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WTF: A personal information dashboard for your terminal

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21–30 of 121 posts

Re: WTF: A personal information dashboard for your terminal

#22
post #7

Can't this be made more general and modular by creating a windowing system for terminals first, and then write little programs that operate in that system?

That's an excellent idea! It could be called I don't know... maybe "tmux"? Or "screen"?

Re: WTF: A personal information dashboard for your terminal

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At what point do we just say why not 'install a modern GUI'?

I have yet to see a modern GUI that didn't put pretty little animations a higher priority than being modular and configurable and having as much or as little data density as I desire. Command lines, on the other hand, do it natively if not intuitively.

Have you seen GKrellM? http://gkrellm.srcbox.net/

Re: WTF: A personal information dashboard for your terminal

#25
post #11
post #7

Can't this be made more general and modular by creating a windowing system for terminals first, and then write little programs that operate in that system?

Another commenter has mentioned Python's urwid [0], which is precisely that. [0] http://urwid.org

This seems more like a python version of curses than a window manager

Re: WTF: A personal information dashboard for your terminal

#27
post #22
post #7

Can't this be made more general and modular by creating a windowing system for terminals first, and then write little programs that operate in that system?

That's an excellent idea! It could be called I don't know... maybe "tmux"? Or "screen"?

Hmm, let's also allow you to edit text in those windows. And it should be extensible, of course. With a dialect of LISP!

We could call it "emacs".

Re: WTF: A personal information dashboard for your terminal

#28
post #7

Can't this be made more general and modular by creating a windowing system for terminals first, and then write little programs that operate in that system?

Such things existed in the pre-GUI-everywhere days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview is probably the most well known example.

If you are not wanting a full windowing OS (just a windowing display) then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tmux may do the job for you in unix-a-like environments, with or without https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byobu_(software). In fact I sometimes have several log monitoring windows open in one tmux screen, essentially a dashboard like this and you describe. Done this way all that is running is console applications: almost any existing console application can work well and there is no need for extra development to interface a new windowing API.

You could use an existing CUI/TUI library to write such a condole-based windowing system, if tmux/similar don't quite do what you are looking for. For example https://github.com/chjj/blessed if node.js is your bag. Similar libraries exist for other languages too (go, .net, ...) - search for "Terminal UI " or "Console UI " and options should pop up.

Re: WTF: A personal information dashboard for your terminal

#29
post #22
post #7

Can't this be made more general and modular by creating a windowing system for terminals first, and then write little programs that operate in that system?

That's an excellent idea! It could be called I don't know... maybe "tmux"? Or "screen"?

or "dvtm"

http://www.brain-dump.org/projects/dvtm/

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