My Choice of Minimalist Apps
These are the terminal-based apps that are part of my daily workflow. They might be available in your OS's repository, otherwise, you can always download from Github.
ranger
Terminal File Manager | Link
This is a great file manager. It's quite fast, easy to start off with, uses vim-based shortcuts, and plenty customizable
nnn
Terminal File Manager | Link
This is my current file manager. It's even faster than ranger because it's written in C (ranger is written in Python). The design choices of this application is a bit out of the oridinary but it's very speedy, specially in low-end devices, such as Raspberry Pi's.
cmus
Terminal Music Player | Link
This is a simple music player which is plenty fast. It follows a server-client model. So you can send commands for volume control or previous/next track, even remotely.
tremc
Terminal Torrent Manager | Link
This needs to be used in conjunction with transmission, which is the actual torrent client.
Normally, people use the transmission-gtk package to interact.
But why not use a curses variant?
It covers only the basic usecases though.
speedometer
Terminal Network Usage Monitor | Link
Plots a graph of the network usage. Simple and useful.
tty-clock
Terminal Clock | Link
If you wanted a clock for the terminal, this is it.
cli-visualizer
Terminal Music Visualizer | Link
If you want a cute little distraction in your terminal which dances with your music, this would do it.
Conclusion
Other than the ones mentioned above, some apps are just too popular to warrant a special mention such as
vimhtopscreen
Once you get used to terminal based minimalist apps, you will start to see that traditional GUI apps look very "busy", as if the app is "advertising" what it wants to do. There is less hand-holding in terminal apps.