Command Line Apps for Linux

Abhinav Pathak
CodeX
Published in
7 min readDec 11, 2022

Using the system text console, you can do everything. Each system has its own commands and tools. It is amazing how developers build great command-line apps that fully replace the graphical user interface.

Today I will show you very cool command line apps for Linux. Easy to use, fast, small, and when you use it you look nerdy.

Files

Used for File managers and file listing.

Midnight Commander

GNU Midnight Commander is a visual file manager, licensed under GNU General Public License and therefore qualifies as Free Software. It’s a feature rich full-screen text mode application that allows you to copy, move and delete files and whole directory trees, search for files and run commands in the subshell. Internal viewer and editor are included.

https://midnight-commander.org/

LSD

This project is a rewrite of GNU ls with a lot of added features like colors, icons, tree-view, more formatting options, etc. The project is heavily inspired by the super colors project.

https://github.com/Peltoche/lsd

NNN

n³ The unorthodox terminal file manager.

https://github.com/jarun/nnn

Exa

A modern replacement for ‘ls’.

https://github.com/ogham/exa

System Monitor

Monitor of system resources, CPU, RAM, HDD

vtop

Wow, such top. So stats. More better than regular top.

https://github.com/MrRio/vtop

bpytop

Linux/OSX/FreeBSD resource monitor.

https://github.com/aristocratos/bpytop

htop

This is htop, a cross-platform interactive process viewer. It is a text-mode application (for console or X terminals) and requires ncurses.

https://htop.dev/

Glances

Glances an Eye on your system. A top/htop alternative for GNU/Linux, BSD, Mac OS and Windows operating systems.

https://github.com/nicolargo/glances

tiptop

tiptop is a command-line system monitoring tool in the spirit of top. It displays various interesting system stats and graphs them. Works on all operating systems.

https://github.com/nschloe/tiptop

Gotop

A terminal-based graphical activity monitor inspired by gtop and vtop.

https://github.com/xxxserxxx/gotop

battop

battop is an interactive viewer, similar to top, htop, and other *top utilities, but about the batteries installed in your notebook.

https://github.com/svartalf/rust-battop

System Info

Showing System details.

Neofetch

Neofetch is a command-line system information tool written in bash 3.2+. Neofetch displays information about your operating system, software, and hardware in an aesthetic and visually pleasing way.

https://github.com/dylanaraps/neofetch

HDD

Disk space.

GDU

Gdu is intended primarily for SSD disks where it can fully utilize parallel processing. However HDDs work as well, but the performance gain is not so huge.

https://github.com/dundee/gdu

duf

Disk Usage/Free Utility — a better ‘df’ alternative.

https://github.com/muesli/duf

Text Editors

Apps to create and edit text files.

Vim

Vim is a greatly improved version of the good old UNIX editor Vi. Many new features have been added: multi-level undo, syntax highlighting, command line history, on-line help, spell checking, filename completion, block operations, script language, etc. There is also a Graphical User Interface (GUI) available. Still, Vi compatibility is maintained, those who have Vi “in the fingers” will feel at home.

https://github.com/vim/vim

Nano

Easy to use text editor.

https://www.nano-editor.org/

Music

Console music players!!!

MusikCube

A cross-platform, terminal-based music player, audio engine, metadata indexer, and server in c++.

https://github.com/clangen/musikcube

Spotify-tui

Spotify for the terminal written in Rust.

https://github.com/Rigellute/spotify-tui

Books

tuir

Browse Reddit from your terminal.

https://gitlab.com/ajak/tuir

irssi

Irssi is a modular text mode chat client. It comes with IRC support built in, and there are third party ICB, SILC, XMPP (Jabber), PSYC and Quassel protocol modules available.

https://github.com/irssi/irssi

rainbowstream

A smart and nice Twitter client on terminal written in Python.

https://github.com/orakaro/rainbowstream

Notes

NB

CLI and local web plain text note‑taking, bookmarking, and archiving with linking, tagging, filtering, search, Git versioning & syncing, Pandoc conversion, + more, in a single portable script.

https://github.com/xwmx/nb

Taskbook

Tasks, boards & notes for the command-line habitat.

https://github.com/klaussinani/taskbook

Web Browser

You can browse websites using console :)

Links

http://links.twibright.com/

Links is a free software text and graphical web browser with a pull-down menu system. It renders complex pages, has partial HTML 4.0 support (including tables and frames and support for multiple character sets such as UTF-8), supports color and monochrome terminals and allows horizontal scrolling.

Lynx

https://lynx.invisible-island.net/

Lynx is a customizable text-based web browser for use on cursor-addressable character cell terminals. As of 2022, it is the oldest web browser still being maintained, having started in 1992.

browsh

https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh

Browsh is a fully-modern text-based browser. It renders anything that a modern browser can; HTML5, CSS3, JS, video and even WebGL. Its main purpose is to be run on a remote server and accessed via SSH/Mosh or the in-browser HTML service in order to significantly reduce bandwidth and thus both increase browsing speeds and decrease bandwidth costs.

Weather

Wanna check weather in console? No problem!

wttr.in

https://github.com/chubin/wttr.in

wttr.in is a console-oriented weather forecast service that supports various information representation methods like terminal-oriented ANSI-sequences for console HTTP clients (curl, httpie, or wget), HTML for web browsers, or PNG for graphical viewers.

wego

wego is a weather client for the terminal.

https://github.com/schachmat/wego

Network tools

Various network stats and bandwidth tools for the console.

Speedtest-CLI

https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli

Command line interface for testing internet bandwidth using speedtest.net

Bandwhich

https://github.com/imsnif/bandwhich

This is a CLI utility for displaying current network utilization by process, connection, and remote IP/hostname

Nethogs

https://github.com/raboof/nethogs

NetHogs is a small ‘net top’ tool. Instead of breaking the traffic down per protocol or per subnet, like most tools do, it groups bandwidth by process.

BMON

https://github.com/tgraf/bmon

bmon is a monitoring and debugging tool to capture networking-related statistics and prepare them visually in a human-friendly way. It features various output methods including an interactive curses user interface and a programmable text output for scripting.

Other

Does not fit in any other category.

Cointop

A fast and lightweight interactive terminal-based UI application for tracking cryptocurrencies.

https://github.com/cointop-sh/cointop

EPR

CLI Epub Reader.

https://github.com/wustho/epr

Any type of comments are welcome. Thank you for your time :)).

Happy Hacking !!!

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Abhinav Pathak
CodeX
Writer for

Computer Engineer | Cybersecurity Researcher | Infosec is just a part of Life