
A fullscreen desktop application resembling a sci-fi computer interface - nailer
https://github.com/GitSquared/edex-ui
======
tyingq
Blessed contrib has a pretty cool "retro future" look. I wonder if it's made
it's way into any movies:

[https://github.com/yaronn/blessed-contrib](https://github.com/yaronn/blessed-
contrib)

There's also "Hollywood Terminal" [https://www.tecmint.com/fake-hollywood-
hacker-terminal/](https://www.tecmint.com/fake-hollywood-hacker-terminal/)

~~~
teekert
But... Can it take input from two people hacking on one keyboard? [0]

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ)

~~~
tyingq
Painful, but I watched it to the end. Urgh. "DOD Level 9 Encryption" and
pretty sure their "fix" was unplugging the monitor.

~~~
Bluestrike2
I wonder if the actors realize just how dumb these sorts of scenes are when
they're filming them.

~~~
the_af
I suppose they don't realize it.

To be fair, I can only tell when it's computer-related nonsense, but I
absolutely cannot tell if (for example) medical dramas such as Grey's Anatomy
are at all realistic, barring reasonable artistic licenses to make a scene
more dramatic. The surgeons could be doing something as silly as "hacking the
same keyboard" and I wouldn't know. The computer-related scenes in medical
dramas are dumb enough that I suspect the medical stuff probably also is, but
I can't tell.

~~~
tyingq
My mother, a nurse, likes House. She says there's plenty wrong, but enough
right that it's not too distracting.

~~~
joopdevries
Wasn't there this trivia that comedy hospital series Scrubs was actually the
most technically correct medical show?

~~~
surge
Yes, but it was mostly accurate in its coverage of life working in a hospital
if anything.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTGxzYo_YyY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTGxzYo_YyY)

------
camkerr
If anyone is interested, here's a post about the original graphics and
interface design from the movie by jt nimoy:

[https://www.talisman.org/~erlkonig/misc/tron-legacy-
effects-...](https://www.talisman.org/~erlkonig/misc/tron-legacy-effects-
blog/)

~~~
rsync
I feel that the 'Tron: Legacy' and 'The Martian' interfaces ar the high water
marks in this category ...

Here is a full treatment of the Martian screens/interfaces:

[https://territorystudio.com/project/the-
martian/](https://territorystudio.com/project/the-martian/)

~~~
reaperducer
Someone once made a HAL 9000 screensaver for the Mac.

The author spent an incredible amount of time matching the fonts and
animations to the film _2001: A Space Odyssey_.

Unfortunately, he was too good at it, and got a nastygram from the people who
own the rights to the film, so it's no longer available.

But I still have my download that I run on my machine, and it's very
impressive in a very retro-cool way.

~~~
Zardoz84
Oh man ... I remember the time that I was thinking seriously about doing
Plymouth theme of HAL9000. The idea was having a little window showing dmesg
at boot, and random HAL900 stuff on the other fake screens.

------
cabraca
Let me just mention [https://www.rainmeter.net/](https://www.rainmeter.net/)
for desktop customization.

while i'm just using some of the system metric widges, some people go all in
and reskin their complete desktop. unfortunatly windows only.

~~~
pier25
iStatMenus is great on macOS for any types of system stats.

~~~
Pawamoy
And Conky for Linux (and others?).

------
nabla9
These type of desktop modifications were very popular in Linux in late 90's
early 2000's.

My Linux KDE desktop featuring Tron Legacy theme
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKFR6fnxlKg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKFR6fnxlKg)

You can also totally overdo the cool effects.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QokOwvPxrE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QokOwvPxrE)

[https://youtu.be/zk0EAEWok94?t=246](https://youtu.be/zk0EAEWok94?t=246)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ftpcHD3378](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ftpcHD3378)

------
akerro
[https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/2sz5xo/bspwmofxoc...](https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/2sz5xo/bspwmofxoc_i_love_sci_fi_movie_interfaces_so_i/)

~~~
__sb__
oh hey, thanks! I'm excited this is something people still remember. I hope
people get behind this, it's a lot more accessible and there seem to be a lot
of people trying it out.

Studios keep pushing the UIs visually but we need to keep up with the
ridiculousness

------
nailer
I compiled it (takes a while there's a lot of native modules) and ran it on a
Surface Go. Here's a video:

[https://twitter.com/mikemaccana/status/1065615451940667396](https://twitter.com/mikemaccana/status/1065615451940667396)

Short version:

\- Task manager, CPU cores etc works.

\- Touchscreen keyboard works

\- Yeah the globe is the location of your public IP plus socket connections
(ie Get-NetTCPConnection / netstat)

\- It's slow, and Ctrl C doesn't work. It's not going to replace Terminus (or
ConEmu, if you haven't heard about Terminus) as your main terminal anytime
soon. But it is fun.

~~~
lostgame
>> Ctrl C doesn't work

Also confirming it works on MacOS, High Sierra.

------
LeonM
Man, I would just love to see this in action on a MS Surface Studio. I anyone
here has one of those, please, please install this and take a photo

~~~
ioulian
I have a surface book 2, will test it tonight!

------
Svoka
Looks nice, but sad to see "electron" in top processes on screenshots.

------
dijit
Oh man, I love this.

It's so cheesy! I'm glad you didn't cut corners with the UI elements, all of
it is accurate and functional.

Super cool. I will have to use it the next time a manager comes to my desk.

------
kleborp
Just an FYI that the antivirus on my work machine blocked it due to ping
sweeping, which I'm guessing is related to the globe. So it's probably
harmless but if you don't want to get a call from your IT dept I'd save it for
your home machine.

------
MayeulC
Is the "network endpoint" displaying the location of the remote servers there
is/was an open connection to? That could be an interesting feature!

One could even imagine opening a website from the globe view.

~~~
arscan
It does does exactly that. Visit Hawaii.edu in a browser and watch a pin pop
up in the middle of the Pacific!

------
taspeotis
Related reading [1].

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14939255](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14939255)

------
lostgame
>> If you have a physical keyboard wired to your computer, pressing keys IRL
will illuminate the virtual keyboard: please remember to not type any
passwords if you are recording your screen!

Maybe just disable that on password fields? :3

~~~
undecisive
I feel like this is appropriate here:
[https://xkcd.com/1425/](https://xkcd.com/1425/)

Or do you have an idea how you would programmatically determine whether input
was not echoed due to password, game, or just so that the app can do some pre-
processing before displaying the glyph?

~~~
lostgame
Oh, I at least simply mean on text fields that are formatted, e.g. in CSS, to
be password-type fields.

It may even be possible to write a hook into the Terminal client, so, e.g.
when the user is asked for sudo permissions, it temporarily disables the glow
on the keyboard.

I'm talking about basic solutions that may not cover all the angles, but can
cover the most common points. But heck, it's open-sourced, so I know I could
implement something like that myself if I wanted to, so I'll shut up. :P

------
jakobdabo
It looks nice, but does it have that super important "hacking" sound effects
every Hollywood blockbuster incorporates into their computer UI scenes?

Anytime I hear those sounds the movie is ruined for me.

Sorry, I just had to let it out.

------
segmondy
I love it, 3 features I'll like to see, and I might hack on when I'm done with
my current side projects.

toggle keyboard so it doesn't flash. toggle to hide the keyboard. toggle to
retain original shell colors

------
kakaorka
I'm so happy something like this exists. I absolutely love TRON and anything
that relates to it. I was really sad that Disney didn't push for a third
movie.

~~~
laumars
Has that been canned? The cartoon TV series[1] was amazingly deep considering
it was a kids show but that was cancelled after the 1st season because Disney
wanted to focus on a 3rd movie. From what I read, those involved with the
cartoon weren't happy (and neither was I, for that matter).

[1]
[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1812523/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1812523/)

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
I just want to second that TRON: Uprising was really good. Definitely the high
water mark of the franchise.

------
TwoQ
It's cool but struggled on my laptop (i7-8550U clocked at 3.0GHz).

Glad you finally wrapped up your project! Hope it was fun and informative.

------
diimdeep
Take a look at
[http://tracesof.net/uebersicht/](http://tracesof.net/uebersicht/)

Übersicht lets you run system commands and display their output on your
desktop in little containers, called widgets. Widgets are written in
JavaScript + React's JSX.

------
mamcx
Is actually, not bad as a UI.

More fleshed and could be a good alternative to the regular shells.

------
akoster
Great work! Reminds me of some things I have seen in this subreddit:
[https://old.reddit.com/r/FUI/](https://old.reddit.com/r/FUI/)

------
syntaxing
Interesting! Reminds me of Enigma. I wonder what ever happened to Enigma after
the 2.0 release. Those were the days! I think around 2010 was the peak of
Linux desktop customization craze.

------
androidgirl
This would be pretty awesome as a background window now that I think about it!
Love this.

------
SmellyGeekBoy
Aww, why was the title changed? Copyright concerns? That's a real shame if so.

~~~
lostgame
The previous title was also inaccurate as I believe it actually labelled it as
something like 'TRON OS' \- the issue with that, of course, being, this isn't
an OS, but an application.

~~~
nailer
No, I wrote the title, it uses 'interface' or 'UI'.

It's inspired by edex as well as Tron:Legacy but I wanted to keep it short.

New title is less relevant and needless meddling.

------
Andrex
A small part of me has been waiting for this for seven years now. Thank you!

------
butz
How about just installing Linux and i3 window manager?

------
sandGorgon
interesting - I'm seeing more and more Linux software packaged as AppImage.

Works brilliantly on a single click install.

------
everyone
Its funny how to make something look 'advanced' or 'sci-fi' designers tend to
spam pointless crap all over the UI.

------
smnplk
those nested setTimeout fn calls are hard to read. I would extract their
bodies.

------
enriquto
not unlike my current setting of several tiled xterms with black background :}

------
vectorEQ
love this. super cool design

------
mnx
Off topic, but I think it's the first time I see emojis in commit messages.
Nice to see that it works, but I don't know how to feel about it.

~~~
androidgirl
With recent(-ish) support for color emoji in Gnome terminal, where I work has
fully embraced emoji driven development.

Kidding aside, it's fine but on older terminals (read: default terminal in
ubuntu 16.04) they cause display issues, so they fit a bit better in the
README.

~~~
lloeki
> emoji ... cause display issues

Well, that gave me a stupid idea.

[https://github.com/lloeki/he_comes](https://github.com/lloeki/he_comes)

Whatever.

