Show HN: WOPR – A markup for rich terminal reports | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: WOPR – A markup for rich terminal reports

github.com

125 pointsyaronn0137 comments

For now I'm categorising this (mentally, I mean) under "awesome, but idky useful".

I'd love to be told I'm wrong though. It's the best thing when you discover how to usefully use awesome but hitherto useless tools :p

one use case is when ssh-ing machines you can see visual reports rather than text and numbers (think cpu metrics or app specific).

I'd want to combine with pigshell[0]

0. http://pigshell.com/v/0.6.4/

Hi everyone, I am the author. Feel free to ask me anything or come up with suggestions!

Why do you decided to use XML as the basic format?

XML is a standard format for markup (e.g. HTML). When XML is used where it shouldn't (object serialization) it adds complexity. Here it signals that creating a report is as simple (or at least as standard) as creating HTML. What other format you had in mind?

>XML is a standard format for markup (e.g. HTML).

XHTML is maybe the most hated incarnation of HTML, and is no longer encouraged.

You can still write xml-compliant HTML; whether it's called XHTML or not is splitting hairs. You still get all the benefits of a very rich toolset for document preparation. I work on a site that makes heavy use of xslt and works with xml-compliant HTML as input/output.

Maybe "SGML" would have been a better descriptor?

XML and XHTML are two different things. Related, but different. XHTML is no longer encouraged for website markup, that part is true too. That does not mean that XML is no longer encouraged.

Very cool! It got me daydreaming about an alternative to html designed from the ground up to minimize webpage bloat and avoid tracking (1x1 pixel gifs, etc.)

Greetings, Professor Falken.

Joshua: Shall we play a game?

Global Thermonuclear War

Wouldn't you prefer a good game of chess?

Later. Let's play Global Thermonuclear War.

A strange game: The only winning move is not to play. :)

Another example is US weather map:

$> a=$(curl -Ls "bit.ly/1OuRPDJ"); curl --data "$a" "tty.zone?cols=${COLUMNS}"

Very cool indeed - pair this with 'watch' and you have instant ASCII monitoring tools implemented as http endpoints.

Impressive. I keep using bare xterm since it still supports Tektronix emulation (but, unfortunately, no Regis nor Sixel). This seems like a viable substitution for all three.

xterm actually does support ReGIS and Sixel graphics! However, it must be compiled with --enable-regis-graphics` (or `--enable-sixel-graphics`); and it's likely that your distro didn't compile it with those flags. If they did, you can get ReGIS support by running xterm in VT340 mode (`-ti vt340`).

Great! Did not know that, thought that only the DEC version could do it.

Haven't tried this. Just want to know -- what advantage does this give over using gnu plot with sixel output?

I can see the advantage over tek 4010 (this could be dynamic). If this is static (again, haven't tried yet), with multiple pages, why not just use tek 4010?

I also don't understand the admonish to use something other than xterm. What is the issue that was observed?

Ratboy

this uses xterm, so it's more accessible to most users than the other alternatives you mentioned. also note wopr is not just about the graphs (like https://github.com/yaronn/blessed-contrib) but also about having a declarative format, and even consuming it with curl.

This would be useful for AWS instances where you don't want to install a desktop environment on the server.

Why would you wanna do that (install a desktop env)?!

To support graphical installers and specific service administrators that are used to using a GUI on a server? I knew an Oracle DBA once that always wanted X and and Gnome installed on the the RHEL DB servers, it was what he knew and was comfortable with when installing Oracle.

This is cool. I've been looking for something like it.

Very cool!

I didn't know, you could display something like that in a terminal. And why tty.zone maps to that wopr site?

That's a shortcut for the wopr page

Absolutely fantastic name choice; kudos.

reminds me of http://zachholman.com/spark/ (spark-line graphs using unicode graph chars)

I wonder if it's manageable to build a converter to SVG with just XSLT?

Long live the TUI!

heh, this is pretty awesome. I literally just started hacking with blessed over the weekend. Nice work!

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