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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

#141

Post by shay_ker »

unknown2374 wrote: post #137
shay_ker wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 term…

I mainly brought up Google Docs because it's something that many of us use that breaks us from "living in the terminal". Someone who "lives in the terminal" would want all of Google Doc's functionality, but in a terminal. In theory, I should be able to grep & sed a Google Docs page for some things.

> Not all software is suited for the terminal, that should be obvious

Like wtfutil, the very thing that's linked here on HN???

Re: WTF – A personal information dashboard for your terminal

#142

Post by shay_ker »

inetknght wrote: post #129
shay_ker wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of these actions seem like something you'd just never do in GUI though? Except maybe some of the CSV stuff.

All of these actions are things which can be done in a GUI, just definitely not at the scale mentioned... certainly not at the scale mentioned and in a time-efficient manner

Right exactly, they'd just be unreasonable to do in a GUI. But what about Google Docs? Admin tasks? Emails? Slack? Code review? Calendar meetings?

Re: WTF – A personal information dashboard for your terminal

#143

Post by Arcsech »

atarian wrote: post #138

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

Even though I'm not a fan of go myself, it does work well for small, simple utilities - it's lightweight, fast, and compiles to self-contained executables, with no dependency on a runtime like Node.js, Python, or a JRE.

There are some other languages that have similar benefits, but go is the most popular and trendy. Rust could fill a similar niche but GC is very nice and Rust definitely has a higher learning curve.

Re: WTF – A personal information dashboard for your terminal

#144

Post by federico_3 »

shay_ker wrote: post #77

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

Faster reading: everything uses the same font, size, color and position on the screen. Your eyes don't have to constantly scan for different graphical elements across applications.

(if this sounds far-fetched, try reading a book with a different font for each paragraph for 4 hours)

Faster interaction: no dreaded mouse needed.

UI speed: terminal application are rarely slow at it.

Consistency: Works on local and remote hosts over SSH.

Re: WTF – A personal information dashboard for your terminal

#145

Post by hultner »

shay_ker wrote: post #77

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

Everything can be done with the keyboard and is generally scriptable, leading to high productivity but also superior ergonomics is a big part for me.

My wrist joint have a tendency to crack loudly (not sure if this is the correct English term), which feels unpleasant and have been a driving reason for me personally to avoid the mouse unless absolutely necessary. Additionally to basically living in my terminal I use vim bindings in my browsers and replaced my caps-lock with the Hyper-modifier* allowing me to control almost all parts of the operating system from my keyboard and mostly from my home row.

* https://github.com/suliveevil/Capslock

Re: WTF – A personal information dashboard for your terminal

#146

Post by weinzierl »

cptnapalm wrote: post #134
weinzierl wrote: post #114

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.

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.

When I looked at the Linux boot process the first time I thought this just kinda sorta works in a horrible "are you mad?" way*:-). Just short of three decades later the boot process didn't really change a lot but I don't have the same feeling about it. I just got used to it and in the end all that matters is that it works.

Re: WTF – A personal information dashboard for your terminal

#147

Post by [deleted] »

rvense wrote: post #135
shay_ker wrote: post #77

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 n…

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