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WTF – A personal information dashboard for your terminal

wtfutil.com

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Re: WTF – A personal information dashboard for your terminal

#131

Neat. For people looking at alternatives for configurable dashboards i suggest sampler[0]. It has a weird license but free for personal use. You can report any output of a terminal command with a custom time rate. E.g. you can SSH and pipe HTOP of a remote system, query your local DB and do a timeseries etc. all in one place. [0]: https://github.com/sqshq/sampler

It's GPL v3.0, so no weird license at all.

EDIT: A closer look revealed that it had indeed an unusual license just 22 days ago. It's GPL v3.0 now.

Re: WTF – A personal information dashboard for your terminal

#132
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The login screen is ultimately just a regular process. I haven't tried it but there is nothing against starting cool retro term and hollywood inside of it. The most difficult part is probably to make it display on the framebuffer. For the login itself you could then just reuse the decades old login binary that provides the login prompt you see in text mode terminals, if you like. Shouldn't be too hard.

Your login screen could be a 3d game where you have to solve a puzzle to access the password prompt.

QuakeDM =]

Re: WTF – A personal information dashboard for your terminal

#133

Does it run on Windows? I can't tell if the lack of Windows binaries is because the author didn't compile it/test it for the platform or because for some reason it won't run there. For a desktop project, supporting the OS of 60+% of desktops would seem a boon to adoption (putting aside the politics and all).

I'm currently using it without many issues under WSL.

Re: WTF – A personal information dashboard for your terminal

#134

I've been wanting something sort of like this for my login screen. Little box for the login, of course and a whole bunch of scary-to-everyone-but-me looking output, like hollywood ( https://github.com/dustinkirkland/hollywood ). +1 if I could use the terminal emulator of my choice so cool-retro-term ( https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term ) could make it look like the screen is about to melt.

The login screen is ultimately just a regular process. I haven't tried it but there is nothing against starting cool retro term and hollywood inside of it. The most difficult part is probably to make it display on the framebuffer. For the login itself you could then just reuse the decades old login binary that provides the login prompt you see in text mode terminals, if you like. Shouldn't be too hard.

I did, naively, make an attempt once and it kinda sorta worked in a horrible "are you mad?" way with shell, ssh, xterm and Xephyr. It only worked with a couple of simple window managers and if you hit ^C at login prompt, it cooperatively dropped you to a prompt owned by root. Oops. Still, not bad for a relatively rapid prototype proof-of-concept.

Re: WTF – A personal information dashboard for your terminal

#135

Honestly curious - why do people live mostly in their terminal? Is it a productivity thing?

Force of habit... I'm not really sure how I made the move, I grew up on Macs but moved to Linux (for the FREEDOM), and gradually all the GUI apps just fell away. I have a PDF reader and a browser and I think everything else is in the terminal. Occasionally I'm forced to use a Mac or Windows machine in professional situations, and it just annoys the fork out of me. I just prefer typing, and I have all the commands I need memorized to an embarrassing degree.

I also appreciate the resource usage. My personal laptop is a Lenovo from 2009, and it never feels slow. It is slow for some things, like compilation, but it never feels laggy in the way a GUI can.

I would never recommend to anyone that they go down this road. It's silly to think how many hours I spent learning what I know, and the main effect is that nobody but me can use my computer and I barely know how to work anyone else's. I'm wicked fast on VIM and that looks cool and all but... the bells and whistles in something like VS Code probably help more in the day-to-day as a developer. But I can't use it. I feel completely lost when I can't Control-Z and git grep, or whatever. I don't even know how to quit a GUI programme anymore.

Re: WTF – A personal information dashboard for your terminal

#136

Nice. I might have to try use it. I use tmux (wrapped in byobu) a lot and tend to end up with one screen (on each host I usual a fair amount) as a dashboard like this, manually constructed from many panes each running a tool like iftop, watching a log with "tail -f", or regularly running other checks via "watch", ...

Why do you use byobu? Just curious as I only use tmux.

Re: WTF – A personal information dashboard for your terminal

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a productivity thing. CLI tools have consistent interfaces and once you are familiar with the common tools and workflow, it is considerably faster to do what you are looking to do. One particular trait that has personally made my workflow a lot faster is being able to repeat a command from history (by pressing Ctrl-R) and then writing only part of the command to run it. It saves a lot of time and makes it less…

> But perhaps the strongest selling point of working in the command line is consistency among tools Isn't this.... not true? A lot of the *nix commands have strong consistency, yes, but there are many commands that are just designed poorly and you can't easily pipe them. And what about widely used tools like Google Docs? How could that have a consistent interface in a terminal?

Google Docs is not for development, perhaps I should have been clearer about that. The vast majority of tools for development, devops, system/network administration are consistent, or at the very least consistent enough that it helps towards making the workflow more productive.

Not all software is suited for the terminal, that should be obvious. Like you would not want to play a graphically intensive game on the terminal because... graphics.

Since you brought it up, what use-case do you have with piping Google docs exactly?

Re: WTF – A personal information dashboard for your terminal

#139

Why are so many of these command-line tools/dashboards written in Go?

I haven't used Go much but I've gotten the impression that tooling is very good, it's easy to create a self-contained executable and startup time is low. All this while the language itself aims for simplicity and doesn't include a plethora of features rarely used or needed creating an almost python-like simplicity.
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