My Aptitude UI tweaks

This is the way I tweak aptitude: I find it useful, other people found it useful, time to share it.

  1. Run aptitude
  2. Options / UI Options
  3. Disable "Prompt for confirmation at exit" (aptitude saves state, so a quit can perfectly be undone by running aptitude again)
  4. Enable "Advance to the next item after changing the state of a package"
  5. Go to "The default grouping method for package views" and remove this part: ,section(subdir,passthrough),section(topdir) (I find that splitting packages by section adds too many levels between me and the packages)
  6. Go to "The display format for package views" and change it into %c%a%M%S %p %d %Z %v %V (I like to see the short descriptions)

Then most of the work I do on aptitude is using l (powerful filters, like in mutt) to get to packages, + or _ to install/purge them and the fantastic ^u to have a multi-level undo. ^u in fact allows to play what-if with package selections: priceless!