AsciiMol: Curses based ASCII molecule viewer for Linux terminals | Hacker News Reader

AsciiMol: Curses based ASCII molecule viewer for Linux terminals

github.com

121 pointspizza15 comments

Looks great and is certainly useful for a quick check. For finer discrimination a real graphical display will still be required though, e.g. for checking bonds, and geometries.

Sounds very useful to check whatever the HPC is doing from a SSH session without having to move files around.

Heh I wonder whether the venerable Rasmol could be used for this. It was originally developed in a much more client-server world.

Most of the time it's impossible because even if we can connect from the head node to the compute nodes, we cannot open an X tunnel there. So at the moment what I do is copy the latest file to a filesystem on the head node and then run a lightweight X visualiser on the head node (Rasmol or equivalent is fine there).

We have fancy complicated visualisers and they are great, but I really hope the (often old) barebone ones that work over an SSH tunnel on a flaky VPN keep working for a very long time.

Reading the title I definitely didn't expect it to look THIS good! Well done!

Is referring to curses as for "Linux terminals" trolling, or am I just getting old?

It's referring to the ncurses library: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ncurses

Probably just ignorance. ncurses should work for all POSIXes I think.

As the other poster pointed out, it is probably using ncurses. Ncurses stands for new-curses, and it is from 1993, and it is the new-and-improved version of a library from the early 80's at least.

If this seems new to you, the good news is, you aren't getting old. Bad news is, you've been there for a while. Beats the alternative though, right?

It's interesting how the 3d rotation adds 2d resolution. At least in my brain.

Can it show transparent aluminium?

Unreal that it is 2022 and this is the state of terminals.

There is no reason that terminals should not be able to show actual graphics other than a complete and utter failure of innovation in command-line interfaces.

I mean, there is Sixel.

But why do we care about graphics in a terminal? If I want to display graphics, I'll use a GUI, if I don't care, I'll use a terminal.

If I want to use graphics remotely, there's X, or any number of remote desktop solutions, or scripting remote data and local programs, or web browsers.

Responding to your response below:

> Just not for controlling computers for some absurd reason.

Yes. Because we have X, or remote desktops for that.

A CLI is a CLI because we want a text based interface. It makes documentation easier, it makes reusability easier, it makes scriptability easier.

If what you want is a GUI... use a GUI? We have plenty of those, why do terminals need one?

Last response because you clearly didn't read my first comment or any of my others.

> None of those things are true, though. You can have all of those exactly like before. But you can now also do, for instance, "cat image.jpg" and you will see the image inline in your terminal. That only adds value and prevents nothing

That case is covered by Sixel [0] like I mentioned before.

Also, the use for 'cat' is not to display the contents of a file, but to output the contents of a file for concatination, so 'cat image.jpg' doesn't make sense.

> Again, I specifically said I do not want a GUI

This is also not what you said before when you said

> And there are plenty of CLIs that use graphics. Just not for controlling computers for some absurd reason.

You know what something that uses graphics to control computers is? A user interface, with graphics... I wonder if there's an acronym for that. The fact that graphics are a key part of usage make it a GUI by default.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel

Reply on news.ycombinator.com