 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Console application" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(December 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Aconsole application orcommand-line program is acomputer program (applications orutilities) designed to be used via atext-onlyuser interface.
A console application can be used with acomputer terminal, asystem console, or aterminal emulator included with agraphical user interface (GUI) operating system, such as theWindows Console inMicrosoft Windows,[1] theTerminal inmacOS, andxterm in theX Window System onUnix-like systems.
A user typically interacts with a console application using only akeyboard anddisplay screen, as opposed to GUI applications, which normally require the use of amouse or otherpointing device. Many console applications such ascommand line interpreters arecommand line tools, but numeroustext-based user interface (TUI) programs also exist.
As the speed and ease-of-use of GUIs applications have improved over time, the use of console applications has greatly diminished, but not disappeared. Some users simply prefer console based applications, while some organizations still rely on existing console applications to handle key data processing tasks.
The ability to create console applications is kept as a feature of modernprogramming environments such asVisual Studio and the.NET Framework on Microsoft Windows.[2] It simplifies the learning process of a new programming language by removing the complexity of a graphical user interface (see an example in theC# article).
For data processing tasks and computer administration, these programming environments represent the next level of operating system or data processing control afterscripting. If an application is only going to be run by the original programmer and/or a few colleagues, there may be no need for a pretty graphical user interface, leaving the application leaner, faster and easier to maintain.
Multiplelibraries are available to assist with the development of Text User Interfaces.
On Unix systems, such libraries arencurses andcurses.
On Microsoft Windows,conio.h is an example of such library.
Console-based applications includeAlpine (ane-mail client), cmus (anaudio player),Irssi (anIRC client),Lynx (aweb browser),Midnight Commander (afile manager),Music on Console (anaudio player),Mutt (an e-mail client),nano (atext editor),ne (a text editor),newsbeuter (anRSS reader), andranger (afile manager).
