

Ask HN: Rate my webapp: commandlinefu.com - codeinthehole

http://www.commandlinefu.com (and related http://twitter.com/commandlinefu)<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>All feedback appreciated via this forum, or uservoice.
======
yan
Idea and implementation look good.

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!

~~~
antiismist
You mean <http://dotfiles.org>

(dotfiles.com hasn't been updated since 2006!)

~~~
yan
Er; Updated. Thanks.

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cubicle67
Looks useful.

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.

~~~
raju
Agreed. Looks useful. I am no command-line ninja and often struggle with the
commands, so I can see myself using this. Having said that, I would not know
something was dangerous till I executed it, which by then would be too late.
Flagging something as dangerous is probably a good idea.

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

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axod
"This site has temporarily exceeded its connection limit. Please try again in
a few minutes."

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 :)

~~~
codeinthehole
Already on NFS but still having these problems

~~~
icey
Right... He's saying to move _away_ from NFS to a host that can more easily
(and more economically) handle the traffic you're getting.

~~~
codeinthehole
Whoops. You're right - I'll actually read the comments in future.

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yan
I just realized what'd make a great feature, in my opinion: Add a "recommend
alternate" option. For instance, if I see a command I know is suboptimal or
there exist other tools that do the job better, I can submit an alternate way
to perform the same action.

For instance, I see something like:

    
    
      find $PWD -type f -exec grep pattern {} \;
    

I can suggest an alternate to be:

    
    
      grep -r . pattern

~~~
rmaccloy
This is the killer app for this sort of thing, cf. "useless use of cat",
pgrep, etc.

You might want to have some sort of field for platform, since these things are
going to vary from GNU/Solaris/*BSD.

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leftnode
Definitely love the usefulness of this so far. I've already implemented the
grep for stuff script ignored .svn directories. Been looking for how to do
that for months.

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!

------
mk
The idea is great, and I actually don't mind the terminal look. I could see
where some people might be annoyed by it though, so making it optional would
probably be a good idea. What I do not like is the min/max/close icons in the
top right of the terminal window that have no functionality.

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/153/add-all-unversioned-
files-to-svn)

[http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/36/add-all-
files-...](http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/36/add-all-files-not-
under-version-control-to-repository)

------
TrevorJ
Good idea. From a design standpoint I have seen successful designs use the
black/green pallet, but the white border on your site makes it too difficult
to pay attention to the text.

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?

------
ph0rque
Minor nitpick... the color scheme hurts my eyes.

~~~
hotshothenry
Yeah, the first thing I noticed when I opened the page was the harsh colors.

~~~
talleyrand
Colors work for me. Don't change.

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pclark
Sort the UI out :

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.

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jsmanger
I'm viewing it in Firefox, and the content area at the top is blank, while the
sidebars ("What's this" etc.) appear. The content area (Command-line-fu alpha)
appears all the way at the bottom, once all the sidebars finish.

~~~
sunkencity
happened to me too until I made the window bigger, You need to wrap the two
columns in a div that has min-width set or whatever the that property is
called...

~~~
nanexcool
Is happening to me too (Firefox 3.05 on Ubuntu 8.10). Unfortunately, I'm on a
very old laptop and can't go past 1024x768.

~~~
nanexcool
Well, that was fixed very quickly. Thanks!

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timf
Cool, added to RSS.

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

~~~
rrwhite
Can you drop me a line (rich@uservoice.com) so we can look into that
performance issue?

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jkmcf
Green and black take me back to my standalone terminal days...

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.

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thorax
Nice work!

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!

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dhimes
"This site has temporarily exceeded its connection limit. Please try again in
a few minutes."

Dang.

~~~
codeinthehole
That's with trouble with being on the frontpage of both reddit and hacker
news. My hosts, NearlyFreeSpeech reckon their systems can handle the surge.
But apparently not.

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sam_in_nyc
Isn't this type of site an ideal usage for a SlinkSet or a Sub-Reddit?

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!

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thesethings
Good job. I like the idea, but I think what might be special is the execution,
the design and karma system, making useful/common stuff a bit more high-
profile than jokey aliases :D The site's slow, but that's a good thing,
congrats! Nice work.

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gregstoll
Very neat - I like the "Commands using <whatever>" feature.

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.

------
ratsbane
Nice idea and execution. I've bookmarked and twitter-followed. The
autocomplete search is excellent. I'm not too keen on the black background.
I'd like to read about the server-side design.

~~~
codeinthehole
No probs. Once the storm's over, I'll blog about the set-up.

------
jhancock
nice. I am working on a website redesign for my startup, ShellShadow
<http://shellshadow.com>. Its a collaborative terminal client...there is a
linux client to be published in the next week.

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.

------
fizx
As a potential user, I'd love to subscribe to a human-edited "fu of the day"
RSS feed. Don't really want the firehose.

~~~
clemesha
Agreed. My finger was hovering over the Follow button at
twitter.com/commandlinefu, but then I saw the tweet timestamps. Firehouse
indeed.

~~~
codeinthehole
Great idea! Have added this to the uservoice suggestions and will have a look
at how to implement. As NearlyFreeSpeech doesn't supper cron as yet - it might
be easier to only tweet commands once they get more than 5 votes say.

~~~
vulpes
Vote threshold would work once your site is popular but I would pick them out
by hand until that happens.

