Ask HN: Rate my webapp: commandlinefu.com | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Rate my webapp: commandlinefu.com

51 pointscodeinthehole43 comments

http://www.commandlinefu.com (and related http://twitter.com/commandlinefu)

In short - it's a repository for unix/bash commands that you want to save for future use, featuring autocomplete search, voting and commenting (very much inspired by daily reading: HN, Programming Reddit, Stack Overflow ...). Kept as clean and simple as possible.

More: I really wrote this for myself as my own collection of command-line snippets was getting too unwieldy and hard to parse. I just wanted autocomplete really so I could jump straight to that command I can vaguely remember in a few characters.

We're quite hot on using Twitter at work for project communication (all SVN commits tweet) and commandlinefu lends itself nicely to tweet-sized nuggets. It turns out that it's quite a good way of staying in touch with the latest commands. All command lists are available as RSS feeds also.

It's still pretty raw at the moment - I've got a few features in the pipeline that should make it better such as tagging and requesting a needed command (see the uservoice link). However, it's gone onto reddit today so I thought now's as good a time as any to ask for HN feedback.

All feedback appreciated via this forum, or uservoice.

Idea and implementation look good.

A similar site exists for all dot files (configuration files under unix,) which might be helpful: http://www.dotfiles.org

Regarding the actual site, there are a few design comments:

* Yeah, we get that it's supposed to look like a terminal, but the novelty of harsh fonts/colors wears off very quickly. Either having the ability to change it to something else or making a more pleasant default would be nice.

* Make it possible to increase the number of command lines per page. I doubt it is very tolling to generate and submit the pages, but I find it more convenient to just scroll rather than keep clicking 'next.' The way I use your site as of right now, is just keep going through commands, glazing over those I either know or don't find useful until I find the gems. Clicking next continuously is unproductive.

* The "minimize, maximize, close" buttons over the terminal are, as I see now, just a static image to simulate an actual terminal window. This is very unintuitive as I tried clicking them to, what I thought, will make the terminal either span the entire page or load more commands. Either add functionality to buttons or make it obvious that they aren't buttons.

* Finally, it'd be really nice if you don't have to sign up to vote or submit commands. Sometimes I just have one or two commands I'd like to contribute and would not want making an account in YetAnotherWebsite just to do so. You might be missing a lot of useful contributions by making sign-ups mandatory.

Otherwise, well done!

You mean http://dotfiles.org

(dotfiles.com hasn't been updated since 2006!)

Er; Updated. Thanks.

Great feedback - thanks! I've added all these as uservoice items so the non-HN crowd can look and vote. I'll definitely be implementing some of these over the weekend though.

I'm looking forward to reading Google Analytics in the morning.

Looks useful.

You might want to consider a means of flagging dangerous/mis-titled scripts. I see you've already got a destroy everything ("best line eva") and a fork bomb.

Agreed. Looks useful. I am no command-line ninja and often struggle with the commands, so I can see myself using this. Having said that, I would not know something was dangerous till I executed it, which by then would be too late. Flagging something as dangerous is probably a good idea.

You allow users to click on the command and it turns into this text box. Is there a way to get a single click - copy this to clipboard option? It doesn't make that much of a difference to me, but I figured it would be a nice feature to have.

Good job, will look out for you on twitter

"This site has temporarily exceeded its connection limit. Please try again in a few minutes."

I'd move it from nearlyfreespeech.net to linode/slicehost/etc to start with. The bandwidth pricing on nearlyfreespeech is tons ($1/GB) compared to linode ($0.10/GB).

Once I got in, very cool, bookmarked :)

Already on NFS but still having these problems

Right... He's saying to move away from NFS to a host that can more easily (and more economically) handle the traffic you're getting.

Whoops. You're right - I'll actually read the comments in future.

One way to help is to optimize the website; load less resources and make them more compressed. Your users will have a much better experience and you will save money. Take a look at rockstarapps.com for some tools to help out with this.

Also the site doesn't display well on a 1024 monitor the left panel is displayed below the right.

I just realized what'd make a great feature, in my opinion: Add a "recommend alternate" option. For instance, if I see a command I know is suboptimal or there exist other tools that do the job better, I can submit an alternate way to perform the same action.

For instance, I see something like:

  find $PWD -type f -exec grep pattern {} \;

I can suggest an alternate to be:

  grep -r . pattern

This is the killer app for this sort of thing, cf. "useless use of cat", pgrep, etc.

You might want to have some sort of field for platform, since these things are going to vary from GNU/Solaris/*BSD.

Definitely love the usefulness of this so far. I've already implemented the grep for stuff script ignored .svn directories. Been looking for how to do that for months.

I would make it totally non-registration necessary. For example, I'd like to upvote some scripts but I don't like that I have to be signed in to do so. Its a great idea for a site, but I don't see it becoming a huge community where people trade scripts, rather a place where someone posts a small script they find. Thus, I'd like to be able to post scripts and vote on them without being a member. Or, make it only possible to downvote scripts by being a member.

I'll definitely be using this to learn some new command line stuff. Great idea!

The idea is great, and I actually don't mind the terminal look. I could see where some people might be annoyed by it though, so making it optional would probably be a good idea. What I do not like is the min/max/close icons in the top right of the terminal window that have no functionality.

Another little thing is search. Before I submitted my command which was

svn st | grep "^\?" | awk "{print \$2}" | xargs svn add $1

I searched for it and came up with no results. After browsing the popular page though I found

svn status |grep '\?' |awk '{print $2}'| xargs svn add

Also I noticed that commands that have no whitespace after the | are not being picked up and added to the tags. For example, that last command only xargs would be listed but not grep and awk.

Here are links to the examples:

http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/153/add-all-unver...

http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/36/add-all-files-...

Good idea. From a design standpoint I have seen successful designs use the black/green pallet, but the white border on your site makes it too difficult to pay attention to the text.

Green and black is bold, white and black is bolder so it is pulling the eye to an element that should be a background element.

Other than that, nice idea. How about providing a bookmarklet people can drag to their browser bars?

Minor nitpick... the color scheme hurts my eyes.

Yeah, the first thing I noticed when I opened the page was the harsh colors.

Zee goggles, Zey do noting.

Colors work for me. Don't change.

I like the color scheme actually. It makes all those small backquotes and weird characters stand out.

Right. Although. I find the central terminal box soothing, because I tend to use green on black myself - but the white on green isn't so good and the default white of the page blares out at me when I'm trying to read the snippets.

I think possibly the answer is you've got two colour schemes there and want to split them - provide a "normal" black on white or grey on white or whatever for the people that prefer that, and one that's pure green on black (or purple/amber on black, probably pretty easy to supply all three once you've done one :) and a cookie to switch between 'em.

Of course, I'm not a designer at all but I'd happily accept a cookie to have everything in soothing black with green text - and it sounds like others probably would to make things more "normal" looking. I'm expressing no opinion whatsoever about which should be the default though ...

Sort the UI out :

Green and Black? argh :) Black on white will suffice, thanks

Either make the widgets [maximize, minimize, close] do something, or remove them.

The block on the right is too large, there is barely enough room to read the actual content -- consider moving all that sidebar into a nice JQuery slider at the top.

Do we need to know who submitted it and when on the front page? Can't we see those details when we click a command?

"You must be signed in to comment." ++ "or register"

I think you could order these nicer. Consider having tabs along the top: UNIX | WINDOWS | ALL

Clicking a tab shows you the relevant snippets. Allow me to sort each category by popularity or recentness.

I'm viewing it in Firefox, and the content area at the top is blank, while the sidebars ("What's this" etc.) appear. The content area (Command-line-fu alpha) appears all the way at the bottom, once all the sidebars finish.

happened to me too until I made the window bigger, You need to wrap the two columns in a div that has min-width set or whatever the that property is called...

Is happening to me too (Firefox 3.05 on Ubuntu 8.10). Unfortunately, I'm on a very old laptop and can't go past 1024x768.

Well, that was fixed very quickly. Thanks!

Cool, added to RSS.

I wanted to say: the uservoice feedback thing on the left makes it slow to scroll and maybe even more annoyingly gives unsmooth/unpredictable scroll time which means I can't ignore it.

I've noticed this in many sites recently that have persistent buttons/sidebars off to the sides. Don't know if it's a problem specific to Firefox or what... makes CPUs jump into the ~20%s which is more than youtube videos etc.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2009010220 Gentoo Firefox/3.0.5

Can you drop me a line (rich@uservoice.com) so we can look into that performance issue?

Green and black take me back to my standalone terminal days...

Two comments on presentation in addition to the aforementioned wrapping of the columns in a div:

1) More space between entries. The list looks very cramped. 2) Less items per page.

Hardest part about Unix is learning the command line. I luckily had an unwilling, but unavoidable, roommate back in 1989 to answer my "read the man page" questions :) Which leads me to my next comment:

C) Classify the entries as n00b, ..., guru.

Nice work!

This goes very well with some of our company's long-term goals of making things easier for techies (e.g. http://bug.gd and http://featurelist.org )

If you're interested in talking about partnership opportunities (at a minimum we can help with hosting), drop me a line at matthew at bug.gd.

Nice work again!

"This site has temporarily exceeded its connection limit. Please try again in a few minutes."

Dang.

That's with trouble with being on the frontpage of both reddit and hacker news. My hosts, NearlyFreeSpeech reckon their systems can handle the surge. But apparently not.

Isn't this type of site an ideal usage for a SlinkSet or a Sub-Reddit?

Regardless, I like it... and it looks like you have a hit! I'd suggest a "flag as dangerous" link... and I think "example output" should be required upon submission.

Great work!

Good job. I like the idea, but I think what might be special is the execution, the design and karma system, making useful/common stuff a bit more high-profile than jokey aliases :D The site's slow, but that's a good thing, congrats! Nice work.

Very neat - I like the "Commands using <whatever>" feature.

The "Popular functions" box on the right has some command names running together ("perl" and "ping", "uname" and "uniq") for me on Firefox 3.1b2 on Windows.

Nice idea and execution. I've bookmarked and twitter-followed. The autocomplete search is excellent. I'm not too keen on the black background. I'd like to read about the server-side design.

No probs. Once the storm's over, I'll blog about the set-up.

nice. I am working on a website redesign for my startup, ShellShadow http://shellshadow.com. Its a collaborative terminal client...there is a linux client to be published in the next week.

I decided a while back _not_ to provide a "Knowledge Base" section of the site and instead to partner with others that are organizing content such as what you have done. Please get in touch if you have ideas for me or want to link up somehow.

As a potential user, I'd love to subscribe to a human-edited "fu of the day" RSS feed. Don't really want the firehose.

Agreed. My finger was hovering over the Follow button at twitter.com/commandlinefu, but then I saw the tweet timestamps. Firehouse indeed.

Great idea! Have added this to the uservoice suggestions and will have a look at how to implement. As NearlyFreeSpeech doesn't supper cron as yet - it might be easier to only tweet commands once they get more than 5 votes say.

Vote threshold would work once your site is popular but I would pick them out by hand until that happens.

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