I have been using apt-get and apt-cache a lot over the years. But I never really got used to having to use different commands. Now it seems the management tasks have finally found a common home: apt.

To unify the package management, commands have been combined in the new apt application. Here is a short overview of the new variants versus the old ones:

  • apt search instead of apt-cache search
  • apt show pkgname instead of apt-cache show pkgname
  • apt update instead of apt-get update
  • apt upgrade instead of apt-get upgrade
  • apt list --installed instead of dpkg --get-selections

But it is not only this, what has changed. I also noticed some changes in the shell-based user interface. For example, it now uses colours to highlight package-names in the output and during upgrades now shows an overall progress-bar at the bottom.

root@host:~# apt upgrade
[...]
Setting up libudev1:i386 (215-17+deb8u3) ...
Setting up udev (215-17+deb8u3) ...
update-initramfs: deferring update (trigger activated)
Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.19-18+deb8u2) ...
Processing triggers for initramfs-tools (0.120) ...
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-3.16.0-4-amd64
(Reading database ... 400012 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../libsystemd0_215-17+deb8u3_amd64.deb ...
De-configuring libsystemd0:i386 (215-17+deb8u2) ...
Unpacking libsystemd0:amd64 (215-17+deb8u3) over (215-17+deb8u2) ...
Preparing to unpack .../libsystemd0_215-17+deb8u3_i386.deb ...
Unpacking libsystemd0:i386 (215-17+deb8u3) over (215-17+deb8u2) ...
Preparing to unpack .../systemd_215-17+deb8u3_amd64.deb ...

Progress: [ 16%] [#############..............................................................]

You can see the progress bar but cannot see the use of colours in the snippet. It’s the blog-based highlighting that you see here. So take a look at your own system to see those.

Overall that seems to be a nice enhancement: unified command with better look - and hopefully still the awesome functionality that made me start using Linux systems in the first hand …