I’m all about full-screen, intuitive, colorful interfaces to programs. I don’t really care if something has been done before (everything has been done before), unless you’re reinventing the reinventing of the reinventing of the wheel. Just give me a good interface and a decent perspective on the task at hand, and I don’t care if your program was written in 2012 or 1992 — it’ll work for me.
Here’s stftp, which — with the possible omission of color — hits all three of those criteria. Among FTP clients, stftp is in a crowded box. But among full-screen console FTP client applications, it’s standing tall.
The bottom line is a status bar. The top is a breadcrumb trail. Everything in between is selectable. Navigation is by arrow keys, with left and right moving you up or down in the tree. Press enter on a folder and you move in, but press enter on a file and you download it. Other one-letter keypresses are for uploading, deleting or filtering.
My trusty memory script says stftp is running on a little over a megabyte of memory, which may or may not vary with the depth of your travels and the lists it needs to manage. Still, +/- 1Mb is a svelte number.
I don’t use FTP clients very often, and I know some clients are a lot more feature-full than this (combined FTP and torrent client, anyone?) but I really like stftp for its clean interface and obvious arrangement. I’d jump at the chance to use this over, for example, gFTP, which always irritated me as a rancid excuse for an application. 👿
Now if only we can get some color in stftp. … 😀
Inconsolation 