In short - it's a repository for unix/bash commands that you want to save for future use, featuring autocomplete search, voting and commenting (very much inspired by daily reading: HN, Programming Reddit, Stack Overflow ...). Kept as clean and simple as possible.
More: I really wrote this for myself as my own collection of command-line snippets was getting too unwieldy and hard to parse. I just wanted autocomplete really so I could jump straight to that command I can vaguely remember in a few characters.
We're quite hot on using Twitter at work for project communication (all SVN commits tweet) and commandlinefu lends itself nicely to tweet-sized nuggets. It turns out that it's quite a good way of staying in touch with the latest commands. All command lists are available as RSS feeds also.
It's still pretty raw at the moment - I've got a few features in the pipeline that should make it better such as tagging and requesting a needed command (see the uservoice link). However, it's gone onto reddit today so I thought now's as good a time as any to ask for HN feedback.
All feedback appreciated via this forum, or uservoice.
I think possibly the answer is you've got two colour schemes there and want to split them - provide a "normal" black on white or grey on white or whatever for the people that prefer that, and one that's pure green on black (or purple/amber on black, probably pretty easy to supply all three once you've done one :) and a cookie to switch between 'em.
Of course, I'm not a designer at all but I'd happily accept a cookie to have everything in soothing black with green text - and it sounds like others probably would to make things more "normal" looking. I'm expressing no opinion whatsoever about which should be the default though ...
A similar site exists for all dot files (configuration files under unix,) which might be helpful: http://www.dotfiles.org
Regarding the actual site, there are a few design comments:
* Yeah, we get that it's supposed to look like a terminal, but the novelty of harsh fonts/colors wears off very quickly. Either having the ability to change it to something else or making a more pleasant default would be nice.
* Make it possible to increase the number of command lines per page. I doubt it is very tolling to generate and submit the pages, but I find it more convenient to just scroll rather than keep clicking 'next.' The way I use your site as of right now, is just keep going through commands, glazing over those I either know or don't find useful until I find the gems. Clicking next continuously is unproductive.
* The "minimize, maximize, close" buttons over the terminal are, as I see now, just a static image to simulate an actual terminal window. This is very unintuitive as I tried clicking them to, what I thought, will make the terminal either span the entire page or load more commands. Either add functionality to buttons or make it obvious that they aren't buttons.
* Finally, it'd be really nice if you don't have to sign up to vote or submit commands. Sometimes I just have one or two commands I'd like to contribute and would not want making an account in YetAnotherWebsite just to do so. You might be missing a lot of useful contributions by making sign-ups mandatory.
Otherwise, well done!
(dotfiles.com hasn't been updated since 2006!)
I'm looking forward to reading Google Analytics in the morning.
I'd move it from nearlyfreespeech.net to linode/slicehost/etc to start with. The bandwidth pricing on nearlyfreespeech is tons ($1/GB) compared to linode ($0.10/GB).
Once I got in, very cool, bookmarked :)
Also the site doesn't display well on a 1024 monitor the left panel is displayed below the right.
You might want to consider a means of flagging dangerous/mis-titled scripts. I see you've already got a destroy everything ("best line eva") and a fork bomb.
You allow users to click on the command and it turns into this text box. Is there a way to get a single click - copy this to clipboard option? It doesn't make that much of a difference to me, but I figured it would be a nice feature to have.
Good job, will look out for you on twitter
For instance, I see something like:
find $PWD -type f -exec grep pattern {} \;
grep -r . patternYou might want to have some sort of field for platform, since these things are going to vary from GNU/Solaris/*BSD.
I wanted to say: the uservoice feedback thing on the left makes it slow to scroll and maybe even more annoyingly gives unsmooth/unpredictable scroll time which means I can't ignore it.
I've noticed this in many sites recently that have persistent buttons/sidebars off to the sides. Don't know if it's a problem specific to Firefox or what... makes CPUs jump into the ~20%s which is more than youtube videos etc.
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2009010220 Gentoo Firefox/3.0.5
Dang.
I would make it totally non-registration necessary. For example, I'd like to upvote some scripts but I don't like that I have to be signed in to do so. Its a great idea for a site, but I don't see it becoming a huge community where people trade scripts, rather a place where someone posts a small script they find. Thus, I'd like to be able to post scripts and vote on them without being a member. Or, make it only possible to downvote scripts by being a member.
I'll definitely be using this to learn some new command line stuff. Great idea!
Another little thing is search. Before I submitted my command which was
svn st | grep "^\?" | awk "{print \$2}" | xargs svn add $1
I searched for it and came up with no results. After browsing the popular page though I found
svn status |grep '\?' |awk '{print $2}'| xargs svn add
Also I noticed that commands that have no whitespace after the | are not being picked up and added to the tags. For example, that last command only xargs would be listed but not grep and awk.
Here are links to the examples:
http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/153/add-all-unver...
http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/36/add-all-files-...
Green and black is bold, white and black is bolder so it is pulling the eye to an element that should be a background element.
Other than that, nice idea. How about providing a bookmarklet people can drag to their browser bars?
Green and Black? argh :) Black on white will suffice, thanks
Either make the widgets [maximize, minimize, close] do something, or remove them.
The block on the right is too large, there is barely enough room to read the actual content -- consider moving all that sidebar into a nice JQuery slider at the top.
Do we need to know who submitted it and when on the front page? Can't we see those details when we click a command?
"You must be signed in to comment." ++ "or register"
I think you could order these nicer. Consider having tabs along the top: UNIX | WINDOWS | ALL
Clicking a tab shows you the relevant snippets. Allow me to sort each category by popularity or recentness.
Two comments on presentation in addition to the aforementioned wrapping of the columns in a div:
1) More space between entries. The list looks very cramped. 2) Less items per page.
Hardest part about Unix is learning the command line. I luckily had an unwilling, but unavoidable, roommate back in 1989 to answer my "read the man page" questions :) Which leads me to my next comment:
C) Classify the entries as n00b, ..., guru.
This goes very well with some of our company's long-term goals of making things easier for techies (e.g. http://bug.gd and http://featurelist.org )
If you're interested in talking about partnership opportunities (at a minimum we can help with hosting), drop me a line at matthew at bug.gd.
Nice work again!
Regardless, I like it... and it looks like you have a hit! I'd suggest a "flag as dangerous" link... and I think "example output" should be required upon submission.
Great work!
The "Popular functions" box on the right has some command names running together ("perl" and "ping", "uname" and "uniq") for me on Firefox 3.1b2 on Windows.
I decided a while back _not_ to provide a "Knowledge Base" section of the site and instead to partner with others that are organizing content such as what you have done. Please get in touch if you have ideas for me or want to link up somehow.