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Comment by blahgeek | Hacker News Reader

> taking inspiration from command-line interfaces

IMO the take away from command-line interfaces is compact, precise and minimal design. In a transitional shell prompt like #~$, each character has its meaning. Merely copying these symbols to a watch face is the exact opposite spirit of command like interfaces.

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Cool project, but I also noticed the weird choice of #:~$ as a prompt, it uses almost half the width of the clock screen. And isn't # normally used to denote root shells? I don't think I ever saw it together with $.

My favorite prompt is >: as a callback to the Swan computer in the TV show Lost (not sure if it's also used in early Apple computers).

Good news it's an open source project so you can customise your prompt (:

Brought to you by the "it's configurable, so we don't need sane defaults" crowd.

It's a watch, not a new shell implementation. It looks enough like a shell imo.

If I remember right, > was the prompt for Integer basic, ] for Applesoft Basic and * for the monitor.

Yup.

3D0G to start basic from the Monitor

A prompt including > can be dangerous since that character also does shell output redirection. A sloppy copy/paste could, in theory, overwrite an important file.

The usually trick here is to use a unicode character like ⟫ (U+27EB) instead, which looks basically the same, but isn't interpreted as a redirection by the shell

On the other hand: It‘s art. It‘s ok for art to get inspired from the command line, yet put aesthetics over replication.

Using computers since 1986, not sure where I can find such precise and minimal design, when it is impossible to use them without a manual, there is no discovery, and most commands have an endless list of options.

The manual is there usually: type `man`, or `help`, or run the command with `--help`.

Most GUIs also have "endless" pages of options. Grouping them helps quite a bit.

Having many options is usually considered the trait of the rich and powerful. Studying them for the tools you use often may actually save time, compared to googling around the bush every time.

Only on specific operating systems, not on a CLI as user interface concept across all operating systems.

GUIs have discovery by definition, users have visual references where to click and possibly see some side effect taking place.

Apparently the UNIX way that gets thrown around the Internet doesn't agree with such endless options.

Perhaps one could configure it or fork and modify https://github.com/zsteig/.watch

`date +whatever` right arg for the output would also make more sense than `./t` if there's room

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