Ask HN: Show me the sexy, sexy home page of your favorite free CLI project | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Show me the sexy, sexy home page of your favorite free CLI project

170 pointstomcam141 comments

Would like to make the homepage of my me-too FOSS project (a command-line static site generator (IT'S DIFFERENT FROM ALL THE OTHERS, I SWEAR)) as sexy as possible. Even more than that I want it to be functional and clear. Would you mind linking to super-good home pages of CLI projects? For example, I think Jekyll's is pretty darn good but Hugo, which product I much prefer, has an oddly subpar home page.

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Python Poetry [1] is very sexy.

Oh, and Starship prompt [2] too.

[1] https://python-poetry.org/

[2] https://starship.rs/

You have a very special eye! These are sexy and arty, yet still functional. Maybe the best kind of sexy. Mad props to you, gru.

That starship one is nothing special. Sure, it got me to instantly download and install Starship and its recommended NerdFont without having heard of either one or knowing what they do, but I'm sure the page design had nothing to do with it. /s

Starship uses Vuepress, which is amazing. I used it for a side project and not only is the result great, but the setup is also extremely quick and painless. I find it a lot better than Docusaurus (the React equivalent).

How does starship compare to power level 10k with oh my zsh?

<html><body><h1>project name</h1><hr><p>info</p></body></html>

Stop it you tease

Actually, I think that it is a good idea, although it should need to mention what info (e.g. download link, source code, documentation, etc; this will likely span several paragraphs), and you should probably include the <title> as well. Other than that, I think that is good.

site looks great, great job everyone http://telnet.asia/foss.html

too many <hr>s, wasted bytes

The text is extremely small on my phone.

What's up with the rest of that website?

I am guessing that it is not working because it is just an example, or something like that

I hate when text is flowed to the full screen width. Makes it close to impossible to read without losing track of where you are.

At least add a style="max-width: 840px" or so to the <body>-tag.

I hate it when text doesn't flow to the size I've set my window. Makes it a waste of space when the window is expanded past whatever the designer felt was a good one-size-fits-all fixed limit. At least let me choose how wide my wall of text should be.

Clean – https://cli.github.com

That is sexy AF and so, so clean. THANK YOU CITIZEN

Big giant typography is a turn off for me as if they're trying to compensate for something. I prefer refined aesthetics without the loudness.

Care to share some examples?

Someone posted this in another comment: http://cht.sh/ and http://ix.io/

Well, we can clearly see here that taste is indeed personal.

Not a fan of that IX. On mobile and there is weird wrapping which breaks the indentation making it hard to read.

Both of them are horrible on mobile

Ah, because they are both just copy paste in a `pre` element.

The exa website [1] is pretty good looking. It is an alternative to the ls command.

[1] https://the.exa.website/

Very, very nice. Sexy, minimal, and honest about what it does. You feel really good when you've finished that homepage because they've sold you, but not tried to deceive you. SWEET.

Where has this utility been all my life?! Thank you for introducing me to my new favorite filesystem lister of all time.

Well, you might also enjoy some of these: https://zaiste.net/posts/shell-commands-rust/

I definitely recommend the grep and find alternative, a lot more intuitive.

I'll try this out, thanks. I've been enjoying using lsd [0] for the last couple of years.

[0]: https://github.com/Peltoche/lsd

I'm not sure why we need an ls alternative with different colors. It's not clear what it brings to the table?

A big terminal recording on the front page is a must for CLI tools IMO: https://httpie.io/

Some others that look really clean:

bat: https://github.com/sharkdp/bat

tldr: https://tldr.sh/

fzf: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

Yes, yes, and yes. These are all clean and sexy. Thank you.

Word. You wonder how many of those 50,000 stars are just because they sell it so well. Brilliantly done and sexy as all get out. Bonus points for zooming in so the, ah, temporally disadvantaged among us can view parts of it easily too. The clear Try it and Docs buttons, then a big illustration and bullet list next to it, a brief getting started section, and examples... and testimonials! For a free product! That brings things to a whole new level.

Pretty nice animation of the input & output: https://evidence.dev/

pretty cool presentation. kind of gets missed out in Mobile though

Slick AF! A moving picture is worth a megaword. Way sexy. Thank you!

Agreed, although I wish that animated gif was instead real text, using something like playterm[1] or asciinema[2].

[1] https://playterm.org/

[2] https://asciinema.org/

TIL: HTTPie added a shorthand for HTTPS requests with v2.0.0 [1]

  https httpie.io/hello

[1]: https://github.com/httpie/httpie/blob/master/CHANGELOG.rst#2...

http://cht.sh/

This is the pinnacle of design.

So sexy for the intended audience. Form follows function perfectly.

No, it's so close to being perfect: I can open the dropdown at the top with the mouse, but I have to SPEND ENERGY moving my shoulder, arm and wrist system over to the Enter key for the page to refresh. Unacceptable.

So close to greatness, yet so far.

You actually don't need to, looks like the search box is auto focused by default.

The pain! Why oh why are we only allowed to upvote once?

No one said life was easy my friend. We must all make sacrifices for the cause.

And of course it is by the same person as wttr.in

Damn the open-source world is small.

One of my favorites is https://bluebird.sh/ check out all that amazing command line software! a drawing program, a multiplayer crossword solver, and the amazing visidata program (my visidata review is https://recurse.social/@shapr/105984740425426440 )

Mind == Blown, extra points for weirdly sexy retro presentation and utterly insane concept. Insane but in a good way.

its great but I tried to drag and drop the floppy to the drive and was immediately disapointed.

If I may toot my own horn: The thing that grinds my gears the most about software project websites is when they don't clearly say what the thing does, and who this is for. That's why the website for my configuration management tool (https://holocm.org) has two sections, "This is for you if..." and even more importantly "This is NOT for you if..."

I agree. Very considerate, I love it, thanks.

Strong yesses to both points. The vast majority of these sites do in fact avoid the first trap, and you will notice that I politely chose not to compliment them. A good-looking site is important to me, but well-organized, well-written content always trumps looks to me.

Htop: https://htop.dev/

I think the animated gif in the background is charming.

And so fitting for this particular (indispensable) utility. Seamless. Nice!

I've since moved on to bottom[1]

1. https://github.com/ClementTsang/bottom

They really need to add a screenshot near the top. It took so long to find "what it looks like compared to htop"

Maybe they have their reason to put the screenshot on the bottom... :)

I'm just loving this AskHN. Most of the comments make me laugh. I've seen some great pages and programs, even installed one already. Ask more questions on HN please!

Thank you, Citizen! You're very kind. Former comic, but the vast majority of my humor falls flat here. I was not expecting so many of our HN friends to play along. Was just hoping for a couple of links before being downvoted to Shitpost Purgatory. In other news my current docs are going to be so much better after I have stolen ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H some of the incredible ideas here.

And, seriously, I get that some people find the joke distasteful. That's largely why I put it in the title--so they could at least not be surprised by it when they started to read more in depth.

This compiler (written in Go) generates HTML and serves its own website over HTTPS:

https://NN-512.com

The compiler serves its own source code. Read the HTML generator/server code here:

https://nn-512.com/browse/NN-512#45

You could also look at Fabrice Bellard's websites. They are a paragon of clarity and simplicity

But of course a Fabrice Bellard creation would end up here. Of course. Slightly perturbed I didn't know about this, so double-thanks. And so I think I need to add redbean while we're at it, no? https://justine.lol/redbean/index.html

I’m curious how they managed to get Safari’s reader view to not work on a site that looks that simple.

The size of the code listings probably causes Safari to disable Reader

+1 for Feesh[1]

[1] https://fishshell.com/

"Finally, a command line shell for the 90s"

That line is what got me to try it. I didn't like it so much at that time. Then I tried it again a few years later. And I switched back, again. Recently, I've tried it again, and I'm still using it.

Fish is my default. I'm normally pretty minimalist with my shell configurations, but the Fish defaults just feel so right to me. It's minimal nudges in the spots that help are fantastic, and it's tab-completion is best in class. Unless you have a very specific powerline setup that you absolutely need, I think Fish is better than zsh for everyday use.

Sexy, funny, simple, truthy. Thank you.

I feel like mine isn't that beautiful but I'll show it anyway - https://github.com/chriswalz/bit

It's a CLI "enhancer" for git

Are you out of your mind? It's the sexiest yet! Animated illustration, short description right at the top, news section, clearly delineated sections, update for current users... this is a model of clarity. Thank you for being a role model.

Haha thank you!

Everyone should know that youtube-dl exists and how to use it.

https://youtube-dl.org/

Pretty good. That About button does tell you exactly what's what. I sort of feel the home page isn't a home run because it's all inside baseball. I say not sexy, though YouTube-dl is definitely sexy.

I've replied to you from an account abbreviated as R.W.

Here is a github page for an Emacs package manager: https://github.com/raxod502/straight.el

It's a good page because it contains comparisons too all other emacs package managers[0], and carefully describes the pros and cons of each package manager. I wish more open source projects would do this.

[0] https://github.com/raxod502/straight.el#comparison-to-other-...

It is ALWAYS sexy when they let you know when you might not want to use their product.

Here’s the home page for my static site generator, generated, of course, by the static site generator: https://bagatto.co/

Very sexy, and easy to understand. Extra points for recursive site, of course.

I got 4 links for you (satire but still true):

https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

https://thebestmotherfucking.website/

https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/

Enjoy :)

Are you fucking kidding me [not you, one of the authors], The second site includes freaking google-analytics. Like you had one job!!

(as seen in uBlock Origin)

Yeah he comments on it in the small print ;)

I don't think I can see that.

It's not CLI-exclusive, but Prettier does a good job! https://prettier.io/

Prettier is. You are correct. Thanks.

I like (and use) a lot both - awless as a comfortable aws cli tool - glow as a command line markdown reader

https://github.com/wallix/awless https://github.com/charmbracelet/glow

Both are sexy, simple, and clear, which is sexy in itself. Great contribution, and thanks, menjaprunes!

Does it count if the CLI is kinda it's own home page?

https://github.com/sindresorhus/sindresorhus-cli

Frankly, anything by Sindre is worth checking out: https://github.com/sindresorhus

Wow, sexy! Not only does it count, I think we have to say it ets extra credit. Thanks, Austin! Sindre is a Fabrice Bellard-style rabbit hole...

https://www.visidata.org/

Not sure if this counts, but I'll throw my own project (semi-CLI-driven testing framework) into the ring, not as a perfect example overall, but as an example of what I wish more projects did, which was let me experiment a bit with their interfaces before I downloaded them.

This isn't something that's doable for every utility, but especially with the advent of WASM and easier cross-compiling from C, I wish more CLI/API documentation would allow me to play around with examples or try out a command on their docs page or in a sandbox; particularly if they're selling themselves as having a composable interface.

That's not only helpful for figuring out whether or not I want to use the project, it's also helpful when I look at a piece of documentation and am not sure which flag or option is actually important.

https://distilledjs.com

It sure does count, Dan. Love how you pare it down to the absolute minimum so anyone visiting all of the site just pick up the essentials and learn more or just dip without wasting any time. And I agree, the playground concept is always welcome. Definitely sexy.

I kind of like the "one page with screenshots readme" type design. Not to toot my own horn, and this one is not super great, but here's one of mine: https://github.com/tducasse/go-instabot

Maybe not the "home page" you asked for, but https://github.com/derailed/k9s gives all the info I need/want for an amazing front end.

Disagree, shric, that's exactly what I asked for. Definitely sexy. Thank you.

Please sign my petition to never use "sexy" to refer to anything ever again.

Duly upvoted and signed because while all this is meant to be lighthearted I don’t blame your attitude in the slightest

Ecasound: http://nosignal.fi/ecasound/

Mixer4 (closed source, though): http://www.acousticrefuge.com/mixer4.htm

Edbrowse: http://edbrowse.org/

K2pdfopt: https://willus.com/k2pdfopt/

Thanks so much for the many contributions, marttt!

ix: command line pastebin

http://ix.io/

HOW CAN YOU NOT LIKE THIS! So sexy it's downright daring. A++.

LazyGit -- https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit

That is a sexy home page. It draws the attention, and even a lazy reader understands exactly what's happening thanks to the live illustration!

https://github.com/chadwickbureau/chadwick but it would be nothing without some data, so ... https://retrosheet.org and specifically https://www.retrosheet.org/game.htm

https://github.com/chadwickbureau/chadwick Totally qualifies as sexy. It gets right to the point, has the right install instructions, lays out the programming language requirements. I love it. Thank you.

Not sure if this qualifies as sexy: https://rust-starter.github.io/

But you don't need to do any design/css, the theme is available: https://terminalcss.xyz/

These are both elegant and sexy IMHO. Thank you for these fine contributions.

Magit https://magit.vc/

Oooh, so beautiful! Thank you.

WP-CLI is great :) https://wp-cli.org/

It's very clear about what it does, gets both beginners and existing users into the mix ASAP, gratifies sponsors.. pretty sexy. Thank you for that contribution.

I have to say that WP-CLI is how I do everything now for a few personal sites I manage, and I have zero complaints. So much better, actually, than doing anything in the WP GUI.

It’s for more than just a single CLI tool, but I’m a big fan of Charm’s site (https://charm.sh/). It’s hard to understand what it all is at first, but I still had a pleasant experience just looking at it!

Sensational! That is truly a sexy, sexy CLI site. Thank you.

Anything that looks like it came from a perl script over a cron job is all I ever wanted really.

I think there’s many nice OSS websites (and docs) built with Docusaurus [1].

It’s not exclusively for CLI projects, and their own website is pretty nice IMO.

[1] https://docusaurus.io/showcase

Scrumptious!

Ok, I'll bite. https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs. It's functional and clear. Sexy is 'very' subjective.

Analysis: True, that is a sexy homepage. Thank you.

Not a CLI tool but rather a format. Still it has similar challenges in making it interesting:

https://concise-encoding.org

Also, the website is 32k ;-)

Is this effectively a form of compression for data transfer?

If you squint at it the right way, sure ;-)

It's basically a binary format that has a 1:1 compatible text format. The idea is that everything stays in binary format (which is faster to process, more efficient, and smaller), and then convert the document to text only if/when a human needs to see it or edit the document.

It could still be further compressed using a general purpose compressor like gzip, but the main purpose of the data format is to be easy for a machine to process compared to JSON/XML/etc, and tight in specification so that you don't end up with exploitable security holes due to implementation differences like you do with JSON/XML: https://labs.bishopfox.com/tech-blog/an-exploration-of-json-...

Certain websites load extremely fast. This is one of them, well done.

A sexy, sexy site and an incredible advertisement for itself!

Trying to keep it simple: miniflux-cli https://sr.ht/~xn/miniflux-cli/

Sexy all right. Everything's right out there and so, so easy to understand.

I am not feeling comfortable when someone is using word "sexy" in a professional setting. What does it mean? Should I be aroused when looking at it? That's inappropriate

A little inappropro. Just having fun, but I really do sympathize with you and I sincerely apologize for making you feel uncomfortable. Most people who know me would regard me as very, very "conservative". I use that word on purpose because of course the subject is not at all sexy.

Is browsing HN a professional setting?

nmh: https://www.nongnu.org/nmh/

Heirloom troff: http://n-t-roff.github.io/heirloom/doctools.html

Plan 9 Port: https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/

Most excellent! Thank you for those sexy examples.

FFmpeg is sleek. https://www.ffmpeg.org/

ucspi-tcp https://cr.yp.to/ucspi-tcp.html

After browsing the current (as of now) 41 comments, I am curious: what constitutes 'sexy' for your audience?

I am totally letting them decide!

Another static site generator huh? I would love to hear what you are doing differently :)

Ibraheem, I hang my head in shame after seeing all these sexy home pages. With your permission I will let you know at the email address in your profile after I revise mine because I have been massively humbled by some of these masterpieces.

Please do :)

Why make a sexy homepage? To convince people to use it? Don't you want to make it work real well first, and then make the sexy homepage, when it's, you know... good software?

Back in the day, you would release your software on Freshmeat.net (https://web.archive.org/web/20010528211603/http://freshmeat....). You would get excited if people clicked on your project (https://web.archive.org/web/20100627062409/http://freshmeat....), but you'd get more excited if people downloaded your software, because it meant people were actually trying it out. (I can't find the graphs anymore, but it used to show you if anyone had clicked on the .tar.gz of your source code. It also used to have comments, but in later versions seems like comments were removed)

Anyone else remember back when the web was useful?

Well I’m having fun with this post, your objections are completely warranted.

If you’d like to email me the address in my profile I will post a serious response in my blog. Long story short, I think an attractive, credible looking webpage helps enormously in user acceptance.

I get that a nice looking project can make people want to use it more, but what I'm really asking is your motivation. Why is it important that people other than yourself use it?

Making it work well first is my first priority by a country mile. Making it maintainable is my next priority. Documenting it well, third. Following those are:

1. Professional vanity. 2. Personal vanity. 3. Public service. 4. Backup business idea.

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