aptitude: One just for the swirlies

I admit I spend most of my time with pacman and its evil twin, yaourt. But neither of those is a real console application, for managing packages in Arch. yaourt might spice things up, but it’s no more a console “application” than pacman is.

aptitude, by comparison, is quite impressive in its scope and arrangement.

Maybe you didn’t know there was a text-based interface to your computer’s package databases, already installed on your machine. 😉

I guess it should go without saying that aptitude is really only on Debian and its derivatives, and even then you might have to specifically install it to get at it.

But from within it, you can search, install, remove, update, trace, inspect … just about anything you could possibly want to do to an application.

It’s a fantastic tool, considering how sparse things like dpkg -l or apt-cache search can be. This is something you can sink your teeth into. 😀

And best of all … a fun little minesweeper game!

😉