Aptitude is an Ncurses and command-line based front-end to numerous Apt libraries, which are also used by Apt, the default Debian package manager. Aptitude is text based and run from a terminal.
It comes with a number of useful features, including a mutt-like syntax for matching packages in a flexible manner, mark packages as “automatically installed” or “manually installed” so that packages can be auto-removed when no longer required.
Other fetures present include a preview of actions about to be taken with different colors marking different actions, persistence of user actions, the ability to interactively retrieve and display the Debian changelog of all available official packages, apt-like (i.e. apt-get and apt-cache) command line mode.
More features include a score-based dependency resolver which is more suitable for interactive dependency resolution with additional hints from the user like “I don’t want that part of the solution but keep that other part of the solution for your next try”.
The primary command is “aptitude” for example aptitude update.
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