Another (fairly) recent improvement for apt, but on the UI side, is the apt command [1]. It "combines the most commonly used commands from apt-get and apt-cache. The commands are the same as their apt-get/apt-cache counterparts but with slightly different configuration options." So no need to remember that it's apt-cache search, and it's a shorter command. (I know you can set aliases, but this works by default, so on a live USB or another user's machine.) Bash completion didn't work at first, at least on Ubuntu, but as of 15.10 it's working.