Recommended tools

This page is intended to list tools recommended for use in a shell (terminal/console) environment. See Recommended applications for other software.

Hardware

 * : mytop - a top clone for mysql
 * : enhanced pager (alternative to more and less)
 * : ncurses disk usage
 * : Attempts to replicate the functionality of the 'old' apm command on ACPI systems.
 * : interactive process viewer (improved alternative for top)

Network

 * : Active OS fingerprinting tool - this is Xprobe2
 * : A layer 2 attack framework
 * : ncurses based utility to display real time statistics about network traffic.
 * : console-based network monitoring utility
 * : console application which monitors network traffic and bandwidth usage in real time
 * : Network traffic monitoring
 * : Ncurses based monitor for IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN cards

File management

 * : GNU Midnight Commander is a text based file manager
 * : Console file manager with vi(m)-like keybindings

Communication

 * : alpine is an easy to use text-based based mail and news client
 * : A small but very powerful text-based mail client
 * : CenterIM is a ncurses ICQ/Yahoo!/AIM/IRC/MSN/Jabber/GaduGadu/RSS/LiveJournal Client
 * : A modular textUI IRC client with IPv6 support
 * : A RSS/Atom feed reader for the text console
 * : Snownews, a text-mode RSS/RDF newsreader

Organizers

 * : A nice command line todo list for developers
 * : An ncurses based password database client that is compatible with KeePass 1.x format databases
 * : Text-based front-end to Remind
 * : a text-based personal organizer
 * : A Password Safe compatible command-line password manager

Others

 * : Dynamic virtual terminal manager
 * : A command line CD encoder

Shell

 * : Generic Colouriser beautifies your logfiles or output of commands
 * : Command-line interface to various pastebins
 * : readline wrapper
 * : Gentoo-specific bash command-line completions (emerge, ebuild, equery, repoman, layman, etc)
 * : Gentoo-specific zsh command-line completions
 * : command line interface to X selections (clipboard)