Hacker News Reader

Comment by softwarelimits | Hacker News Reader

Does anybody know a shell that keeps its input line on top of the window?

Think of a browser window with the url-bar being the shell line editor. But of course I want a real, quick shell, not a clunky electron-based monster or some html based shell simulation in a browser.

I imagine that it will have a positive effect on our neck muscles if we would not have to stare at the bottom of the screen all the time, but instead at the top.

I looked into the existing pythonic shell libraries like the python-prompt-toolkit but could not figure out in a few minutes how this could be realized, so I hope some experts in this field would like to spend a few minutes on this?

Thanks for your attention!

View on HN

In eg bash you can set the title of your X window to arbitrary things. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1687642/set-screen-title-...

You could reset the title on each keystroke, or even just after inputting the full command.

He means having the input prompt be on top, not the last command he wrote...

I think that it has to do with the flow of the text in the console. the historic text flows upwards, so it is natural to expect input on the next newline. You can of course use a termbox/termkit type library and move the input to the top row, but it would overwrite older historic text, unless you reverse the flow of the history as well.

You just need two text areas: one at the top where you enter text, and one at the bottom where the scrolling happens. This is not rocket science, but I'm sure it's actually literally impossible in Unix, which in general has never moved on from the idea that a computer's primary output device is a printer printing on an endless roll of paper.

Sure you can, just use (n)curses.

Does that work with the scrollback? If it's supposed to, I've yet to see it ever happen!

Have a look at bpython.

I'll try it when I get a moment, but I'll take your word for it for now. From the screenshots it looks to me very much like it'll be a single scrolling viewport, though, with a line of input at the end. So, at heart, differing in some of the details, but no more than a few, a printer printing on a long roll of paper...

Well, yes, it doesn't attempt to modify the semantics of the terminal - the opposite, in fact. I brought it up as an example of something that uses curses for all kinds of fancy stuff, but integrates with the terminal's normal scrollback. Sorry for any misunderstanding.

>So, at heart, differing in some of the details, but no more than a few, a printer printing on a long roll of paper...

The responses of commands are "long rolls of digital paper". They could be from 1 to millions of lines long.

So what exactly would your solution do differently?

And it's not "unix" that does it this way, it's VMS, Windows, and pretty much everybody.

In fact your concept is still not concrete enough to make sense. The browser can have a single address bar on top, because urls are a single string -- and they also don't interact with subsequent contents, commands, etc.

Hum... Say you have an interactive command that takes a "y" keystroke.

Does your history becomes like this:

  Second result - line 1
  Second result - line 2
  Command prompt
  y
  First result - line 1
  First result - line 2

Or this:

  First result - line 1
  First result - line 2
  Command prompt
  y
  Second result - line 1
  Second result - line 2

And if it is the second option, how does it at the instants it shows the prompt, and after it gets a result?

Looks complex to me.

This sounded like fun, so I had a go at implementing it for bash using ANSI control codes[0][1] (though other people have posted much better solutions). You still have to look at the bottom to see the command's output though, so I'm not sure you gain much. If you're having neck troubles, is adjusting your monitor an option?

[0] http://pastebin.com/xaLFyXtT - implementation

[1] http://www.termsys.demon.co.uk/vtansi.htm - reference for some ANSI control codes

https://github.com/swirepe/alwaysontop is this what you need?

ascii.io seems down, but there is another screencast hosted here: https://asciinema.org/a/3779

It seems to clear the screen at each new command, resetting scroll history every time. Renders it pretty much useless for most of us.

What part of

  unautoclear       Turn OFF clear-screen after each command.

seems difficult?

This looks great, I will try! Thanks to all of you for your efforts!

Maybe possible with two terminal windows? One to enter commands only, another for displaying any output -- chained together via named pipes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com