Show HN: WOPR – A markup for rich terminal reports

OJFord 10 years ago |

For now I'm categorising this (mentally, I mean) under "awesome, but idky useful".

I'd love to be told I'm wrong though. It's the best thing when you discover how to usefully use awesome but hitherto useless tools :p

yaronn01 10 years ago | |

one use case is when ssh-ing machines you can see visual reports rather than text and numbers (think cpu metrics or app specific).

anonbanker 10 years ago | |

I'd want to combine with pigshell[0]

0. http://pigshell.com/v/0.6.4/

yaronn01 10 years ago |

Hi everyone, I am the author. Feel free to ask me anything or come up with suggestions!

akkartik 10 years ago | |

Very cool! It got me daydreaming about an alternative to html designed from the ground up to minimize webpage bloat and avoid tracking (1x1 pixel gifs, etc.)

raindev 10 years ago | |

Why do you decided to use XML as the basic format?

yaronn01 10 years ago | | |

XML is a standard format for markup (e.g. HTML). When XML is used where it shouldn't (object serialization) it adds complexity. Here it signals that creating a report is as simple (or at least as standard) as creating HTML. What other format you had in mind?

mburns 10 years ago | | |

>XML is a standard format for markup (e.g. HTML).

XHTML is maybe the most hated incarnation of HTML, and is no longer encouraged.

oneeyedpigeon 10 years ago | | |

You can still write xml-compliant HTML; whether it's called XHTML or not is splitting hairs. You still get all the benefits of a very rich toolset for document preparation. I work on a site that makes heavy use of xslt and works with xml-compliant HTML as input/output.

merlincorey 10 years ago | | |

Maybe "SGML" would have been a better descriptor?

themodelplumber 10 years ago | | |

XML and XHTML are two different things. Related, but different. XHTML is no longer encouraged for website markup, that part is true too. That does not mean that XML is no longer encouraged.

agumonkey 10 years ago | |

Greetings, Professor Falken.

mannycalavera42 10 years ago |

Joshua: Shall we play a game?

rglover 10 years ago | |

Global Thermonuclear War

mannycalavera42 10 years ago | | |

Wouldn't you prefer a good game of chess?

jzawodn 10 years ago | | |

Later. Let's play Global Thermonuclear War.

beobab 10 years ago | | |

A strange game: The only winning move is not to play. :)

yaronn01 10 years ago |

Another example is US weather map:

$> a=$(curl -Ls "bit.ly/1OuRPDJ"); curl --data "$a" "tty.zone?cols=${COLUMNS}"

chazu 10 years ago |

Very cool indeed - pair this with 'watch' and you have instant ASCII monitoring tools implemented as http endpoints.

sklogic 10 years ago |

Impressive. I keep using bare xterm since it still supports Tektronix emulation (but, unfortunately, no Regis nor Sixel). This seems like a viable substitution for all three.

LukeShu 10 years ago | |

xterm actually does support ReGIS and Sixel graphics! However, it must be compiled with --enable-regis-graphics` (or `--enable-sixel-graphics`); and it's likely that your distro didn't compile it with those flags. If they did, you can get ReGIS support by running xterm in VT340 mode (`-ti vt340`).

sklogic 10 years ago | | |

Great! Did not know that, thought that only the DEC version could do it.

ratboy666 10 years ago |

Haven't tried this. Just want to know -- what advantage does this give over using gnu plot with sixel output?

I can see the advantage over tek 4010 (this could be dynamic). If this is static (again, haven't tried yet), with multiple pages, why not just use tek 4010?

I also don't understand the admonish to use something other than xterm. What is the issue that was observed?

Ratboy

yaronn01 10 years ago | |

this uses xterm, so it's more accessible to most users than the other alternatives you mentioned. also note wopr is not just about the graphs (like https://github.com/yaronn/blessed-contrib) but also about having a declarative format, and even consuming it with curl.

gavazzy 10 years ago |

This would be useful for AWS instances where you don't want to install a desktop environment on the server.

atmosx 10 years ago | |

Why would you wanna do that (install a desktop env)?!

kbenson 10 years ago | | |

To support graphical installers and specific service administrators that are used to using a GUI on a server? I knew an Oracle DBA once that always wanted X and and Gnome installed on the the RHEL DB servers, it was what he knew and was comfortable with when installing Oracle.

Kinnard 10 years ago |

This is cool. I've been looking for something like it.

johng 10 years ago | |

Very cool!

ivanceras 10 years ago |

I didn't know, you could display something like that in a terminal. And why tty.zone maps to that wopr site?

yaronn01 10 years ago | |

That's a shortcut for the wopr page

Bud 10 years ago |

Absolutely fantastic name choice; kudos.

jaxb 10 years ago |

reminds me of http://zachholman.com/spark/ (spark-line graphs using unicode graph chars)

astro1138 10 years ago |

I wonder if it's manageable to build a converter to SVG with just XSLT?

ape4 10 years ago |

Long live the TUI!

bbrock25 10 years ago |

heh, this is pretty awesome. I literally just started hacking with blessed over the weekend. Nice work!