Most daily tasks, like reading and answering emails, listening to music, reading some RSS feeds, calculating the BMI, creating and extracting zip archives, surfing the internet, copying files from one computer to the other or checking the weather forecast can be accomplished in the terminal.
Some of the people here at the BBQ even say, that this is the preferred way of doing something.
Why?
To answer this question, check the links at the end of this lesson.
There are people who have written huge articles about the topic - and they are right :)
In this lesson you can lay back and relax. It's really just about choice now, and hopefully you will remember some of the tips when you build up your own productivity systems.
Of course, we first have to know what your daily computer tasks are. Let's put the browsers aside for a moment, they are usually GUI applications and under the hood they really just render websites, plus or minus a few extras.
Let's take a look at file managers instead. They can come handy when you want to move stuff around, in a more visual way than the core utilities. We fire up apt-cache search:
search file | grep manager | more
So we search for packages that have 'file' in the description or package name.
The '|grep' will filter out results that contain the word 'manager' additionally.
Let's add a '|more' because we'll get a huge list, and we prefer to scroll through it.
Damned, still too much choice!
There's everything inside, from nautilus to ytree.
But the BBQ is a nice place, so here's a list of file managers for the console, to save you from installing bullshit:
clex
fdclone
gnuit (gitfm)
lfm
mc
ranger
vifm
vfu
ytree
Well, what's the difference between clex and fdclone, or vifm and vfu, for example?
Firstly, they look and work different. You can have file managers with a single pane, some with two panes, others have a preview mode, some can be navigated with the 'home row'. But most importantly, they have different dependencies. Dependencies are packages that are needed by the (main) program to run. For example, 'ranger' (a very nice file browser with on-the-fly preview of images and file contents) depends on Python. If you program in Python anyway, this would be an OK choice as file manager. If you want to keep your system lean and clean, you would rather prefer to install a file manager that does not depend on extra packages.
How to find out? Use apt-cache depends:
depends ranger
which spits out:
ranger
Depends: python
Depends: python
Suggests: atool
Suggests: caca-utils
Suggests: elinks
Suggests: elinks-lite
Suggests: lynx
Suggests: w3m
Suggests: highlight
Suggests: less
Suggests: poppler-utils
Recommends: file
Recommends: python-chardet
Recommends: sudo
sudo-ldap
Recommends: w3m-img
And now let's compare it with one of the lightest file managers that is in the repos, clex:
depends clex
clex
Depends: libc6
Depends: libncurses5
Quite a difference!
And that's how clex looks like:
A nice file manager is vfu. It's similarly lean, and it's a bit easier to use:
And this is ytree, with a nice layout and shortcut help in the bottom row:
Now just to continue the terminal brainwash, here is the dependency count of one of the lightest graphical (!) file managers, using GTK2 and depending on policykit and more:
depends pcmanfm
pcmanfm
Depends: libatk1.0-0
Depends: libc6
Depends: libcairo2
Depends: libfm-gtk4
Depends: libfm4
Depends: libfontconfig1
Depends: libfreetype6
Depends: libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0
Depends: libglib2.0-0
Depends: libgtk2.0-0
Depends: libpango-1.0-0
Depends: libpangocairo-1.0-0
Depends: libpangoft2-1.0-0
Depends: libx11-6
Recommends: gvfs-backends
Recommends: gvfs-fuse
Recommends: policykit-1-gnome
Recommends: lxsession
Recommends: mate-polkit
Recommends: lxpolkit
Recommends: lxde-icon-theme
Recommends: gnome-icon-theme
Recommends: oxygen-icon-theme
Recommends: tango-icon-theme
And hey, there's more. One of the dependencies is libgtk2.0-0. And guess what, this package has another bunch of dependencies that have to be satisfied:
depends libgtk2.0-0
libgtk2.0-0
Depends: libgtk2.0-common
Depends: libatk1.0-0
Depends: libc6
Depends: libcairo2
Depends: libcups2
Depends: libfontconfig1
Depends: libfreetype6
Depends: libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0
Depends: libglib2.0-0
Depends: libpango-1.0-0
Depends: libpangocairo-1.0-0
Depends: libpangoft2-1.0-0
Depends: libx11-6
Depends: libxcomposite1
Depends: libxcursor1
Depends: libxdamage1
Depends: libxext6
Depends: libxfixes3
Depends: libxi6
Depends: libxinerama1
Depends: libxrandr2
Depends: libxrender1
Depends: shared-mime-info
PreDepends: multiarch-support
Suggests: librsvg2-common
Suggests: gvfs
Recommends: hicolor-icon-theme
Recommends: libgtk2.0-bin
... and so on, and so on.
So, before you bloat up your system with dependencies of dependencies, check the repositories first if there is a CLI program that can do what you actually want to do.
See also the most important article of every LinuxBBQ user:
The BBQ Philosophy: http://ow.ly/NkY9P