List of useful CLI programs for console-only desktops

[NB: Mods: would it be alright if someone made this sticky?]

In the interest of keeping ancient computers alive and useful, I'm trying to compile a list of useful applications for CLI only systems; particularly Pentium III and earlier machines. I will update this as necessary as people post additional suggestions.

Apps that use framebuffer graphics

Browsers
Links2

Image viewers
fbi
fim

PDF/PostScript viewers
fbgs (usually included with fbi)

Movie players
mplayer (can also be used for audio, without any video output)

Apps that only need a text console

Audio players
cmus
moc

Word processors
nano
emacs
joe (has lots of different modes)
jed (ditto)
zile
(... pretty much any emacs clone, really)

Document viewers/extractors
antiword (for older MS Word files)
wv (for newer MS Word files)
poppler-utils (can extract text from PDF files)

Browsers
links2
elinks
lynx
w3m

Chat clients
centerim
weechat
irssi

Terminal multiplexers ("console window managers")
tmux
screen
byobu

Printing systems
CUPS
lpd (annoying to set up, rarely used on Linux)

Wireless management
wicd (has pure CLI and ncurses versions, may not work for all wifi networks)
wpa_supplicant (old school, but works very reliably)
networkmanager (recent versions finally have a working CLI)

Screen lockers
vlock

 

htop - useful system stats, process monitoring and killing.
wget - to download files
tail - to look at logs files
fdisk - to partition disks
ssh - to connect to ssh servers, remote machines.
telnet - mostly to connect to network gear like firewalls and routers.
grep - for searching in files.
locate - for searching for files.

dd - for creating and writing disk images.
rsync - for making backups

Package managers (yum, apt-get)

File system tools (fsck.* mkfs.*)

Standard file manipulation tools (sed, awk, cp, mkdir, rm chmod etc)

 

htop is good, but a bit of a CPU hog compared to ordinary top and ps. The others are more like CLI essentials IMO, not so much "good to have" as "can't get by without them."

Also of note: if you have KMS supporting graphics (Intel, AMD, maybe nVidia if you're lucky) then you can very easily "cheat" and use xinit to launch a single graphical application. Without KMS it takes a little more configuration, you have to use vesafb and the fbdev Xorg driver.

Unfortunately there is no easy way to cut/copy/paste text between VTs and X11. I'm still looking into that.

 

Is there a htop-like live display of network activity?

Something like pftop in BSDs, but with more netstat-type process information?

Or maybe just a way to make something clean and live from netstat?