gtorrent-ncurses: Not quite ready for prime time

It’s no secret I’ve been an rtorrent fan for nearly a decade now. It has its shortcomings and at times it seems to lack some features that the new kids have. But overall, it has been a reliable standby.

That doesn’t mean it’s the best way of doing things though, and when you stop trying new things, that’s when you get old.

But gtorrent-ncurses — the text-only option to the full gtorrent — might not be the one to take the throne.

It looks like a good start, and as best I can tell it is actually working. But that interface looks suspiciously broken, and as best I can tell, there are only two controls: “a” for add a torrent, and “q” for quit.

No progress indicator. No bandwidth meters. No throttling controls. No help screens, priority settings, peer lists, sharing ratios, tab completion for adding files … the list goes on.

I only looked briefly at gtorrent’s full graphical interface, so it may be that it’s possible to get those things from the full X-based UI. They are suspiciously missing from the text-only version though, and in this day and age, more than a dozen years after the original BitTorrent, it’s a little hard to overlook.

I’m willing to give gtorrent-ncurses the benefit of a gestation time, and come back to it later. Like I said, it appears to be working, even if the “interface” wasn’t doing much to tell me that. I’ll be back in a little while. 😉