APT 2.9 Released: Debian's APT 3.0 To Have A New UI With Colors, Columnar Display & More

APT as the packaging tool built around Debian Linux is embarking on some big upgrades with the APT 2.9 development series to then roll-out as APT 3.0. There's big improvements to the command-line user interface with the new APT and it's certainly looking nice from my initial Friday night encounter.

Released tonight was APT 2.9 as the latest version to this packaging tool used on Debian and derivatives like Ubuntu. Catching me by surprise in the release announcement was:

"Welcome to the APT 3.0 development series. It has a new UI for apt(8). It has colors, columnar display, some more padding, and shows removals last (Closes: #755088), making the output more easy to quickly scan."

Catching my interest, I decided to quickly try a test build of APT 2.9 on an Ubuntu box.

Ooo yes APT is finally sporting colored text.

I immediately loved the columnar format for the APT output. Paired with the colors and columnar format, the new text UI is a big improvement over the long-standing APT output.

While just spending a few minutes with the new APT 2.9 build, it's a big improvement in my perspective over how APT has long looked with its text user interface. This will culminate with the APT 3.0 stable release but already the coloring and columnar layout is a big improvement for quickly sorting through the output when involving a long list of packages.

It's looking nice and I'm looking forward to APT 3.0. Downloads and more details on today's APT 2.9 release to Debian unstable via the v2.9 announcement.