Edit: Unfortunately, the images originally included in this post are gone, because of hosting problems in late 2009. My apologies.

I was absent-mindedly flipping through a screenshot thread today and came up with two programs that have turned out to be real gems — centerim and slurm. Neither one is particularly fresh, or terribly innovative, but on a terminal-based system I know of nothing better. (Until someone suggests alternatives, that is. 😉 )

slurm is probably the nicest network activity monitor I have seen for the terminal. I had been installing tcpdump just as a troubleshooting measure, but slurm makes tcpdump look primitive. The colors run nicely alongside htop‘s default, and this is, apparently, another console-based program that’s themeable. Horrors.

I know that development has apparently ceased on slurm, but that doesn’t keep it from being a very attractive, very useful program in my framebuffer/console arsenal.

centerim, on the other hand, is a very active project, and while I don’t have a screenshot for you (I don’t have any chit-chat I care to share online 😉 ) I can point you to the home page for examples of what it looks like. I already have irssi installed, but centerim seems to fill a gap I had thought unserviced.

And yes, it too is themeable. The good old days of one-color bland and cryptic console applications appear to be gone. Thank goodness.

And so kids, the moral of the story is that idle time spent sifting through screenshot threads … is not idle.