Sat, 17 Apr 2004

Yet Another FTP Client
I'll admit it: I'm a commandline junkie. I cut my teeth on an Apple II+ (literally: I started messing with computers at age 3), so to me a GUI has always seemed foreign: nice eye candy, but not the real user interface. I hate being tied to the window system to do my work, so most of the applications and utilities I use are text-based. It bugs me that I have to use OpenOffice to do real word processing and Mozilla Firefox to browse the web (for you fellow CLI addicts, I do use w3m and lynx fairly often, but most sites these days pretty much require a graphical browser to be useful).

I also get frustrated when I can't find a text-based or commandline program to accomplish a task. For a long time, I've been looking for a text-based sftp client that supports command history and tab-completion. Today, I finally found one: yafc (Yet Another FTP Client). I could tell you all about this very cool app, but instead I'll just shamelessly steal the list of features from the project's website:

• cached directory listings
• extensive tab completion
• aliases
• colored ls (ie, ls --color, uses $LS_COLORS like GNU ls)
• automatic reconnect on timed out connections
• recursive get/put/fxp/ls/rm
• nohup mode transfers
• multiple connections open simultaneously
• tagging (queueing)
• very configurable
• autologin and bookmarks
• automagically enters nohup-mode when SIGHUP received (in get and put)
• redirection to local command or file
• proxy support
• Kerberos support (version 4 and 5, heimdal, kth-krb or MIT)
• SSH2 support (sftp)
• it's free!