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Show HN: Building terminal dashboards using ASCII/ANSI art and JavaScript

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Re: Show HN: Building terminal dashboards using ASCII/ANSI art and JavaScript

#21

Post by yaronn01 »

yellowapple wrote: post #19

How difficult would it be to split the widgets off into their own independent/standalone terminal applications? I like the idea, but I'd rather lay things out myself with tmux (thus incorporating it into my existing workflow) rather than using the included layout system. Sorry if this seems like a dumb question; I'm not particularly familiar with Node.js, let alone this particular codebase, so the answer isn't partic…

It's easy to do. The grid layout is optional. You can give relative and absolute positions. The first code sample in the readme shows something like this (though position is implicit there). You can also read about blessed (=ncurses for node) which this project is implemented as an extention of.

Re: Show HN: Building terminal dashboards using ASCII/ANSI art and JavaScript

#22

Post by mdcox »

This is really nice! Just built something quick with it and I find it way easier to work with than something like ncurses, though that might just be because I work with javascript alot. Sorta feels like a terminal based d3 in a way, though not as atomic. Not a huge fan of Node for terminal applications (I'd sooner use Go or Ruby), but this alone might make me use it for things people other than me will use.

Do you plan on accepting pull requests? I'd love to contribute to something like this.

Re: Show HN: Building terminal dashboards using ASCII/ANSI art and JavaScript

#23

Post by yaronn01 »

mdcox wrote: post #22

This is really nice! Just built something quick with it and I find it way easier to work with than something like ncurses, though that might just be because I work with javascript alot. Sorta feels like a terminal based d3 in a way, though not as atomic. Not a huge fan of Node for terminal applications (I'd sooner use Go or Ruby), but this alone might make me use it for things people other than me will use. Do you pl…

Pull requests are more than welcome!

Re: Show HN: Building terminal dashboards using ASCII/ANSI art and JavaScript

#24

Post by tmandry »

At first I thought this was just an awful idea, but after hearing what you're using it for I want to use it myself :P

Did you look into the possibility of "adapting" something like d3 to draw on the terminal? Or does it just lack the abstractions necessary to do that cleanly?

Re: Show HN: Building terminal dashboards using ASCII/ANSI art and JavaScript

#25

Post by yaronn01 »

tmandry wrote: post #24

At first I thought this was just an awful idea, but after hearing what you're using it for I want to use it myself :P Did you look into the possibility of "adapting" something like d3 to draw on the terminal? Or does it just lack the abstractions necessary to do that cleanly?

Initially I used chart.js to paint the charts but I had to introduce it so many flags (no label Transformation, sensitive spacing etc) that I reverted to do it myself (even though I also have a working version with an altered chart.js).

I am using node-drawville which provides an Html5 canvas Api abstraction over the terminal. D3 uses svg so it is not adequate. However I did saw a port of d3 to canvas which I didn't had time to check.

Re: Show HN: Building terminal dashboards using ASCII/ANSI art and JavaScript

#28

Post by hnriot »

yaronn01 wrote: post #14
edpichler wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much time you spent to do this project. And for what reason you did it? To solve some personal problem? I really enjoyed it, mostly the world map. Once I was thinking in something similar, I was thinking in create a terminal software to monitor my small portfolio of stocks, and tell me about opportunities on the market. The reason to be on terminal was because I was looking for a more discreet interface running l…

It took me a few weeks, one of them was fully on this project. Most of the time was spent on investigating and improving the different canvas implementations (map and charts work on an html5 canvas abstraction). A lot of the time was spent on false directions but this is expected. One particular direction was reusing Web js libs to do the charting logic but it turned that it is easy enough to implement on my own. In…

Helicopter FTW

Re: Show HN: Building terminal dashboards using ASCII/ANSI art and JavaScript

#30

Post by juliangregorian »

andrewchambers wrote: post #4

So bringing some of the web designers into the terminal isn't such a bad thing after all, they have great taste. I'm partially sad its written in nodejs, but I can't really think of what else it should have been written in. I think clojurescript bindings would be awesome. The dashboard can be rendered from an immutable app state om style. dnolen, I'm looking at you :).

quality comment. shit on node for no reason and ask the author of another project to rewrite it for you.

node is actually really good at working with streams, which are a reasonable expectation for streaming logs e.g. to be in.

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