BitTornado

I've come to prefer BitTornado as my BitTorrent download client. It's a discovery I made when I started using Xubuntu.

Ubuntu, as you may know, includes a Gnome client for BitTorrent in its base installation. This is a good thing. But in comparison to BitTornado, the Gnome client just seems a tad slow. Maybe it's really just my imagination, but my downloads seem to be completing faster.

BitTornado is a set of command line utilities for working with BitTorrent files. What I use most often is btdownloadcurses, which is a curses interface to downloading torrent files.

Install BitTornado using:

sudo apt-get install bittornado

The format for using BitTornado is:

btdownloadcurses mydownload.torrent

This opens a curses-based interface looks like this:


There's an alternative command, btdownloadheadless which you can use to effect a torrent download in the background. I rarely use it, though, because I prefer to see the progress of my download (watched pots and boiling notwithstanding).