I never found a good post or reference for command line apps in a categorized fashion. Made this initially for myself to organize them (cause there’s a whole lot), but hopefully it’ll come in handy for others. Eventually if it gets to that point I’d like to turn it into a wiki.

A few notes:

• tmux/screen + ssh + 256colors is a given with cli apps listed
• Core utilities (i.e. top,ls) are not included.
• Arch Linux is highly recommended as most of these are available there in the AUR if not in the main repos, but may need to be compiled manually on other systems.
• Preferred apps in each category are in italic, though of course the beauty of *nix/open source is the ability to choose apps that fit your tastes – which is really the purpose of this guide – to have one place to go to find many of the best cli apps available.
• This is meant to be a reference to command line apps as well as framebuffer ones. Have also thrown in a few GUI apps (i.e. firefox with pentadactyl).

Should also probably state upfront that I’m highly biased towards vim and apps with vi keybindings.

major update: May, 2011
minor update: May, 2012