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Show HN: Building terminal dashboards using ASCII/ANSI art and JavaScript

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Re: Show HN: Building terminal dashboards using ASCII/ANSI art and JavaScript

#32

Post by andrewchambers »

juliangregorian wrote: post #30
andrewchambers wrote: post #4

So bringing some of the web designers into the terminal isn't such a bad thing after all, they have great taste. I'm partially sad its written in nodejs, but I can't really think of what else it should have been written in. I think clojurescript bindings would be awesome. The dashboard can be rendered from an immutable app state om style. dnolen, I'm looking at you :).

quality comment. shit on node for no reason and ask the author of another project to rewrite it for you. node is actually really good at working with streams, which are a reasonable expectation for streaming logs e.g. to be in.

I don't think you understand, clojurescript interfaces with javascript, it wouldn't be a rewrite. Nodejs has many debated problems, I can shit on it if I want. This project rocks though.

Re: Show HN: Building terminal dashboards using ASCII/ANSI art and JavaScript

#33

Post by juliangregorian »

andrewchambers wrote: post #32
juliangregorian wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

quality comment. shit on node for no reason and ask the author of another project to rewrite it for you. node is actually really good at working with streams, which are a reasonable expectation for streaming logs e.g. to be in.

I don't think you understand, clojurescript interfaces with javascript, it wouldn't be a rewrite. Nodejs has many debated problems, I can shit on it if I want. This project rocks though.

I know what clojurescript is. What I don't understand is why you can't write an externs file.

Re: Show HN: Building terminal dashboards using ASCII/ANSI art and JavaScript

#34

Post by SwellJoe »

That's both adorable and oddly soothing to watch. Moreso than "nice" graphics, actually. It may be that I'm old enough to remember when text terminals were the way we interfaced with the world on bulletin boards...and animated ASCII art like this was common. I want to set it up just to watch it, not because I need it (we have web-based charts already, and I'm in the midst of making them realtime).

Re: Show HN: Building terminal dashboards using ASCII/ANSI art and JavaScript

#35

Post by andrewchambers »

juliangregorian wrote: post #33
andrewchambers wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you understand, clojurescript interfaces with javascript, it wouldn't be a rewrite. Nodejs has many debated problems, I can shit on it if I want. This project rocks though.

I know what clojurescript is. What I don't understand is why you can't write an externs file.

There is more to it than an extern file if you want a well designed wrapper which is idiomatic.

Regardless, the smiley in my original post indicates I was just teasing. I think you need to calm yourself down.

Re: Show HN: Building terminal dashboards using ASCII/ANSI art and JavaScript

#36

Post by bostonvaulter2 »

yaronn01 wrote: post #23
mdcox wrote: post #22

This is really nice! Just built something quick with it and I find it way easier to work with than something like ncurses, though that might just be because I work with javascript alot. Sorta feels like a terminal based d3 in a way, though not as atomic. Not a huge fan of Node for terminal applications (I'd sooner use Go or Ruby), but this alone might make me use it for things people other than me will use. Do you pl…

Pull requests are more than welcome!

Also, for reference this is MIT liscensed

Re: Show HN: Building terminal dashboards using ASCII/ANSI art and JavaScript

#38

Post by cgb_ »

Wow this is the coolest thing I've seen in the terminal since I discovered a sparkline bash script. I've embarrassingly used gnuplot's ascii output to realtime chart Cisco network interfaces in a shell I'm writing, this looks 1000x better than gnuplot's output. Thanks for sharing.

Re: Show HN: Building terminal dashboards using ASCII/ANSI art and JavaScript

#39

Post by arcatek »

yaronn01 wrote: post #21
yellowapple wrote: post #19

How difficult would it be to split the widgets off into their own independent/standalone terminal applications? I like the idea, but I'd rather lay things out myself with tmux (thus incorporating it into my existing workflow) rather than using the included layout system. Sorry if this seems like a dumb question; I'm not particularly familiar with Node.js, let alone this particular codebase, so the answer isn't partic…

It's easy to do. The grid layout is optional. You can give relative and absolute positions. The first code sample in the readme shows something like this (though position is implicit there). You can also read about blessed (=ncurses for node) which this project is implemented as an extention of.

As a side note, there is also OhUI (https://github.com/arcanis/ohui, i'm the author) which has the same goal than blessed, but a different api (dom-based) and codebase.

Blessed is great, but I had some performance issues with really fast updates, so I made OhUI, which tries to minimize as much as possible the repaint zones. I think it is pretty efficient at this regard.

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