Episode: 4426
Title: HPR4426: My Command Line Applications
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4426/hpr4426.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-26 00:34:23

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4,426 for Monday 21 July 2025.
Today's show is entitled, My Command Line Applications.
It is hosted by Kevin and is about 12 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, Kevin goes over his must of command line applications whenever he installs
a new distro.
You are listening to a show from the Reserve Q. We are airing it now because we had free
slots that were not filled.
This is a community project that needs listeners to contribute shows in order to survive.
Please consider recording a show for Hacker Public Radio.
Hello, hello, this is Kevin from the Tuxjam Podcast.
If you are listening to this, this is an episode from the Reserve Q which means that HPR did
not have a short cover today.
Can I please encourage each and every one listening to record something and send it in?
As we all know, when the shows run out, HPR finishes a project, so if you like this podcast
and you want to see it continue, please consider recording a show.
The last episode I did for the Reserve Q was my list of my desktop apps on Linux.
For some stupidly unknown reason, I actually forgot to mention Audacity, which is one of
the main actual applications that I use, so I'll just throw it down in there.
But today, I want to actually turn my attention away from the desktop and go to the command
line.
Now, you may think, seriously, command line, you actually still use some of these, and yes,
the un-honest answer is I actually do, and I'll give you a few that I use.
I'm not going to include here just commands, so I'm not doing things like SSH, say that
are just things that I would use or the DD command, because I'd rather actually consider
more applications as such.
Now, the first one I'm going to go is MPG123.
What does this do?
Well, it simply plays the audio stream, and it's as simple as MPG123, and then space,
and then you put in the streams through it after it.
It'll start playing this stream, but the thing I like about this is it doesn't just stop
there.
It then starts to list the name of the track and the artist that's been played, so that's
actually quite a nice feature I like.
You can stop at any point, no bother, as you can with any of these, with Ctrl C. Just
be aware of that, because obviously, Ctrl C on the desktop is copy, and quite a few
times if I've been doing something in the background, and then I've been copying and
pasting something somewhere else, and accidentally, don't realize that I've actually got the terminal
window activated after I press Ctrl C, and of course, my application has stopped.
So just be aware of that, right?
So we've got that's for playing audio streams, however, sometimes I quite like to record
them, and you can record very easily with FFMPIG.
Now I actually cover that in a recent, well, I'm saying recent, in a recently recorded
episode of HPR, so you might want to go back and check that out, just look for a streaming
from the command line, and then the follow-up was recording from the command line.
So again, I don't want to go into too much detail.
All you've really got to do with FFMPIG is put in the FFMPIG, put in the name of the stream,
put in the time you want, if you want to say it as a timer, and then put in your destination
file.
It's actually really easy, it's nice and easy.
It can be useful other things, it can be used to convert and change different file formats
or do file formats, but that's not how I use it.
The next one I like is the MOC, and that's the music on, stands for music on console,
it's a music player, and it plays, essentially plays your localized files.
I really love this one, this is actually a great way application, it's two, it's split
window, it's two panels, and you switch between the two with tab, the panel on the left
is your files, the panel on the right is your playlist, it's really simple to use, up
and down just out of keys, if you want to add a file to the playlist, you press E, if
you wish to remove a file from the playlist, you go and highlight the file and place Z,
placing space, we'll pause it, or play it again, yeah I mean that's literally is it,
you can actually do things like you can search, search for some reason is G, I don't actually
get the G part, if you want help just type in H and it gives you a list of all the commands,
you can also do things like increase and decrease the sound, etc, you can switch, you can
skip the track, you can go back a track, or you don't actually have to make a playlist,
you can quite simply just go to any file and place enter, and yeah it's actually that easy,
I quite liked it, if you're a fan of making mix tapes in the 80's, this is what just
I absolutely love about it, so just say today I feel like a certain type of music, I don't
want to listen to a whole album of one artist, I go and make up my playlist and then leave
it running in the background, so I mean it's I know the modern kids will probably think
of a Spotify playlist and just think of it almost like that, except you're using the command
line which is of course super geeky, and you've also you're not requiring an internet
connection or a subscription because these are your own files, right so we've got that's
a music rating once, now I do actually browse using the terminal, not all the time, but
I use a browser called links and that's the LYNX browser, okay so to get started just comes
up with that read me file, just simply place G, and it says where do you want to go, type
in where you want to go, now you may be thinking heavy, why in the world in this day and age
do you want to browse on the command line, well when I'm looking for something and for
research, when I'm actually busy and I'm doing something, I absolutely love links, why?
Because when I'm on it, it's only text that appears and I don't get distracted, I'm
not going to go on to YouTube, I'm not going to go and start looking around on Jemento,
instead I'm just purely getting research done and all I'm looking for when it's research
is text, and it renders quite nicely, some websites, if they've got a particularly big
menu tree for where the site map is, you may have to scroll down, again it's dead easy
up and down keys will do one line at a time or if you go page up, page down, that again
will, that'll skip a whole page up or down, again super useful, now it's the same with
the mutt email client, now once again you'll be thinking why, why, well again it avoids
distractions, if I am expecting an email from somebody and that's all I want is just some
text, I essentially just want a message, that is it, so when I'm actually looking, I'm
not clicking through, I'm not actually looking at my beer website, I'm not actually getting
clicked through, oh this thing from Pymaroni looks great, it avoids distractions and again
makes me personally much more productive, so that's a mutt email client, lovely feature
that I actually like about it is, if you do a file in your home directory with dot signature
then whatever you've put in there will actually go at the bottom of every email you send, so
if you did like dot signature then in that just a text file, you've put using mutt email
client, that'll go at the bottom of every email you send, so it's a nice feature, this
next one I think it's an application but if at all honesty this could just be our command
but it's still one I absolutely think is nice, especially when somebody says what are
the spakes on your machine, NeoFetch, just type it in, you get ASCIIART and of the distribution
you're on and then all you need to do is have a read down the right hand side ASCIIART
on the left, information on the right hand side, nice and simple and of course again,
a nice geeky touch, now the final one that I'm going to go over is WeChat and yes, believe
it or not, I still do occasionally jump into IRC, it's not regular for me, so WeChat is
actually quite simple to get, sorry, it's quite easy to set up, however it is not simple
to set up, not obvious, you really do need to go to a WeChat website, helping website,
I wrote a blog post on it, it's actually no bother, once you get that, once you've got
it set up, it's really easy to use, but until you actually, but before you get set up,
really isn't obvious and if you're especially if you've come from an era where you've not
been used to IRC then you may find this one actually quite difficult to use, now back
in the day of identica, yes for those of us who have been on the before master done,
or status knit, well actually identica was a status knit, but we had another one identica,
there was a client called identica, which has been the, by far and away the best command
line tool that I have actually ever used for social media, I absolutely loved it, it was
my favourite client without a doubt, and sadly this never got forked for master done,
nobody's ever kind of made one similar, I have tried a few, I mean two springs to mind,
but it wasn't what I was looking for, so if there's any web developers out there, sorry
any developers out there listening, you think that this could be something they would
do, can I please ask, and then also please let me know, I would dearly love for an identica
thing to come, and I think that was developed back in the day by P-squid and Morgersh, and
I think Luke might also have had a hand in it as well, so if any of you guys are listening
and you fancy selecting that project, then it might be master curse or something, I don't
know, but yes please do, one thing you may have noticed is the emission of a file manager,
I have used command line file manager in the past, I've never actually got on with it,
I know, I know a lot of people do love ranger, I wasn't a particular big fan, I know people
love midnight command that, it's not that bad, it's just, when it comes to using files,
I just wanted, I'd like the graphical, I like drag and drop, I think that's, I think
to be honest, the GUI house just made me pretty lazy, nothing wrong with them at all,
I just don't find them as useful as a GUI file manager, right, do you have any favourites,
do you see any of these you want to try it, please leave in the comments, and tune in tomorrow
for another episode of Hacker Public Radio!
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