Nala an useful frontend for apt

Nala a useful frontend for apt

If you like the cli like I do, you might also like modern tools with some eye candy. Nala is a nice frontend for dpkg and a replacement for apt. It has some useful features for your daily work.

The history for nala can help to undo the installation of packages and all their dependencies. This makes it a good replacement for apt. Since it is based on dpkg like apt, you can use both in parallel.

To install nala on Debian bookworm you can use

sudo apt install nala

Now you should be ready to go

The nala command has very similar options to the apt command. Let us focus on some outstanding features that make nala an improvement over apt.

Use nala fetch to test the fastest mirror for you. This is similar to netselect. Remember that using close mirrors helps you and the project.

The history with nala history makes it possible to review recent actions and even undo some jobs you have done with nala.

For all zsh users, there is a completion to make the console a nicer place ;)

All in all, this is how CLI tools can be improved by a successor. Use the good features, be interoperable, and make it easy to switch.