vim - and not its girlie cousin Vim -g, gvim for those who still don't get it. Emacs is ok I suppose but keep in mind the following list of tools can be done from inside of it...with LISP implementations of course.
tin - USENET still not completely useless regardless of how many outlook readers are out there. If tin isn't your style slrn is my second choice
mutt - while mail is sufficient I like it because of the vi interface
gcc - the entire compiler collection
ssh - if you can't figure out why then don't worry; you probably didn't make it past the previous suggestions.
screen - Keep your WDM and spend all your time tweaking it. If you do this you probably think MS VS is the best IDE in the world. I'll do you a favor if you can't ween yourself off of GUI's - fluxbox then ratpoison then screen.
w3m/links - You have to be able to surf. If you are new to the truly powerful ways of shell interfaces then you may want to ease into it with links -g; you do have to compile that in yourself though. (You did get this via tarz/bz2, right? Hmm, package managers - figures...)

Oh and if you must have a file browser because you don't like things such as find, grep, cd, etc:
mc although I resort to :Sex or :Ex if I 'need a gui' tool. It's left as an exercise to the reader to figure where and what those do...

That's about it. This should get me plenty of boos from the window zealots and the *nix wannabes.

I learned an ingenious trick from the trolls this weekend here on Slashdot. Of particular interest is Serojin. I really do not know if I should be amazed at his creativity to abuse the /. moderation system or at the daftness of moderators to give this person up mods so that a signature line can be changed later to a rather "colorful" link as described by this shock-site information. More info here if you really do not understand /. trolling phenomena. I suppose that if I spent more time at anti-slash I could learn even more. Truth is I don't take any of this very serious and at the end of the day as I suppose entertainment is what it is really all about. Serojin would be happy to know that in the midst of me singling his account out to the 'others' a 'slash-bot' account by the name of Eponymous Cowboy marked me as the foe! Talk about irony. Amusing, totally amusing. Eponymous Cowboy - who is the real troll here?
Others even came to defense of Serojin and implied that I was the one that should think of my actions!
!!!WARNING: Don't click the sub-links if you are offended easily :WARNING!!!
Now that you have been warned please keep in mind _OR_ educate yourself that I did _NOT_ post the original links! (Get it Eponymous Cowboy? I was doing you a 'favor'; geesh!)
Here is a thread to demonstrate my point. Follow this if you are unable to see the big picture here. You can't make this stuff up!!!

Thanks to all who help make these comical gems exists; the serojins and the slashdotters alike.

If there is something you should take away from this journal entry it is the following: DO NOT POINT OUT FLAWS TO OTHERS LEST YOU BE BLAMED FOR THEM! Now if you truly do not care one way or the other then 'point out' away...

I'm off to see if I get modded to oblivion, like this, from this point on as well as lose my bi-weekly moderation points that I seem to get.
***UPDATE 5/30/2004: I have yet to be able to mod again after this incident. Should I feign surprise at this point?
***UPDATE 11/23/2004: I have been getting mod points like crazy for the last three weeks. I guess either my karma is back up or it is just a mod-point cycle and I am back on the upswing.