

Web Terminal Prototype - justips

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.<p>Please, take a look at this video [01:03]: http://www.screencast.com/t/Z1oGwRVq5ZhB<p>What do you think? Do we need a tool like that?<p>Prototype: http://kolbasov.github.com/frosty
Project: https://github.com/kolbasov/frosty
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lutusp
> 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
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
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.

~~~
justips
> 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.

I agree. The prototype follows this philosophy. It contains a set of small
modules: one module for a task.

