Top 10 Command Line Applications for Linux

1. irssi - IRC client
Irssi is a very powerful and highly configurable IRC client. It can be configured in any way possible and it supports Perl scripts. Documentation on the official website is abundant.

2. ttv - television application
ttv can prove useful if you have a TV-Tunner and (someway, somehow) you don't have X installed. It uses ASCII characters for the output, and the quality is increased if you use a higher console resolution.

3. emacs - IDE, text editor, email client
Emacs was developed and maintained by the GNU founder, Richard Stallman. It's a complete IDE (Integrated Development Environment), and can be also used as an email client or basic file manager.

4. lynx - web browser
Lynx is a popular CLI web browser. It displays websites with lots of text decently. Why use a CLI web browser when there are so many graphical nice ones out there? I don't, but it wasn't only once when I had no X and had to troubleshoot problems only with a command line and an internet connection available.

5. nano - user-friendly text editor
Nano is a simple and intuitive text editor. It's probably the command line text editor which every new user learns the first time. It's not Vi, but it's configurable enough if you want to do basic programming or text editing.

6. ogg123 - OGG Vorbis player
Part of the vorbis-tools package, this is a good player for those of us who like our music collection in OGG Vorbis instead of MP3. It displays information about the currently playing song and accepts parameters with wildcards (i.e. ogg123 Led_Zeppelin_-_*.ogg).

7. mpg123 - MP3 player
A very popular MP3 player, mpg123 offers many options for playing MP3 files.

8. mc - file manager
I always preferred ls, pwd, cd (and so on...) over any console file manager, but some might find the features in Midnight Commander very useful. Midnight Commander is the most popular file manager which can run without X. It's not exactly a CLI application, benefiting of a TUI (Text User Interface). Or maybe both combined, if I am to consider that it still includes a Bash prompt.

9. wget - download application
wget is an internet downloader, extremely easy to use.

10. ssh - secure remote login
ssh (secure shell) is used in order to login to remote computers and perform tasks just like you were logged at that computer as a normal user. It is very useful when you have a web server you need to maintain.

Updated: Jun 15, 2008 (Created: Jun 15, 2008)