Building Rich Terminal Dashboards

https://www.willmcgugan.com/blog/tech/post/building-rich-terminal-dashboards/

by lumpa • 5 years ago

499 120 5 years ago

mraza007• 5 years ago

Looks pretty cool. As someone who uses commandline all the time I think this can be really useful to build TUIs

It seems like Python and Node are not good choices for command line tools. Rust or Go make a lot more sense as your end users won’t have to install any libs or package managers. Single binary distribution ftw.

Scarbutt• 5 years ago

For an internal app, you could give users restricted ssh access, less pain that giving them binaries.

pottertheotter• 5 years ago

As someone who really only knows Python (I'm not a developer), I was thinking the same thing. I think this would be really useful for me to use for some personal projects. Or for libraries for someone who already uses Python. I guess that's enough for it to be useful, but I wish I could package it up better to let someone who doesn't know a thing about Python use what I made.

solosoyokaze3• 5 years ago

It looks like a great library! Definitely useful for internal tools, personal scripts...

As a user I’m just encouraging people not to use an interpreted language to build tools you plan to distribute.

nhumrich• 5 years ago

pip is installed by default on mac and linux. For non posix experienced users, pip installing packages is actually easier than figuring out how to put a binary on the path. Not to mention, updates are just a command, you dont have to go find the url, redownload, and replace the binary.

solosoyokaze3• 5 years ago

Realistically speaking people will most likely install cli tools with brew on mac. People shouldn’t be pip installing things without virtualenv anyway.

zaphirplane• 5 years ago

I thought macOS stopped shipping with python

em500• 5 years ago

Pip is not installed by default on macOS, and even python itself will be removed in some future version.

wyqydsyq2• 5 years ago

Except you can bake apps into a single stand-alone binary executable for both Node.JS[1] and Python[2]

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/pkg [2] https://github.com/marcelotduarte/cx_Freeze

sokoloff• 5 years ago

Can’t you just shebang a python script to make it feel like a normal executable?

otikik• 5 years ago

Rust has several interesting TUI libraries too.

Check https://github.com/fdehau/tui-rs for example.

lifeisstillgood• 5 years ago

I like this as I find for most things a TUI is simpler to write and 95% as useful - especially for work small tools - where you are making something you might use a few times and just want to throw it in the toolbox and maybe just have a minor UI to guard against horrors.

Being this simple looks enticing

pugio2• 5 years ago

Does anyone know of a similar library for node which does this? I've decided to make my next app TUI first, and then only add in a GUI much later, but I haven't seen anything that looks nearly as good as rich.

acemarke• 5 years ago

There's `blessed` [0], a plain JS lib similar to `ncurses`. There's also `react-blessed` [1], which is a React renderer that targets `blessed` as the display layer, and `ink` [2], which is also a text-based React renderer but using its own display layer.

[0] https://github.com/chjj/blessed

[1] https://github.com/Yomguithereal/react-blessed

[2] https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink

woutr_be• 5 years ago

If you plan on using blessed, there’s also blessed-contrib, which is a library of widgets for blessed.

https://github.com/yaronn/blessed-contrib

dfee• 5 years ago

This is so cool! I knew about Ink, but not Blessed. Curious as to people’s experience using Blessed-React vs Ink.

pugio2• 5 years ago

I saw blessed, thank you, but the last commit was in 2016, and I'm a bit wary of a JS library with that level of activity.

duncanbeevers• 5 years ago

Ink may be the tool you're looking for.

https://vadimdemedes.com/posts/ink-3

It lets you write React CLI apps using a flexbox layout engine, and is used by a number of high-profile node projects.

krasin• 5 years ago

The most productive tools I built for non-programmers were using text UI. They were fast, clean, obvious to use. Turbo Pascal made it especially easy with good support for menus and windows / panes.

Nowadays, terminals have no problem with mouse support, which everyone can test by starting htop in a terminal and clicking with a mouse on a column title to sort by it.

tra32• 5 years ago

Is this better than splitting panes up with Tmux or similar? You end up losing the ability to pipe things. What do you gain?

ramraj07• 5 years ago

Looks like its powerful because you can have a loop and update metrics you can get via python.

I've always wanted to create something like vtop but for network and disk io, this might finally let me do it myself.

rataata_jr• 5 years ago

Take a look at `glances'. I think it does what you want.

rodgerd• 5 years ago

The ability to wrap up arbitrary data sources into an attractive, easy-to-parse TUI. If you have a bunch of things you look at via watch or something similar, wrapping them in this seems like a natural.

javbit• 5 years ago

You could detect if stdout is a terminal and then decide for fanciness or machine readability. I think this, along with flags for manually setting rich features, would provide the best of both worlds.

tra32• 5 years ago

Ahh didn’t know that was a thing. Thanks for setting me straight.

jph00• 5 years ago

I'm one of the developers of ghtop (along with Nat Friedman, who made the original version, and Hamel Husain), which, as mentioned in the post, kinda inspired this new direction for Rich. You can see screenshots of what we made here: https://ghtop.fast.ai/ .

Rich is really great. It didn't actually need us to add much to make it work as a terminal layout manager too - all the pieces were really there already for us to build on.

Let me know if you have any questions about our experiences with Rich and ghtop.

rexreed2• 5 years ago

The future repeats the past. This looks much like the back-end systems I used to design on TurboPascal in the late 1980s / early 1990s.

https://ilyabirman.net/meanwhile/pictures/tp-80.png

naikrovek3• 5 years ago

I miss the simplicity and utility of textual UIs. Nothing unneeded, and everything you need. No filler. No giant gaps between elements or wasted pixels. No fads which do silly things like hide scrollbars or other interactive elements.

Except for CAD applications and some games, almost everything we do online today could be accomplished via textual UI. Almost the entire internet could be replaced with TUIs and a lot of things would be better and more straightforward, and nearly everyone would be able to do what they need to do online.

TUIs are fast, they are light, they are ultra responsive and ... Yeah. They're definitely underrated. They're probably a lot easier for screen-readers, too.

I'm not suggesting that we undo everything and make a TUI web, but I do want to point out that we do a hell of a lot on today's UIs that we don't need to do, solely because some designer who wants to make pretty things that function poorly said so.

rexreed2• 5 years ago

Where's lynx when you need it? [0]

[0] https://lynx.browser.org/

And I might add, it's the oldest web browser still being maintained. Since 1992.

SiVal• 5 years ago

I agree with your claims about the potential advantages of a TUI, but in this case, almost all of these TUIs using Rich will be running as GUI graphics inside a GUI window on top of a GUI OS subsystem, driven by an interpreted Python subsystem, all on an OS juggling many other simultaneous deep-stack processes. In other words, it's a keyboard-driven GUI app making use of the GUI advantages to provide you with your choice of high-quality fonts and designer colors to emulate a TUI. That doesn't make it bad. I still like it.

But like you, I wish we had more options to fully exercise the power of a TUI much closer to the metal, like the old days. Apps where almost every keystroke completes an operation faster than the fastest typist can move from key to key....

Of course, beyond a certain speed, more speed wouldn't matter, so maybe I could get it by installing a (local, not remote) desktop Linux without any GUI and using only CLI dev tools. Is anyone doing this?

xingyzt• 5 years ago

They're probably a lot easier for screen-readers, too.

That might be true for more minimal TUIs, but I don't think most screen-readers can handle the multi-paneled ones like OP.

CJefferson2• 5 years ago

One thing, TUIs are MUCH MUCH worse for screen readers than (well made) websites.

TUIs (as currently designed) have no structure, so it's very difficult to move around from section to section. A website with headers and auto-wrapping text is much easier to move around and read with a screen reader.

zokier• 5 years ago

No giant gaps between elements or wasted pixels. No fads which do silly things like hide scrollbars or other interactive elements

I call bullshit on this.

Using fixed character cell grid for UI absolutely wastes ton of space. First of all just basic text takes more space in fixed-width than variable width. But the biggest offender is any layout or ui elements that would not need whole cell. Even basic 1px horizontal line takes 10px of height or whatever. Places where 1 or 2 px padding could do will use full cell instead.

And then there is of course the space waste from forcing all text to be same size. For tons of applications the UI elements could do with smaller font than content, but none of that is possible with TUI.

I find your example of hiding scrollbars hilarious, considering that TUIs are in general far worse offenders in that area specifically. For example none of the examples for Rich here show scrollbars..

I do also believe that in terms of performance TUIs leave lot on the table, because they are forced to go through all sort of weird legacy layers. Pushing pixels on screen and receiving key events directly almost certainly should be faster/more efficient than going through tty layer and terminal emulation.

invalidToken• 5 years ago

as a person who has the basic HTML version of gmail as his default, I understand.

VHRanger• 5 years ago

Terminals are a really solid front-end interface if you can get by the inherent tradeoffs.

CGamesPlay• 5 years ago

I wouldn't say it repeats it. These new programs are similar to the old ones in much the same way that new books are similar to old books. The medium is the same but what's being expressed and accomplished is vastly different. Two specific categories that come to mind: these new programs are vastly easier to use with modern UI principles than "RTFM" you'd find in the old ones; and validation/error handling is similarly much simpler.

It's reinventing the wheel, but a car tire is a welcome improvement to a wooden wagon wheel.

aduitsis2• 5 years ago

Your point is very well taken, but using Turbo Pascal to create an application with a TUI was surprisingly easy back in the day. You could just add some small boilerplate and you basically had something with a TUI running. So the entry barrier was extremely low, which had the effect of giving you a quick reward to motivate you to understand and build more advanced features.

fmakunbound• 5 years ago

What tools are the car tire in this analogy? I recall it was ridiculously easy to develop rich text applications from Turbo Pascal/Turbo Vision. I believe there’s a modern port of Turbo Vision as well

CoffeeDregs2• 5 years ago

I think I agree but with the point "Isn't this a solved problem?" I'm not sure if the first library should be written in C, Rust, C++, etc but it seems as though very similar libraries-but-in-different-languages are being repeatedly written.

I certainly get that a good library yesterday might not be good today or that an existing library's style might not meet this language's style but I doubt the need to rewrite existing libraries so often. Even with the much-maligned PHP, libraries were frequently bindings to other libraries.

alfiedotwtf• 5 years ago

Although Turbo Vision and nCurses was great for the time, today’s TUI libraries are a different beast

voldacar• 5 years ago

The little drop shadows under the buttons are a great touch. love it

james-bcn• 5 years ago

I was thinking exactly the same thing! There used to be a really cool library for creating windows and buttons using ascii codes.

pridkett• 5 years ago

Well, you’re in luck! There’s a modern version of TurboVision that works on modern systems. I used it the other day to show tvedit to some of the folks at work who were using nano. They were kinda mind-blown by the fact that editors in the late 80’s/early 90’s weren’t terrible.

https://github.com/magiblot/tvision

magiblot• 5 years ago

Show them this, too:

https://github.com/magiblot/turbo

Applications like tvedit were designed for MS-DOS, which offered full interaction with the mouse and keyboard, and many of them were commercial products aimed at a general audience. TUI applications from the Unix tradition, however, were designed for use in terminals with limited capabilities, and were aimed at more technical users (or were created by the users themselves).

User-friendly TUI applications in MS-DOS were succeeded by Windows applications, while the largest revolution in the last 20 years in Unix TUIs has been the widespread support of 256/24-bit colors and UTF-8. Hence the gap in usability between the two worlds.

corysama• 5 years ago

For C++ers, there’s ImTui https://github.com/ggerganov/imtui an ncurses backend for ImGui https://github.com/ocornut/imgui

ggerganov• 5 years ago

wtfutil is a another terminal dashboard [0]. It uses .yml configuration files to define the layout and the content of the splits.

At some point, I used ImTui to create a more convenient way to create these .yml configuration files: wtf-tui [1]. I also made an emscripten port of wtf-tui for easy testing in the browser [2]

[0] https://wtfutil.com

[1] https://github.com/ggerganov/wtf-tui#wtf-tui

[2] https://wtf-tui.ggerganov.com

l33t_d0nut• 5 years ago

I wrote a post about doing this in PowerShell https://blog.ironmansoftware.com/tui-powershell/

Nerada• 5 years ago

This is brilliant, thanks for sharing!

alberth• 5 years ago

If you like terminal dashboards, Go Access has a nice one for web analytics.

https://goaccess.io/

aduitsis2• 5 years ago

Very nice! There is a certain appeal to having simple, versatile and robust systems such as a terminal emulator to build upon instead of complex APIs that require many many hours just to understand their asynchronous operation and complexities. Combined with Unicode, there seems to be a small renaissance in the area of what can be done in a terminal, which is both nostalgic and refreshing!

And, terminal emulators such as iTerm can nowadays display images. And vector or bitmapped graphics were actually a thing once. E.g. I believe xterm can still understand and display https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReGIS graphics. Surely there must be better and simpler alternatives that I may be missing. Having an empty canvas and drawing to it without too much hassle is reminiscent of the era when this was done with a few lines of BASIC.

lumpa3• 5 years ago

Just realized that the post author submitted[0] it hours before I did, but it didn't come up in search because it was dead at the time.

This is sad because Will writes great posts[1] and great software[2], but somehow his submissions mentioning Rich tend to end up dead. Would it be a case of bad project name for HN titles?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26147831

[1] https://www.willmcgugan.com/blog/tech/

[2] https://github.com/willmcgugan

swyx• 5 years ago

@dang perhaps worth merging into the original author's post to give them credit?

OJFord2• 5 years ago

And if a mod does see this, maybe they'll consider also Dispensing With The Title Case - since it reduces the information in the original article title ('Building Rich terminal dashboards') by obscuring that Rich is the name of the Python package behind it, and it doesn't (just) mean adjectivally rich (other than I'm sure that's the reason for the framework's name).

(Bit of a bee in my bonnet because I never like Title Case In Submissions Even If The Article Itself Uses It anyway, but it's especially unfortunate here.)

willm5• 5 years ago

It’s cool. Occasionally my posts do blow up!

politelemon• 5 years ago

That's Rich, coming from you.

xx789• 5 years ago

I dont need menus or dialogs, just something simple like top. Would this be the right library to use?

Zee2• 5 years ago

From the example posted above of ghtop, I think the answer for that is "yes".

ldd2• 5 years ago

Is there something like this for node(javascript/typescript)?

thriqon• 5 years ago

Look at https://www.npmjs.com/package/blessed and the -contrib package.

ldd2• 5 years ago

thanks so much! There is even a second thread here.

dreamer7• 5 years ago

This is really interesting! I've been thinking of creating a TUI version of a marketplace I'm running in the UK. The idea is that most of our time on marketplaces is spent on discovering the product we are looking for and that is much easier to do without all the bloat of modern apps. What do the people on HN think?

prepperdev• 5 years ago

Craigslist approves: https://sfbay.craigslist.org/

gorbypark• 5 years ago

Great idea. I've been toying around with Ink, which is a TUI renderer for React. My idea is to port our existing React front end to it and offer an installable "native" TUI front-end option for our service.

jdnier2• 5 years ago

The Console and Layout api looks really simple for creating dashboards.

Another option for full-screen apps is Python Prompt Toolkit[1], which also handles keyboard and mouse input and can be used to implement editors[2].

[1] https://github.com/prompt-toolkit/python-prompt-toolkit

[2] https://github.com/prompt-toolkit/pyvim

jdnier2• 5 years ago

Also, maybe of interest...

prompt_toolkit 3.0 is completely type annotated and uses asyncio natively.

The rich source is also type annotated and very clean and readable.

samorozco• 5 years ago

Is it just me or does it seems like we're going backwards with things like this?

theodric• 5 years ago

As someone who's not a fan of most of Tech's trends over the last sixteen years: good. Let's go back to lightweight, information-rich, performant interfaces.

leg100• 5 years ago

Does anyone have a recommendation for implementing an equivalently flashy terminal dashboard in golang?

https://github.com/gizak/termui ?

https://github.com/mum4k/termdash ?

willm5• 5 years ago

Author of Rich here. Happy to answer any Rich related questions.

sep_field• 5 years ago

This is awesome! Do you have plans/a timeline for keyboard/mouse input?

willm5• 5 years ago

Plans, yes. Still thinking about the best way to do it without inventing too many wheels. Timeline depends on inspiration and free time. Although lately with the pandemic free time hasn't been a problem.

jawns• 5 years ago

Do you foresee any interplay behind a tool like Rich and terminal emulators like iTerm2, which provides some pretty sophisticated triggers based on terminal output? Or do you see them as two fundamentally different things with little overlap?

willm5• 5 years ago

I probably wouldn't want to add features that weren't broadly compatible with all terminals. Unless they could be added in such a way that didn't break other terminals.

However, they could be implemented as an extension to Rich in another library.

Did you have something in mind?

joseluis• 5 years ago

And there's also Notcurses[0][1], which facilitates the creation of modern TUI programs, making full use of Unicode and 24-bit TrueColor. It presents an API similar to that of Curses, riding atop Terminfo. It's made in C, with C++, Python & Rust wrappers.

[0] https://notcurses.com/

[1] https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses

ho_schi• 5 years ago

Interesting how the show their work results in a completely differnt way. I'm looking at it, because the C, C++ and the Rust interface are my working area. I love TUIs and think they are used to less. Easy usage, concise overview and high efficiency. TUIs seem to naturally restrict itself, keep tight to the task and therefore work better. Mileage may vary well ;)

rbanffy2• 5 years ago

Restraint is a great tool for engineers. When you can't to everything, you focus on what matters the most.

I used to have an IBM 3151 terminal on my desk (I wish I could afford a 3278/9 or 3290) connected over 9600 bps to my workstation. It's a great to remind me to keep things simple.

rbanffy2• 5 years ago

Using curses also allows it to work on terminals that are not ANSI terminals (even though most of the actual hardware that still survives understand most of the VT-100 sequences).

Also, not all terminals have uniform coverage for ANSI codes. Apple's Terminal.App does a good job with double-width and double-height, but lacks the SGR 53 overline that VTE, Konsole and Microsoft Windows Terminal have (and that makes status lines so much better).

rsync2• 5 years ago

Here's what I think I would like ...

A unix command named 'topify' which allows you to create a pipeline of stdio into a top-like, updating, single screen output.

So, let's say you have a command with multiple lines of output - like netstat or certain airport commands - but instead of doing silly things like I do now:

  while true ; do airport -s ; sleep 10 ; tput clear ; done

... I could `topify airport -s` and I would just get a nice, single page, constantly refreshing output summary.

There are a LOT of commands I wish I could 'topify' from time to time ...

harababurel• 5 years ago

Have you tried watch[0]? Sounds like it might be a decent solution for what you want.

[0] https://linux.die.net/man/1/watch

federico_c• 5 years ago

[Sorry for the spam]

If you want to create charts quickly there's also: https://github.com/FedericoCeratto/dashing

lumpa3• 5 years ago

Looks great, thanks for the link! Some very nice examples of other cool stuff that depends on the blessed Python package: https://github.com/jquast/blessed

willm5• 5 years ago

Rich author here. It does look great, I like the API design.

Would you consider adding an integration for Rich?

In theory it should be possible to have your charts object also work within a Rich layout, using the Console Protocol.

https://rich.readthedocs.io/en/latest/protocol.html

Noxmiles• 5 years ago

I don't want my terminal tools rely on a Python pip library. This Rich really looks cool and is nice, but nothing for (my) server use.

(Thanks to @joseluis who posted about notcurses here)

LukeB42• 5 years ago

Reminds me of Window, which has keyboard input: https://github.com/lukeb42/window https://github.com/lukeb42/emissary

dutzi_• 5 years ago

Check out React Ink, it's pretty slow and probably not as polished/feature packed, but it does the job.

That being said, working in the CLI with a GUI does not work very well.

Having the option to search for strings logged in some pages ago is really handy.

mightybyte• 5 years ago

There's a slick little Haskell library that does something similar called reflex-vty:

https://github.com/reflex-frp/reflex-vty#reflex-vty

One thing neither of these libraries appear to have done yet that I would really like is create a more compact window rendering. Currently each window gets a 1-character border. What I would like is something that saves space by collapsing adjacent windows' borders into a single character instead of having two redundant borders next to each other. Of course I get why they do it the way they do, but terminals are often more constrained for space and with complex UIs you can lose a fair amount due to these unnecessary borders. That would be the next thing I'd hack on to improve these kinds of libraries. But alas...too many fun projects to hack on and not enough hours in the day.

itronitron• 5 years ago

Java devs might be interested in Lanterna >> https://github.com/mabe02/lanterna

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8042106

mixmastamyk2• 5 years ago

How does this compare to Urwid, in terms of features, which I've used in the past to build such interfaces? For simpler stuff I often use my own console package, which everyone should write once, haha.

Architecturally however, I think terminal primitives and widgets should be separate layers/packages.

Building Rich Terminal Dashboards

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