheadless.bittornado btsethttpseeds btlaunchmany btshowmetainfo btlaunchmany.bittornado btshowmetainfo.bittornado btlaunchmanycurses bttrack btlaunchmanycurses.bittornado bttrack.bittornado For IRC (BTW it's not called mirc, that's just the name of one Windows IRC client) I'd recommend epic4. Epic rocks. I've been using it for over 10 years now. It is designed to run scripts to customise it to do powerful things with it and comes with excellent online help and programming reference. (here: http://www.epicsol.org/epic4-help/ ) Clients to check out are: http://www.epicsol.org/ - Epic read this for an excellent review & advice: http://www.freshports.org/irc/epic5 "Due to it's minimalist approach it is highly recommended you use a script with EPIC." - like mutt & vim it's a powerful and customisable framework. http://irssi.org/ - irssi is actively maintained and another great client. ( read http://irssi.org/about ) http://www.eterna.com.au/ircii/ - ircII is probably the oldest IRC client around - from the 1980s http://www.bitchx.com/ - based on Epic & ircII - it's main feature was fancy colours - it was very popular in the late 1990s, but Epic is probably a better choice for a number of reasons. Read this for more clients with Text mode UI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_IRC_clients#Features BTW: if you like ncftp, have you looked at lftp? it REALLY rocks! I used to use ncftp, but lftp is lighter and really powerful, it has tab completion which is VERY useful and other great features. I hope this helps! John
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