Web Terminal Prototype

3 points by justips 13 years ago | 4 comments

A few months ago I made a prototype of a web terminal. Yes, command line on the web. I just wanted to design a simple tool for fetching information I actually needed, not ads and banners. Of course, it might do more than that.

Please, take a look at this video [01:03]: http://www.screencast.com/t/Z1oGwRVq5ZhB

What do you think? Do we need a tool like that?

Prototype: http://kolbasov.github.com/frosty Project: https://github.com/kolbasov/frosty

lutusp 13 years ago |

> Yes, command line on the web ... What do you think? Do we need a tool like that?

But such things exists. I just wanted to ask whether you knew about Lynx, which meets this description:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

There's also wget, which does this too, but isn't interactive in the way that Lynx is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wget

justips 13 years ago | |

Yes, I know about Lynx. It's good, but just one tool. What I want from web command line is to be a set of tools: Lynx + wget + instagram client + twitter + etc.

lutusp 13 years ago | | |

Okay, fair enough. But there's a philosophy dating back to the early Unix command-line days and still applies, that argues for a building-block approach -- many small building blocks is "better" than one block that does everything.

As I was preparing my reply, I was surprised to see that Lynx wouldn't function with my own website, but worked fine with Google. It turns out that Google knows how to negotiate with a text-only Web client, but it seems that's increasingly rare in modern times.

Too bad -- it speaks to the ascendance of content-heavy sites in modern times, and relatively inflexible server configurations, including my own.