Here's something I posted years ago on reddit, where I went under the nickname "CorkyAgain". It's pertinent to the discussion in this thread and I'd like to get the nixers' thoughts about these criteria and any others they might suggest.

Quote:http://github.com/agarrharr/awesome-cli-apps
https://github.com/alebcay/awesome-shell
http://robot.unipv.it/toolleeo/contrib/cli-apps.html
http://github.com/k4m4/terminals-are-sexy
https://github.com/topics/ncurses?o=desc&s=updated
http://tim.thechases.com/posts/cli/softw...ine-world/
https://github.com/dbohdan/structured-text-tools
https://kkovacs.eu/cool-but-obscure-unix-tools
https://www.linux.com/news/top-10-linux-...plications

Rather than build yet another list, perhaps we can discuss the criteria we use for selecting our favorites from among the many apps available?

To get things started, here are a few of my criteria, off the top of my head and in no particular order:

Fitness to task. Can it do what I need done?

Small. How big is the footprint, both on disk and in memory once loaded and running? This includes any shared libraries used.

Minimal dependencies. This follows from the previous item.

Fast. Relative to other programs in the same niche.

Hackable. How clean/understandable is the code? Important if I need to debug it or add a feature.

Adherence to Unix philosophy, especially:

Coherence: Does one thing and does it well. One way to measure this is to look at the number of commandline options or the length of the manpage.

Composability: if it's a CLI rather than a TUI it should accept input on stdin and its output should support piping to another program. The latter requirement implies that there is no unnecessary output on stdout, only the generated or transformed data. If it's a TUI does it support the use of user-specified external programs to achieve some tasks -- as with vi(m)'s "!" command -- or does it restrict the user to its own implementation?

Vi(m)-style keyboard commands. (If a TUI.)

It often isn't possible to find an app that satisfies all of these criteria. For example, ffmpeg fails the suggested coherence test with its numerous commandline switches and lengthy manpage, but it's indispensible nonetheless. There are things it can do that no other app seems able to (criterion #1).

For example, is the license or programming language an important criterion for you?