CLI Companion Reaches Version 1.0 RC2

CLI Companion is a tool aimed at making the terminal easier to use: it's a GUI that displays a list of commands and an embedded terminal under it. The application comes with a list of commonly used commands by default, each having a short description and if you want to find out more about a certain command, simply right click it and select "Help". This will display the "man" (manual) for the selected command. But CLI Companion can help advanced users too as you can use it to store long commands which you can then easily find using the search feature.

CLI Companion 1.0 RC2 has been released today, bringing 2 features designed to make CLI Companion more useful as a daily terminal:

• the command list can now be collapsed and expand as needed (see screenshot below)
• The format commands are stored in has been changed. Commands requiring User Input when ran now use question marks(?) as place holders. So a command like 'ls /any/directory' would be added to your command list as 'ls ?'. This changed was required because the old behavior only allowed user input at the end of the command.

To install the latest CLI Companion 1.0 RC2 in Ubuntu (Karmic, Lucid or Maverick), use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:clicompanion-devs/clicompanion-nightlies
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install clicompanion

You'll then find CLI Companion under Applications > Accessories.

CLI Companion Makes It Easier To Use The Terminal

CLI Companion is a tool aimed at making the terminal easier to use: it's a GUI that displays a list of commands and an embedded terminal under it. The application comes with a list of commonly used commands by default, each having a short description and if you want to find out more about a certain command, simply right click it and select "Help". This will display the "man" (manual) for the selected command.


You can of course add your own commands to CLI Companion: simply click the "Add" button, then enter your command, an argument (optional) and a description.

To run a command, you just have to select it and click "Apply" and you'll see the output in the embedded terminal. If the command requires an argument, it will prompt you - all using a GUI. You can also run multiple commands in the same time: click the "+" sign on the right and a new tab will open.

Advanced users may also find Cli Companion useful by storing custom commands they came across for easier access and since CliCompanion has a built-in search tool, those commands will be easy to find and run.

Install / download CLI Companion

CLI Companion comes with an Ubuntu PPA so you can easily stay up to date with new releases:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:clicompanion-devs/clicompanion-nightlies
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install clicompanion

If you don't want to use the PPA you can simply download this .deb - it should work on any Debian based Linux distribution.


We received this tip so many times we just had to write about CliCompanion. Well, we would have written about CliCompanion anyway but as some point I forgot about it. Thanks to Matthew Byers, dart, Greg, eMcE and everybody else who mentioned it in the comments!