Live data from Hacker News

Command Line Tools to Break Your Dependence on the GUI

putorius.net

11–20 of 79 posts

Re: Command Line Tools to Break Your Dependence on the GUI

#11
post #7

If you use Haskell, then I'd recommend just using ghci over bc because you can't do floating point stuff in bc: 1/3 0 Whereas ghci, or your language's REPL, will likely do better: > 1/3 0.3333333333333333

Launch bc using the -l or --mathlib option to get 20 decimals of precision and load some basic math functions. I have this as an alias in my .bashrc, so I don't need to do this every time I launch the program.

Re: Command Line Tools to Break Your Dependence on the GUI

#13
Work in progress, but sixel support may be coming to mainline tmux:

git clone git://github.com/tmux/tmux

git switch sixel

git checkout b1904c9b8db514133d3372aac13b2ff0b2093cc3

This will give you the "placeholder" box for sixels in terminals that do not support sixel (but you should use mlterm on Linux or mintty on Windows)

The upcoming feature is to replace this placeholder box by unicode art for the sixels, cf https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/1613 for the current discussion.

Then you will be able to break your dependency on the GUI just by using w3m and your favorites sites, whether your terminal supports sixel or not (but it should, it's just better!)

apt-get install libsixel1-bin

w3m -sixel -o display_image=1 google.com

Cf https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/244930/how-do-i-vi...

There are other apps with integrated sixel support like mikkuter for twitter, gnuplot (there was https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-gnuplot , but now the sixel backend is compiled by default in the official gnuplot-nox starting from debian-10)

At the moment, I'm working on a mutt hack rendering outlook emails with all their included thingies (images etc) into sixels.

If someone is looking for an idea, it'd be great to have a IRC client that replaces URL containing pictures by their sixels renditions, a bit like what lsix does ( https://github.com/hackerb9/lsix )

Re: Command Line Tools to Break Your Dependence on the GUI

#14

This is really cool. Has anyone made a version for Windows?

yep, it's called linux! :)

Stallman would point out that it's gnu/linux... but then there's a number of things he'd likely try and point out.

More seriously, this doesn't seem to be linux as much as it is bash and a handful of commonly found on linux tools - all of which you can now run on windows anyway.

Windows users: install bash and follow along.

Re: Command Line Tools to Break Your Dependence on the GUI

#16
post #7

If you use Haskell, then I'd recommend just using ghci over bc because you can't do floating point stuff in bc: 1/3 0 Whereas ghci, or your language's REPL, will likely do better: > 1/3 0.3333333333333333

you can use pari-gp for your floating point needs inside unix. It's an extremely beautiful calculator language (for rational, floating point and polynomials). Also octave and julia, if you are mostly interested in matrices, but they take quite a few miliseconds to start and are not as useful inside shell loops.

Re: Command Line Tools to Break Your Dependence on the GUI

#18
post #13

Work in progress, but sixel support may be coming to mainline tmux: git clone git://github.com/tmux/tmux git switch sixel git checkout b1904c9b8db514133d3372aac13b2ff0b2093cc3 This will give you the "placeholder" box for sixels in terminals that do not support sixel (but you should use mlterm on Linux or mintty on Windows) The upcoming feature is to replace this placeholder box by unicode art for the sixels, cf https…

Yes. This (image support in general in Terminal emulators and Terminal multiplexers) is currently being actively discussed here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/terminal-wg/specifications/is...

Many important people are there, e.g. the Tmux maintainer/developer Nicholas Marriott, the Mintty developer, some Xterm.js developer, and others.

Re: Command Line Tools to Break Your Dependence on the GUI

#19
post #5

A dictionary? I mean, that's neat and all, but not all that useful is it? I might check the weather once a day, tops. This is better solved by having a widget on my smartphone. Same for the dictionary, and same for short google searches too (Firefox Focus). I had a twinge of hope that this might have been more of an introduction to using the terminal effectively on Linux for diagnoses. I'm new to Linux, and every tim…

I interpreted the premise of the article as weaning people off of GUI with everyday trivial tasks that can be done via CLI. I myself do almost all my work from the CLI, but it was this blog post [0], specifically the open, pbpaste, and screenshot commands, that got me into dabbling with my shell, before I understood the power and convenience of shell scripting.

I try to get novices interested in the shell via youtube-dl, which is very useful and has no good GUI counterpart. However, for a lot of people, downloading copies of video are just not an everyday task like checking the weather or dictionary.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10143143

Re: Command Line Tools to Break Your Dependence on the GUI

#20
post #5

A dictionary? I mean, that's neat and all, but not all that useful is it? I might check the weather once a day, tops. This is better solved by having a widget on my smartphone. Same for the dictionary, and same for short google searches too (Firefox Focus). I had a twinge of hope that this might have been more of an introduction to using the terminal effectively on Linux for diagnoses. I'm new to Linux, and every tim…

What kind of diagnoses are you interested in learning about? This may be too rudimentary, but I found ‘The Linux Command Line’ a good book to build up skills and knowledge.

Also I would say: don’t try to force it. People write a lot about ricing their Gentoo installs, which tiling window managers use the least RAM and which plugins they use with Neovim. This makes using the terminal effectively seem like a big thing.

But the terminal is exactly not that — all proxies are removed and you just use it for what you want to do, nothing more. Just start by using grep on a text file instead of opening that text file up in your editor.

Post reply on HN