Text mode torrent client

As I mentioned in many of my posts, in Linux you can find text mode applications for various works such as music player, web browser, download manager, instant messenger and so on. The aim of this post is to introduce text mode torrent client with its installation procedure.

For torrenting in text mode there are numbers of applications are available such as GUI. One of the most powerful and famous one is Rtorrent which uses Ncurses library for providing better interface in terminal. In this post Rtorrent is used.

Fortunately, Rtorrent is available in Ubuntu default repository, therefore, for installing it just type the following command in terminal.

$ sudo apt-get install rtorrent

After installation completion, you can start downloading a torrent file like below,

$ rtorrent MyTorrentFile.torrent

Here some common commands of the application are described.

• CTRL+Q – quits the application
• CTRL+S – starts download process
• CTRL+D – stops downloading
• + and - – changes download priority
• a |s|d – increases the upload throttle by 1/5/50 KB
• A|S|D – increases the download throttle by 1/5/50 KB
• z|x|c – decreases the upload throttle by 1/5/50 KB
• Z|X|C – decreases the download throttle by 1/5/50 KB
• ^P|^N|^B|^F – up, down, left, and right

More information could be found on the man page of Rtorrent