Maybe not necessarily something as radical as terminals, but anything providing the same programming ergonomics (in order to be easy to build and maintain) and constrained by the same restrictions (so that functional requirements get tamed).
At first, it would definitely sound as an involution, but I feel somehow confident that the market in general will accept such constraints as soon as the results become evident.
I've had enough of today's slow buggy messes that require gigabytes of memory and two CPU cores to show me a splash screen for 10 seconds.
A lot of the TUI apps I stumbled upon seem really well-done.
I'm currently using nvlc and cmus for music playback, and then of course your standard complement of text editors etc. I like Lynx et al. for some web browsing, but compatibility is a pain.
- `lazygit` is extremely valuable.
- `lnav` for inspecting log files has turned out to be surprisingly good.
- Do you use `fzf` in tandem with your shell so you can also search your command history (and not just look for files)? I use that for like a year now and can't live without it.
- `mc` for TUI file management has been moderately alright.
- How about `ripgrep`? Can't believe I lived without that one too.
- Rust's tool `skim` (the command is `sk`) in tandem with `ripgrep` or `the_silver_searcher` to very quickly search in file contents in big directories has saved me a ton of time already (although I moved to search file contents in projects in Emacs since). To be fair, you can just use `fzf` instead of `sk` here though; I am just positively biased towards Rust.
- `ripgrep_all` allows you to search in ZIP archives, PDF docs, Office docs/spreadsheets etc. Really useful.
- `ht` is a Rust rewrite of `httpie`, the Python friendlier `curl`. I like `ht` much more because it doesn't incur any startup overhead and started replacing my scraping / syncing scripts with `ht` where applicable which is NOT everywhere because `curl` is extremely powerful and it doesn't often make sense to replace it.
- Command-line or in-terminal charting/plotting: `jp`. I have made a CSV file out of all file sizes on my NAS (bucketed by powers of 2) and then invoked it on the input. Here's a sample CSV from a random directory:
0k,79
1k,6
2k,1
4k,166
8k,34
16k,7
32k,6
64k,3
128k,27
256k,2
512k,2
1M,3
2M,4
4M,8
8M,10
16M,135
Then do this:
`cat THIS_FILE.csv | jp -input csv -xy '[*][0,1]' -type bar -height 57`
And enjoy an in-terminal vertical bar charts. :)
- ...And I have a ton more.
But your question makes me sigh. I really have to start a blog. I am a very practical guy and people usually love my posts (scattered on different forums) where I make such lists. I should roll my own blog static web site generator in Rust I suppose, because the existing ones are either slow or don't support what I need... So, not going to happen in the next year, most likely. :(
