ctorrent is good for your soul
Nothing beats a well functioning minimilistic client that does all it’s supposed to and nothing more. More points if that client works on the CLI, instead of taking up GUI real estate. For email, pine and mutt are the venerable classics; for editing, nothing beats vim; mplayer rules in the entertainment arena; wget and links serve HTTP retrieval needs most admirably.
But what about BitTorrent? The traditional python BitTorrent headless client works but is a tad bit too heavy for my tastes (anything that runs on a VM needs heavy justification on my notebook, given the number of VM’s I am already running on it). Azureus is pretty but obese, as far as resource consumption is concerned.
After some searching, I stumbled upon ctorrent, a C++ console app that gets the job done and is ridiculously lightweight. top reports that its memory usage is at 12kb! Yes, that’s right, 12kb while actively downloading and slightly above 10kb when shared libraries are removed from consideration. Very nice, even if the project does look abandoned. For those running Fedora Core 5, installation is a quick yum install ctorrent. Enjoy.