Vote:Best Designed Interface in a Non-Graphical App

A wise man once said that graphics are just bloat anyway. A real man can survive quickly and efficiently using nothing but a VT100 terminal. And why not? With applications like Pine, Lynx, Mutt, Emacs, and Midnight Commander to choose from, its a wonder someone even bothered inventing X. Vote for the best.

Pine non-free

[hadron]

Pine is a proprietary program with a rather vicious licence. Is its inclusion deliberate, and if so, why is it the only proprietary program here?

Re:Pine non-free

[hadron]

Yeah. That makes it "non-free" in debian terms. It also makes it not "open source" software.

zsh

[Dom2]

I have to vote for zsh. It sure doesn't look as pretty as the others mentioned, but it's the fastest and most efficient way of interacting with practically all parts of the known Unix system. Once you've tried it, you won't want to go back to anything else.

vi?

[Jaeger]

Ok, so i'll start the emacs versus vi flamewar right now. I just like vi's interface: it's like a stick shift: difficult to use until you understand it, then easy to do almost anything. vim takes it that much furthur, and vim on Debian does fun things like changing the xterm title. vim has my vote, even if it doesn't exist here. (I'm not going to discuss vigor because it passes the boundry into graphical. But hilarious, nontheless.)

Re:Pine non-free

[gabrielm]

you might be wrong since the source code package's are on the debian website. just cant distribute modified binaries, I think :)

A useful tool, but no original interface

[bafful]

Midnight Commander's interface isn't much more than a clone of the good old Norton Commander from DOS days. So, while it is a useful tool, it certainly doesn't belong into a list of "best designed interfaces" -- the original Norton Commander should have been nominated instead (oh my, that's not Open Source, how dare I say anything good about it).

I'm confused...

[nutsy]

Besides this topic, there's also the similarly-spelled Vote:Best Designed Interface in a Non-Graphical Application [slashdot.org]. Are Rob and Emmett having trouble using Rob's own Slashdot interface? ;)

Midnight Commander

[mozUser123]

Midnight Commander (type mc to start it) is definitely the best non graphical
interface. It's the only one that I know of in Linux where you can use the mouse
(with gpm running) in the console under Linux to make selections (i.e. click on
options) rather than just select text.

When I started with Linux in 1995 I was really impressed with its interface and
nothing on the console has bettered it.

As for Emacs, you have to be joking. I like Emacs as an editor but the interface has
a lot to be desired, you can't call it intuitive.

Pine's interface is easy to use but not as good as the Midnight Commander.
--

You've never used Gnus.

[Alan Shutko]

slsia

mutt: the geek tool for geeks

[GoNINzo]

I have to say mutt is the best geek tool out there. It is the most configurable mail tool i've ever used, can do everything i want, and is still in development!

All you geeks unhappy with pine and elm, try mutt! it rocks!

--
Gonzo Granzeau