Just redesigned my personal site with a TTY-style interface
abdisa.me
abdisa.me
For the clear text version, it could be a hypertext document run by an app! Haha
E.g. there is **__contact__** in the page, bold and underlined, but you cannot click on it to do anything.
I had a friend try to run 'sudo shutdown -r now'. It inspired a much more thorough approach to the terminal functionality, but I didnt want to rabbit hole too far.
As it stands, initially it was a cyberpunk theme but i wanted a vscode-like professional theme as default, so you can toggle between them through cli. Lots of fun to be had with eastereggs.
A middleground might be to make the commands clickable, so that clicking on "help" automatically inserts and runs it, and clicking on any of the commands in "help" does the same. You would still frustrate users who would have to keep scrolling up to reach the navigation, but it would make it usable without a keyboard.
You have to keep in mind your audience. If you presume everybody visiting this site is software-inclined, it's fine. I know a lot of less tech-literate users who would leave something like this straight away thinking they're being hacked or something daft.
That reminds me of the time my friend and I put together a silly shell script called pentagonhack.sh that went through an 80s-movie-style nonsense hacking sequence while you mashed the keys. Most of the content was inside jokes, but there were a number of all caps references to a Pentagon server with warnings about unauthorized access being forbidden, and overall it looked pretty plausible to someone with no technical background or even cursory knowledge of SSH and Bash.
Anyway, my friend got bored one day and fired up the script in a TTY on his laptop during lunch in our high school cafeteria. Apparently his friend who'd been sitting nearby noticed and started paying attention to what was on his screen, and then understandably found it alarming when by all appearances he was in the middle of typing out a command to run a malware executable on a Pentagon server. So she stands up and yells, "JOSH IS HACKING THE PENTAGON!". Of course he immediately switches back to X11/GNOME, probably with some homework assignment open in OpenOffice or an active Blackboard tab in Firefox, and everyone looks at his screen before looking back at her like she's crazy. The way he tells it, she was practically ready to go call the cops until he explained the joke and calmed her down.
On several occasions some complete stranger would interrupt me - usually with a shoulder tap - and demand to know what I was doing hacking in the library/student union/etc. Never happened in the engineering buildings, though.
Personally I'd have gone for a 90s TUI-style hypertext presentation. But, like I said, nice work!
It was a great filter against people who wouldn't have understood the content. If you knew how this model worked, there were a lot of easter eggs, and we received a lot of great feedback to make it more fun and rewarding.
Being told that it would "frustrate users" would have elicited a friendly "Not ours :)".
That being said, it looks like this website is meant to serve as a portfolio and a self-introduction - and for that, you generally don't want to alienate the entirety of your mobile audience :sweat_smile:
Exactly. I can appreciate the effort behind it, but if you want me to consume your content, you need to make it obvious and easy and not make me work for it.
Every time you suggest commands (like "help"), let the user click them, and the UI responds as if they typed it and hit enter.
Every command that can be typed/clicked can be highlighted a green color or something.
The title for "Help" isn't a terminal font, it jumps out as misplaced.
Also, suggestion is to add some hidden easter egg commands. I was surprised `whoami` worked, but then I saw it in `help` and was sad.
But anyway:
abdisaDev@chillSpot:~$ whoami
visitor@linux_x86_64-Europe_London
abdisaDev@chillSpot:~$(Historical note: pixels were bigger, in 2003. Feel free to zoom in / increase the text size.)
All the man pages (same as `man -p`): https://masswerk.at/jsuix/man.txt
(I think, the simple vi implementation acquired a scrolling bug, if the buffer starts with less than an entire screen.)
Also, try `invaders` (it does games, too). ;-)
Link: preload
Link: preloadAs others mentioned, if you use this to attract clients or recruiters, I recommend adding a version for non-technical folks.
As a nerd I'd love to see some more colors like in the themes you can set using Prezto or Oh-My-ZSH (reference: https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/prezto?tab=readme-ov-file#t...).
For the projects I think some click function to open an ncurses-like modal would be cool :)
Another idea: what about adding a light mode?
P.S.: I would also add `rm -rf` and return something like "nice try ^_^"
I thought 1920x1080 was acceptable on a laptop :(
But we were told a TTY not a shell.
Historically, there were all sorts of user interfaces that one could get over a terminal, not just Unix, GNU, and other shells. There were BBSes of many flavours, Prestel, and any number of bespoke menu-driven systems.
Giving people a shell inside a WWW browser has been done, and is even somewhat hackneyed at this point. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39829463 got 0 votes and 0 comments.) But some other kind of terminal interface makes for an interesting change.
The phrase "You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike." seems apposite, at this point. (-:
https://con.rs if you're curious!
I guess they don't like anyone who happens to click on a hyperlink here...
We did something similar for our company website (link in my profile if you’re interested). It started out as more of a TTY but eventually had to find a middle ground for reproducible pages. We didn't really care much for SEO but I wanted to see if there was a way to deliver consistent content while maintaining that style.
Just a small note: It would be even better if the projects in the "Projects" section were clickable and led to their details.
Anyway, fun UI. I was a little less impressed by the 'projects' page, I would have loved being able to visit the projects.
I recently put a minor terminal-ish toy on my personal site https://rayjseth.io/ as an excuse to play with the infra to build/deploy go-wasm+Next in Vercel.
Always feel like those labor of love tangent projects are the best place to grow new skills :)
Of note - autosuggest options, clickable links for ls output.
(you can grab a template here https://github.com/tiulpin/kotlin-cv.js)
https://con.rs (a refactor, limited functionality) https://blog.con.rs/series/#mash (posts related to the saga of development, recently revived!)
Also stealing all these ideas from the comment thread on how to improve it :)
It’s fun to put together nonstandard interfaces. I had the idea of streaming in text like you were connected by an old modem to a remote system. Never experienced it myself, as I am not old enough, but I found the idea aesthetically pleasing.
Nowadays people would think your site is an LLM page, since ChatGPT implemented this and now every LLM apparently has to do the same...
I do find the text streaming aspect of LLM interfaces to be a charming solution to the latency issue. What's old is new again.
With late 1980s character-mode terminals one could do clever things with margins and have a scrolling area in the middle of the screen and an input area at the bottom, so it's not wrong per se. It's just not how things commonly worked. (The clever things brigade were a select few. Mostly the whole screen would scroll.)
A greater than symbol as the prompt character and an e-mail address in the prompt didn't commonly go together, either. If there was an e-mail address, it was some type of Unix shell, and the prompt character was conventionally dollar or hash. If the prompt character was a greater than symbol then it was a BASIC or MS/PC/DR-DOS which didn't do e-mail addresses and multi-user. Again, it's not wrong, as famously prompts can be customized, but it's just ever so slightly off .
It's not really useful, just fun (for me)
Meanwhile, sacc/cgo, gem.awk, offpunk, just work like a terminal prompt under an atom n270 netbook.
abdisaDev@chillSpot:~$ whoami
visitor@macintel-America_New_York
Possible past discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28797535
can we get a dump of the hacker news archive?
also:
abdisaDev@chillSpot:~$ whoami
visitor@linux_aarch64-CETerr