Building Rich Terminal Dashboards

#1

Post by lumpa » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 12:16 AM UTC

Building Rich Terminal Dashboards
willmcgugan.com

Re: Building Rich Terminal Dashboards

#2

Post by mraza007 » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 12:25 AM UTC

Looks pretty cool. As someone who uses commandline all the time I think this can be really useful to build TUIs

Re: Building Rich Terminal Dashboards

#3

Post by solosoyokaze » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 12:51 AM UTC

It seems like Python and Node are not good choices for command line tools. Rust or Go make a lot more sense as your end users won’t have to install any libs or package managers. Single binary distribution ftw.

Re: Building Rich Terminal Dashboards

#4

Post by lifeisstillgood » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 12:56 AM UTC

I like this as I find for most things a TUI is simpler to write and 95% as useful - especially for work small tools - where you are making something you might use a few times and just want to throw it in the toolbox and maybe just have a minor UI to guard against horrors.

Being this simple looks enticing

Re: Building Rich Terminal Dashboards

#5

Post by pugio » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 1:00 AM UTC

Does anyone know of a similar library for node which does this? I've decided to make my next app TUI first, and then only add in a GUI much later, but I haven't seen anything that looks nearly as good as rich.

Re: Building Rich Terminal Dashboards

#6

Post by Scarbutt » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 1:05 AM UTC

solosoyokaze wrote: post #3

It seems like Python and Node are not good choices for command line tools. Rust or Go make a lot more sense as your end users won’t have to install any libs or package managers. Single binary distribution ftw.

For an internal app, you could give users restricted ssh access, less pain that giving them binaries.

Re: Building Rich Terminal Dashboards

#7

Post by krasin » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 1:05 AM UTC

The most productive tools I built for non-programmers were using text UI. They were fast, clean, obvious to use. Turbo Pascal made it especially easy with good support for menus and windows / panes.

Nowadays, terminals have no problem with mouse support, which everyone can test by starting htop in a terminal and clicking with a mouse on a column title to sort by it.

Re: Building Rich Terminal Dashboards

#8

Post by acemarke » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 1:07 AM UTC

pugio wrote: post #5

Does anyone know of a similar library for node which does this? I've decided to make my next app TUI first, and then only add in a GUI much later, but I haven't seen anything that looks nearly as good as rich.

There's `blessed` [0], a plain JS lib similar to `ncurses`. There's also `react-blessed` [1], which is a React renderer that targets `blessed` as the display layer, and `ink` [2], which is also a text-based React renderer but using its own display layer.

[0] https://github.com/chjj/blessed

[1] https://github.com/Yomguithereal/react-blessed

[2] https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink

Re: Building Rich Terminal Dashboards

#9

Post by tra3 » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 1:08 AM UTC

Is this better than splitting panes up with Tmux or similar? You end up losing the ability to pipe things. What do you gain?

Re: Building Rich Terminal Dashboards

#10

Post by pottertheotter » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 1:08 AM UTC

solosoyokaze wrote: post #3

It seems like Python and Node are not good choices for command line tools. Rust or Go make a lot more sense as your end users won’t have to install any libs or package managers. Single binary distribution ftw.

As someone who really only knows Python (I'm not a developer), I was thinking the same thing. I think this would be really useful for me to use for some personal projects. Or for libraries for someone who already uses Python. I guess that's enough for it to be useful, but I wish I could package it up better to let someone who doesn't know a thing about Python use what I made.