Turing Uncomplete

I have been a big fan of Deluge since I first tried it. It was faster than the other clients I had tried, and often managed to connect to more peers. I was even more happy with the 0.6 version, it worked better than the previous version and had a nicer interface. I thought I would keep using Deluge for all my torrenting needs until a more advanced and newer client came along and tempted me away. Little did I know, it would actually be a much simpler and older client that would make me give up on Deluge.

In steps rTorrent, rather old, Ncurses based interface (though a few front-ends exist), and very very simple. I switched for two main reasons; It uses a LOT less CPU time than Deluge (deluged frequently spiked to 97% for a while), and seems to download things even faster. Normally, it would take me a few days to download a 600MB file, today I have downloaded one, and almost finished a second. This is, obviously, much faster than Deluge or any other GUI torrent client I have tried. I’m not sure why this would be the case, but it is.

One particular feature of rTorrent’s that I like is the large number of keybindings to do everything I need:

• Download/upload throttle. The download and upload speed throttle can be controlled by the a, s, d, z, x, c keys (download) and the A, S, D, Z, X, C keys (upload). This is much easier than Deluge’s method, which has two choices; no limit or custom limit. Specifying a custom limit opens up another window where you must enter the speed.
• Multiple views. There are a number of views to help manage your torrents, you can switch between these with the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 keys. Again, this is more powerful than Deluge’s counterpart.
• Detailed torrent stats. Detailed stats for the selected torrent can be accessed by pressing the right arrow key, and views changed by using the up and down arrow keys. This is about as useful as Deluge’s, so neither is a winner here.
• Simple torrent management. New torrents are added by pressing enter and typing the path, relative to your home folder. Torrents are started with Ctrl+S, stopped with Ctrl+D, and deleted with Ctrl+D after stopping. Torrents are switched between with the up and down arrows. This is much faster than using a mouse for everything, often having to use multiple windows, with Deluge.
• Encryption. I’m not sure how to enable this - it’s probably just a quick edit to ~/.rtorrent.rc though. This feature is important to me, as UK ISPs are soon to start cracking down on illegal file sharing and therefore bittorrent - legal usage or not - will be hit. Encrypting the packets makes it look like I’m just using HTTPS or something.

As you can see, rTorrent is a nice little program. The interface is confusing to start with, but, like many CLI programs, can be used much faster than its GUI brethren after learning how. I would recommend it to anyone looking for a new bittorrent client, particularly for servers or other headless setups (or even just for the masochists out there permamently without X).

Edit: Enabling encryption is actually just a case of adding "encryption = allow_incoming,try_outgoing,enable_retry" to your ~/.rtorrent.rc file. And the detailed view is much more powerful than I thought - you can view detailed information about individual peers and files, much better than in Deluge!