Here’s a list of TUIs I use on my OS. They are ranked according to daily usage, from top to bottom. Since I spent my time in a Terminal managed by Tmux, with almost inevitably cmus and neomutt running in separate windows,¹ they are ranked first. I do not mention sed, awk, fzf, rg, and all the good stuff from GNU coreutils, nor zsh itself.

• tmux for it is the best multiplexer available and it is highly customizable.
• neovim because it has a decent terminal and good defaults.
• cmus for everything that’s related to music stored on my HD.
• mpv for all things related to video and music (when I’m not using cmus).
• neomutt because, well, there’s a lot of emails going on when you’re employed and I also like answering questions about statistics or this site in general.
• newsboat to read everything I like from the internet, i.e. people who love to share good stuff.
• irssi to read and occasionally chat with others (channels: #lisp, #commonlisp, #scheme, #clojure, #chicken).
• tig to browser the history of my Git repos.
• rga to augment ripgrep with PDF support.
• csvtk and csvlens when working with Excel or CSV files.
• neofetch to quickly share my config.
• onefetch when I want to get a basic summary of a Git repository.
• wtwitch to check streamers and their VODs; also ytfzf to check video or music available on YT without all the fuzz of the YT web API – these tools rely on mpv of course.
• asciinema to share terminal input/output when I do not want to perform live recording.
• a bunch of Git addons saved in $HOME/bin folder that allow me, e.g., to update all remote repos, get various stats, rewrite author and/or history and so on.
• various shell scripts to convert movie to jpeg or gif, and pdf to png or tikz to pdf, interact with tarball, etc.
• some utilities for interacting with tmux or cmus, as well as neomutt, and a script named radio that triggers mpv with online radios.
• I also have several handy alias in my zsh config.

Here’s a raw list of binaries I installed over the time. I won’t show my $HOME/bin folder, whcih I purged recently from old X11-only or defunct shell scripts. I still have a dozens of those lying around.

» ls .local/bin
akku@         csvtk*      gen-hie*                marksman*         pylyzer*      ruff*             streamlink@       viu*
alen*         deno*       haskell-debug-adapter*  matterbridge*     py-spy*       rust-analyzer*    stylish-haskell*  wtwitch*
ark*          difft*      hdc*                    mdbook*           qlot@         scc*              stylua*           xlispstat*
bandcamp-dl@  duckdb*     hoogle*                 mdcat*            qr*           seqkit*           swish-lint@       xstata@
bb*           dut*        ihaskell*               nvimpager*        qsv*          seqtk*            tdf*              xstata-mp@
bibclean*     elm*        joker*                  onefetch*         reader*       shellharden*      texlab*           ya@
cabal-fmt*    fast-tags*  lein*                   ormolu*           rfc*          sixcat*           theme.sh*         yazi@
clojure-lsp*  floskell*   lsix*                   pandoc-crossref*  rga*          stack-clean-old*  ueberzug*         ytfzf*
csslint*      fourmolu*   ltex-ls@                pdfcpu*           rga-fzf*      stan*             ueberzugpp*       zaread*
csvlens*      fzf*        lua-language-server*    poetry@           rga-preproc*  statweave.jar     vale*

Apart from LSPs, I like to keep in this XDG folder stuff installed from GitHub and alike, or binaries that are too old in Ubuntu official repositories (e.g., fzf). I still need to write an install.sh shell script to download and/or update binaries from latest GitHub release. I removed everything installed with pip after I upgraded to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and I’m now symlinking binaries from package installed in separate virtual environments in my $HOME/.Local/lib folder. I also keep binaries like matterbridge for memories. Many are still installed for testing purpose, e.g. marksman. I know this is a lot and for many of those binaries, I must admit I don’t use them often. Some binaries are also simple shell scripts for old X sessions (i3 or Regolith) and are not relevant anymore since I’m on Wayland.