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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

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

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

IMO the only significance of it running in the terminal is that you can assume it's reasonably performant without digging into comments to see if people are saying 'Cool but Oh God, Electron?'.

If I were creating it, I would be choosing between Electron and ncurses-wrapping library for whatever language I wanted to use. Then I'd choose the ncurses-wrapping library, because, well Oh God Electron.

Sure, it could be a native GUI, but then I'd have to learn about that for every platform I wanted to release on.

Sure, it could be Qt or GTK, but I've only used them once each briefly and in anger, and again, no desire to learn.

Point is it doesn't need to be in the terminal because no you're not going to feed stuff in and redirect its output, but it certainly does it no harm, and the terminal's an easy development target.

Re: WTF – A personal information dashboard for your terminal

#172
post #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.

Habit as much as anything else. I used byobu around screen for a time before switching to tmux. I've not looked into what tmux can do by itself, compared to screen, without byobu's additions.

Re: WTF – A personal information dashboard for your terminal

#173

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

Become a developer, then you will understand. It is like asking why mechanics have a lot of tools around them.

This is the most zaney gatekeeping I've seen, even for HN standards

Re: WTF – A personal information dashboard for your terminal

#175

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.

See, there is a reason don't do this in a GUI. For a short while it looked like Apple's Automator would get there. Maybe Microsoft can crack this in a couple of years if they go nuts with python as a GUI scripting language with native OLE support.

Powershell is already there.

Re: WTF – A personal information dashboard for your terminal

#176
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The site does mess up inertial scrolling on iOS Safari though.

Internal scrolling works fine here.

I think it was fixed. It’s working just fine now, but it was borked when I posted the comment.

Re: WTF – A personal information dashboard for your terminal

#177

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 v…

Thanks for the project on Github. Seems like it has some more ideas and easier already configured things over my usage of karabiner elements just for hyper key. Though I use Hammerspoon for shortcuts already.

Re: WTF – A personal information dashboard for your terminal

#178

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

Become a developer, then you will understand. It is like asking why mechanics have a lot of tools around them.

Developers don’t need to be super terminal centric. Common sense alone would dictate tons aren’t.

Re: WTF – A personal information dashboard for your terminal

#179
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can't be the only one. I just don't see a lack of features being a feature. You can easily statically link most languages by passing switches to the linker. Python like simplicity is a far stretch. Golang basically just C with co routines and some of the annoying syntax cleaned up.

Lack of features hasn't stopped C from being an extremely useful and prolific language.

Your last sentence, to me, reads as a pro rather than a con. C + coroutines - bad_syntax = Great language to me.

Mind you, I don't use Go in a professional setting, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

Re: WTF – A personal information dashboard for your terminal

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, it is easier to automate a workflow using command line applications. The GUI versions of tools have to try and predict every possible workflow, while terminal applications can be easily combined in scripts. That being said, there are definitely major productivity features to be had with GUIs, such as those with web browsers and IDEs.

what's an example of a workflow you've automated on a terminal?

Virtually anything you need (or want) to do more than a small handful of times.

Key elements of a decent shell tool are varables, pipes, loops, logic, and parameters.

This ranges from the bog-simple (an xmessage "tea timer" that pops up a reminder after a few minutes to tell me my tea is steeped), to complex scripts.

Things I've run from a shell include downloading and analysing 50,000 G+ profiles for most recent activity, literally a "bash on-liner", as described here:

https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq

Resizing or modifying images via Imagemagick (scales to however much time and disk space you have), converting files from one format to another, generating lists of stuff for further analysis or conversion, updating a whole slew of documents in one fell swoop, creating and listening to playlists of local or remote content with mpv.

You've got a ton of small, simple tools which can be combined flexibly in virtually any way you want. That's a lot of power.

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