With desktop GUI apps becoming generally becoming increasingly bloated and sluggish over time (largely thanks to growing popularity of Electron.js) some technical users are turning back to sofware using the simpler and leaner user interfaces - command line and pseudo-GUIs being rendered in ASCII/Unicode (text user interfaces). CLI tools have the additional benefit of being relatively easy to be used via subprocceses from automation scripts. We will take a look at some modern software that is meant be used via terminal.
Carbonyl: 21st Century Lynx
Remember Lynx, a text-only web browser to render web pages in simplified, text only form? Funny thing is, Lynx is still being maintained to some degree, but lack of support for client-side JavaScript largely makes it obsolete for browsing the modern web, even if we consider the lack of image rendering to be a feature.
Carbonyl is a Chromium fork that is a modern take on TUI-based web browser idea. If you have Docker installed you can easily try it out:
$ docker run --rm -ti fathyb/carbonyl https://trickster.dev
It works quite well with simpler sites, but it can run into issues when you trip something up in anti-automation solutions. Another limitation is that you cannot watch videos with sound.
ag, ripgrep - the new grep(1)
You use grep(1) when you want to search something in source code or text file(s).
The Silver Search (ag) is
a tool similar to grep, but designed to search for substrings in source code
and optimised for that end.
Ripgrep is another grep-like tool to run fast searches for text in a directory tree (with regex support), while also respecting your .gitignore file.
bottom, btop, glances - better kind of top(1)
In Linux/Unix systems top(1) is a TUI tool that renders a list of running processes with their resource consumption numbers - similar to Activity Monitor in macOS or Task Manager in Windows. Many tech people are aware of htop - an alternative tool with enhanced interactivity.
But we can go even further. Bottom
(btm) is a Rust program that renders resource consumption graphs in Unicode
pseudo-graphics with a process list.
btop and glances are another programs similar to Bottom.
Terminal Image Viewer (tiv)
But what if you want to take a quick glance at pictures without having a GUI environment? Perhaps you have some web scraping project that involves downloading images and it’s bit of pain to use scp(1) or sftp(1) to download them from the server in order to preview them. Terminal Image Viewer is a C++ program that relies on features of modern terminals for actually quite good image rendering.
Note however that this does not work on default Terminal app on macOS - you will need iTerm for this.
HTTPie - command line API client
HTTPie is a CLI tool designed specifically for launching requests against RESTful APIs. Unline curl, which is more general tool, HTTPie provides a simple CLI that directly maps into aspects of HTTP requests you want to generate:
$ http GET https://ifconfig.me/all.json
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Alt-Svc: h3=":443"; ma=2592000,h3-29=":443"; ma=2592000
Via: 1.1 google
access-control-allow-origin: *
content-length: 268
content-type: application/json; charset=utf-8
date: Tue, 08 Aug 2023 12:17:07 GMT
server: istio-envoy
strict-transport-security: max-age=2592000; includeSubDomains
x-envoy-upstream-service-time: 1
{
"encoding": "gzip, deflate, br",
"forwarded": "[REDACTED], 34.160.111.145,35.191.2.1",
"ip_addr": "[REDACTED]",
"method": "GET",
"mime": "*/*",
"port": 60392,
"remote_host": "unavailable",
"user_agent": "HTTPie/3.2.2",
"via": "1.1 google"
}
We can see it also pretty-prints the JSON payload in the response.
jq - CLI tool and DSL for JSON processing
If pretty-printing the JSON is not enough, you can use jq - a CLI tool that provides an entire Domain Specific Language for JSON wrangling.
tshark - CLI equivalent of Wireshark
Wireshark is a prominent packet sniffer used by network engineers, security people and software developers. TShark is a relatively obscure sibling of Wireshark that is CLI-based. Think of it as a tcpdump(1), but better. It can be used to not only capture network traffic, but to run various filters and statistical techniques for traffic analysis purposes.
TermShark
But what if you want something like Wireshark GUI in your terminal environment? TermShark is a TUI wrapper for TShark that renders a user interface similar to that of Wireshark.
mitmproxy
When doing exploration of web and mobile apps for security research or automation one may want to intercept API traffic to see what conversations between the app and remote servers. mitmproxy is an interactive TUI program that works as HTTP(S) proxy server meant to capture and inspect the HTTP(S) requests. It’s a simpler alternative to Burp Suite GUI app that you can also customise with your own plugin code.
neovim
Neovim is a modernised and more extensible addition to the vi/VIM text editor lineage with features like Language Server Protocol support, Lua scripting interface, improved usability, RPC API, system clipboard integration, built-in terminal emulator and so on.
GitHub CLI tool
There’s git(1), and there’s GitHub. The former is CLI tool and the latter is web-based platform. To bridge the gap between the two there’s a Github CLI tool for doing tasks like working with tickets, managing pull requests and configuring the CI system. This can be helpful when doing devops work to automate various aspects of software development lifecycle.
mapscii
But what if you want to see some maps in your terminal? You can do that with mapscii - a Node.JS program that renders OpenStreetMap data in terminal environment with mouse support. If you don’t want to install it via NPM you can access a test instance via telnet protocol:
$ telnet mapscii.me
Visidata
In scraping and automation it is very common to deal with tabular data in formats such as CSV files, Excel spreadsheets, SQLite databases and so on. Visidata is TUI application for doing exactly that. It does a good subset of what Excel can do - data filtering, rendering some charts (for example, Shift-F quickly renders a histogram of values in the current column), lettting you edit cells and so on.
Since Visidata is developed in Python you can install it via PIP. It is also available on packet managers of some Linux systems.
Radare2
Radare2 is a programmable binary reverse engineering
toolkit for low-level hackers. Besides the main TUI program it also ships
r2pipe - a Python module for scripting binary analysis workflows (disassembly,
binary code analysis, runtime debugging).
Rich and Textual
These are all nice examples, but what if you want to develop something like this yourself? Writing ncurses-based C programs is not the most productive way to spend time in 2023. When it comes to Python CLI/TUI programming, there are two inter-related projects of interest:
- Rich - a library for enhanced text formatting.
- Textual - a TUI programming framework, based on Rich (with CSS support).
To get a glimpse of what it can do, you can run:
$ python3 -m textual
