Rip CDs on the command line: ripit

I try to use simple command line tools for many tasks that most readers probably accomplish with the default tools provided by GNOME or KDE. Thus I like to listen to the ogg vorbis music files using ogg123 and I rip my CDs using ripit.

Ripit is a command line tool written in Perl. It is a front-end to several other command line tools and provides them an easy to use interface that is as simple as it can be. It can fetch the CD title and track information from CDDB, rip the CD, tag the songs, create a playlist and edit the CDDB information, if necessary. Usually I just accept the defaults provided by the application.

Simple and effective.

Text Mode Linux Applications

During the first year of blogging for Lightweight Linux, I have written about many useful text mode applications. Some of them might be considered obsolete by modern standards, but they might well be enough to satisfy the needs of a command line junkie.

Here is a short overview of the applications I have written about.

1. Twyt is a command line Twitter client. It is a lot more sophisticated than my own simple three-line Twitter script that can only update the status.
2. e3 is a very lightweight text mode editor that can emulate the keyboard shortcuts of several better known editors like Emacs and vi.
3. wtf deciphers acronyms.
4. Adventure is an old text mode adventure game - a classic early example of interactive fiction.
5. Nethack is another golden oldie. It is even installed on some of the proprietary Unix systems at the University where I used to study.
6. Alpine is a simple and easy to use email client. The article shows also how to configure it to for gmail.
7. If you are looking for a text mode contact manager, take a look at abook.
8. Midnight commander, a.k.a. mc is a text mode file manager.
9. Burn your CDs and DVDs with cdw.
10. Create postscript calendars on the command line with pcal.
11. Text mode reminders can be handled by remind .
12. Catdoc and antiword are useful for reading Microsoft office formats.
13. What about reading pdf files in text mode? No problem!
14. Htop is better than top.
15. I use wget for downloads.
16. One can even browse the net with some of the text mode web browsers.
17. And finally, bc is a command line calculator.
    

Any suggestions for future articles? What are your favourite text mode Linux applications?