Wow this is the coolest thing I've seen in the terminal since I discovered a sparkline bash script. I've embarrassingly used gnuplot's ascii output to realtime chart Cisco network interfaces in a shell I'm writing, this looks 1000x better than gnuplot's output. Thanks for sharing.
It would get really interesting if this combined with the new inline image support present in iTerm2 (only nightly builds for now).<p>Basically you can do something like :<p><pre><code> ESC ] 1337 ; File = [optional arguments] : base-64 encoded file contents ^G
</code></pre>
And then display an image inline along with other text. E.g. that ascii rendering of the world could be replaced by an actual image of the world.
This is really nice! Just built something quick with it and I find it way easier to work with than something like ncurses, though that might just be because I work with javascript alot. Sorta feels like a terminal based d3 in a way, though not as atomic. Not a huge fan of Node for terminal applications (I'd sooner use Go or Ruby), but this alone might make me use it for things people other than me will use.<p>Do you plan on accepting pull requests? I'd love to contribute to something like this.
Neat. One cool thing about this is you could wire up a SSH server to show this when you login. "ssh stats.mycompany.com".<p>Or you could wire it up to a browser-based terminal emulator like tty.js.
How difficult would it be to split the widgets off into their own independent/standalone terminal applications? I like the idea, but I'd rather lay things out myself with tmux (thus incorporating it into my existing workflow) rather than using the included layout system.<p>Sorry if this seems like a dumb question; I'm not particularly familiar with Node.js, let alone this particular codebase, so the answer isn't particularly obvious to me.
That's both adorable and oddly soothing to watch. Moreso than "nice" graphics, actually. It may be that I'm old enough to remember when text terminals were the way we interfaced with the world on bulletin boards...and animated ASCII art like this was common. I want to set it up <i>just to watch it</i>, not because I need it (we have web-based charts already, and I'm in the midst of making them realtime).
Along with using Tmux as your login shell [1], this would be a nice equivalent to something like Conky [2].<p>Or, replacing `top` with sparklines, say.<p>[1]: <a href="https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=935588#p935588" rel="nofollow">https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=935588#p935588</a>
[2]: <a href="http://conky.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html" rel="nofollow">http://conky.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html</a>
At first I thought this was just an awful idea, but after hearing what you're using it for I want to use it myself :P<p>Did you look into the possibility of "adapting" something like d3 to draw on the terminal? Or does it just lack the abstractions necessary to do that cleanly?
This is great. I want to find a reason to use this. I have been doing some retro looking visualizations on an oscilloscope lately. I need to learn more about programming vectors to sound frequencies.
reminds me ALOT of <a href="https://www.npmjs.com/package/vtop" rel="nofollow">https://www.npmjs.com/package/vtop</a> you guys should join forces
This is really cool! Seems like it would be easy to extend and link to simple projects, that way I can run this on my second monitor and feel like a real hacker ;)
It's not 100% clear unless you can read the code.<p>Where is the data coming from? Seems like a lot of animated data with limited data points specified.
So bringing some of the web designers into the terminal isn't such a bad thing after all, they have great taste.<p>I'm partially sad its written in nodejs, but I can't really think of what else it should have been written in.<p>I think clojurescript bindings would be awesome. The dashboard can be rendered from an immutable app state om style.<p>dnolen, I'm looking at you :).