Improving Terminal Experience in Proxmox and Debian: nala, htop, and vim

This article explains why replacing some default command-line tools with more user-friendly alternatives can dramatically improve your efficiency and comfort when working on Proxmox VE or any Debian-based system.

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📦 Replacing apt with nala

While apt is reliable and powerful, it’s also:

• Verbose and sometimes unclear in its output
• Lacks dependency trees
• No clean history management
• No download progress bar by default

✅ Why nala is Better

nala is a Python-based frontend for apt, and it's fully compatible with the Debian/Proxmox ecosystem.

Feature	apt	nala
Output formatting	Basic, hard to scan	Clean, color-coded tables
Dependency tree	No	Yes (like dnf on Fedora)
History	Minimal	Tracks history of installs/removals
Parallel downloads	No (default)	Yes (if supported by config)
Speed	Moderate	Often faster with clean UI

Command Examples:

# Instead of:
apt update && apt upgrade

# Use:
nala update && nala upgrade

# Instead of:
apt install htop

# Use:
nala install htop