aptitude vs. apt

[Akkana Peck]

Chris Jones writes:
> I was simply pointing out that in addition to apt-get's
> functions, there really is nothing that aptitude can technically do that
> can't be done already with other built-in tools.

I use aptitude primarily for aptitude search. It shows which packages
are or are not installed, deleted etc., which apt-cache search doesn't.

Is there a better way of getting this information without aptitude
(and without firing up a gui program)?  Certainly aptitude isn't
perfect (like the way it truncates lines at the display width even
if stdout isn't a terminal), but getting the same information with
other programs seems like it requires scripting or at least a fairly
long shell pipeline.

	...Akkana