November 9, 2019

Here’s a pretty useful command if you’d like to search for programs on the command line within a Debian based Linux distro:

apt-cache search (pattern or name of program you're interested in): This allows you to search for programs on the command line to install.

Here’s an example of how to apply this idea in action. In this example, let’s search for some terminal emulator programs on Debian’s apt package manager by simply providing “terminal emulator” as the pattern:

apt-cache search terminal emulator

Here’s a screenshot of Sakura terminal with tmux running that command: <img id=“IxAptSearchTerminalScreenshot” src=“images/aptsearchterminalscreenshot.png”/>

As you can see, this is pretty powerful, especially if you know a few things about pattern matching with grep commands. Try using this idea to try some new programs out!