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Ask HN: Good examples of interactive command-line user experience?

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Re: Ask HN: Good examples of interactive command-line user experience?

#71

Post by yourapostasy »

Tangentially-related: check out Vermont Views [1], a complete TUI development solution. I wish they open sourced it before they exited the market, or re-entered the market for IOT/embedded developers. I've never found a comparable open source effort, though here's to hoping the Blessed project for node.js takes inspiration from Vermont Views for future directions.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20091011010412/http://www.vtsoft....

Re: Ask HN: Good examples of interactive command-line user experience?

#72

Post by romdev »

Telemate BBS client was a great example of a windowed TUI in the style of DESQView. You could have a chat window, a DOS terminal and an ANSI terminal all open at the same time. Overlayed dialog boxes were framed, resizable and movable within the window. Scripting was supported in chat and terminal windows to navigate through menus or to type "^H^H^H^Hsexy beast" any time your name comes through the chat. Another favorite of mine, Vern Buerg's List.com, was far better than Norton Commander or the MC clone, in my opinion. As a multi-column file viewer/manager, it maximized the number of files displayed onscreen and allowed simple file operations from a keystroke. By using a hex editor you could change the viewer and external editors. It was also written in 8086 assembly and was very fast.

Re: Ask HN: Good examples of interactive command-line user experience?

#73

Post by andrewf »

I'd look at old DOS applications - the last mass market (i.e. not just technical users) for non-GUI apps. Although towards they end, they were often just aping Windows GUIs as well as they could (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access )

Re: Ask HN: Good examples of interactive command-line user experience?

#74

Post by type0 »

e12e wrote: post #61
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sad to see this in the grey. Git is unintuitive to those who don't understand it. If you read about its internals and learn how it works, the command line gets much better. It's well documented and it gives you a whole lot of power and insight into the inner workings of the VCS. Things like launching your editor to do more complex commands, plugging a script into git bisect, these are all great design choices.

I personally think mercurial (hg) is much more intuitive than git. Even for use with git, via hg-git[1]. Can't quite put my finger on it, but some subtle differences seem to nudge the user towards more usable workflows than bare git. [1] https://hg-git.github.io/

Thanks, didn't knew about hg-git

Re: Ask HN: Good examples of interactive command-line user experience?

#78

Post by rdavis »

I highly recommend ranger[0]. It's a very useful console based file manager with great vi key bindings.

The configuration is also very flexible and includes a python API to write your own commands[1].

[0] http://ranger.nongnu.org

[1] https://github.com/ranger/ranger/wiki/Commands

Re: Ask HN: Good examples of interactive command-line user experience?

#79

Post by zie »

git-pull wrote: post #43
d0mine wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python prompt toolkit is worth a look https://github.com/jonathanslenders/python-prompt-toolkit/bl...

Yes good on you for mentioning that, as well as the other projects in the umbrella: - pymux (tmux clone): https://github.com/jonathanslenders/pymux/ - pyvim (vim clone): https://github.com/jonathanslenders/pyvim/ Lots of community-driven CLI tools with superb autocompletion: - ptpython: http://github.com/jonathanslenders/ptpython/ - pgcli: http://pgcli.com/ + mycli: http://mycli.net/ - complete shells: xonsh ( http:/…

The talk covers Prompt Toolkit. The presenter wrote pgcli and mycli, and covers most of your list as well. But it's probably good to list it all out here, for the lazy, or the ones unable/unwilling to play youtube.
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