screen ^[1]

Especially over SSH, it lets you keep the programs running when you disconnect and then continue your work from where you were left. Having multiple virtual terminals is also very useful.

I find wget ^[1] to be useful from time to time.

Nethack ^[1]!

Roguelikes are great fun to blow off steam for a few minutes or a few hours. There are native Windows, Mac, GTK, X11, WinMo, and other versions, but the original is the text-based terminal version. Combine with screen and an internet connection for nethack on any device with a monitor+keyboard, or combine with the NAO server for a good meta-game (or hints from watching people better than you).

"Died from choking on a donut-shaped piece of meat." says it all.

Irssi ^[1] - IMHO the best IRC client ever invented. I have used it for years now and whenever I try another one out I end up coming back to a shell with Irssi running.

It has a neat scripting ^[2] system that takes perl scripts, some useful ones include..

• trackbar.pl ^[3] - "Shows a bar where youve last read a window"
• autoaway.pl ^[4] - "Automatically goes away after defined inactivity"
• or screen_away.pl ^[5] - "set (un)away, if screen is attached/detached"
• nickcolor.pl ^[6] - "assign a different color for each nick"

It is commonly used in conjunction with screen, which keep irssi running even when you close the terminal, and allows you to access the session from other machines via SSH - "A Guide to Efficiently Using Irssi and Screen" ^[7] is a good article on this

Oh and you need the theme I've used all these years, gothic ^[8]! Many more themes can be found on themes.irssi.org ^[9]

cowsay ^[1]

You can pipe fortune, like in this example from Wikipedia:

baldur@baldur-desktop:~$ fortune | cowsay
________________________________________
/ You have Egyptian flu: you're going to \
\ be a mummy.                            /
----------------------------------------
    \   ^__^
     \  (oo)\_______
        (__)\       )\/\
            ||----w |
            ||     ||

I'm guessing you've already got grep ^[1] and sed ^[2] unless you've got something weird set up. These tools are infinitely useful for programmers, and I would assume for just about anyone who edits text files.

I'm also told that ack ^[3] and gawk ^[4] are also good tools for this stuff.

fortune ^[1].

Not especially the best for productivity, though. But always nice, from times to times ;)

Vim ^[1] (or Emacs ^[2]?) and Htop ^[3] (replacement for top).

Htop ^[1] - better version of top (system monitor)

sl ^[1]!

ImageMagick ^[1].

svn

Kind of obvious, perhaps, but for developers, especially on Unix-like systems, who use Subversion ^[1] for version control, knowing how to use the command-line client ^[2] is invaluable. Oftentimes, especially for things like branching, tagging or merging, it's much handier than graphical Subversion front-ends.

The command reference ^[3] in svnbook is a great for learning to use svn.

rTorrent ^[1] - a configurable torrent client.

rsync – for archiving and copying files and directories.

Pipeview (aka pv ^[1]) is my must-have.

Email clients: Pine or Mutt. I use both on different systems.

IPTraf ^[1] - Detailed network traffic monitor. Provides some really good live data in a nice origanised layout.

Seriously, someone hasn't said Lynx ^[1]?

How else would you search for solutions to your problems when you lose your GUI?

More serious

• mtr ^[1] instead of traceroute and ping
• dialog ^[2] and whiptail ^[3] for getting input in shell scripts
• gt5 ^[4] - a du browser

Less serious

• boxes ^[5] - for fans of cowsay ^[6] and want something similar (it's practical, too, since it can create comment boxes for several languages)
• figlet ^[7] and toilet ^[8] - similar to banner

VLC ^[1] and mplayer/mencoder ^[2] are awesome for multimedia

Does the operating system matter? A CLI is a CLI.

I use NirCmd and Nopey for a lot of strange things you CAN do in Windows, but need to do from CLI.

Also, random things from http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages.html.

sc - the text-only spreadsheet

Python ^[1]

Write your own apps :)

bc ^[1]

I alias the command to 'bc -l' to get rid of the lame rounding.

feh ^[1] - image viewer and great for setting wallpaper.

• For text stream processing, the obvious grep, cut, tail, head, cat, etc... and lot of pipes over them ! I also tend to develop my own tools command line tools in python, and ensure they pipe well.
• rsync for synchronizing between machines, but also for simple backups
• git for versioning (you are not limited for source code, I version all sort of documents)
• curl or wget
• cron and at
• scripts you coded yourself that make your life easier !

Newsbeuter ^[1] - the Mutt of RSS feed readers.

A few years ago I wrote a DOS-like file manager called Midnight Commander which was a copy of the Norton Commander, the command is "mc"

cat is for printing file content so tac is for printing file content, but reverse order ...

mc - file manager

cmatrix and vlock together make a pretty good screensaver for your terminal. Just put the following in your .bashrc (or equivalent):

alias screensaver="cmatrix ; vlock"

Some without you surely will not be able to do much:

ls
cd
sudo

elinks / w3m - text mode browsers!

and

mutt - text mode email client :)

dig and host from BIND ^[1]

A newsreader for reading Usenet newsgroups and gmane.org ^[1]. A good one is slrn ^[2], or if you are an Emacs user, try Gnus ^[3].

MPD (music player daemon) and a terminal client like ncmpcpp ^[1].

Anything made with libcaca ^[1].

pansenctrl ^[1] console based XMMS player :)

screen ^[1] - terminal multiplexer; cplay ^[2] - curses based music player; cmatrix ^[3] - terminal 'screensaver'

ranger ^[1] - VIM-like console file manager.

For music, I find cmus ^[1] much better than MOC. Alternatively, if you like to grab the music status from some widgets, MPD + ncmpc ^[2] or ncmpcpp ^[3].

I use Axel ^[1] for downloading, it can make many connection I love it.

Mac OS X specific:

| pbcopy

And pbpaste.

airport from /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport

airport -s to scan the networks

I like fping (available via MacPorts)

fping -e www.google.com

I have the output from fping-ing several servers dumped onto my desktop via Geektool every 30s, replacing the "is alive" / "is unreachable" with snazzy Unicode symbols.

I also recommend rolling your aliases to common apps, for example I have

alias photoshop="open -a Adobe\ Photoshop\ CS3"

in my .profile and .bashrc, and with symlinks to dirs on network shares where I have lots of images I want to photoshop, I can very quickly tab-complete to the files I want to open.

PuTTY ^[1]