Notcurses 3.0 Released For Adding "Bling" To Your Terminal Apps

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Notcurses 3.0 Released For Adding "Bling" To Your Terminal Apps

For those wanting to add some "bling" to your command-line programs to make some "rad" terminal apps, Notcurses 3.0 was released today for designing colorful and complex text-user interfaces. Notcurses allows adding a range of multimedia, Unicode, and other graphics capabilities to command-line applications across Linux / macOS / Windows...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Notcurses-3.0

[waxhead]

No matter how much they ruin normal GUI's with CSD, hiding scrollbars and other insanity I have always found a safe haven in my terminal. God old trusty things that work as I expect them to. Now this era seem to be threatened as well by a horde of 20 years old that has grown up with their cellphones and think stuff is better just because it has a new colour or something.... I curse you all!!!

[uid313]

I don't know if all terminals are compatible with all that.

But you can use emojis with different colors to indicate status and success/failure.
⚪⚫🔴🔵🟠🟡🟢🟣🟤
⬜⬛🟥🟦🟧🟨🟩🟪🟫
⚠⚡⚙️✔️❌❗🔥

[skerit]

What? How?

I know about rendering images in the terminal with Block Elements, but I just tried the demo in my Gnome terminal and it seems to be using something totally different?
(Maybe the "writing to framebuffer directly" they mention, though I don't know how that would work when running in Wayland. Still might be it, because it does seem to use block elements when trying the demo over SSH)

[coder]

Now this era seem to be threatened as well by a horde of 20 years old that has grown up with their cellphones and think stuff is better just because it has a new colour or something.... I curse you all!!!

Agreed, except this stuff ain't so new. These screen shots gave me an instant flashback to ANSI graphics of the late-80's/early-90's BBS scene.

[coder]

I don't know if all terminals are compatible with all that.

I think these sorts of libraries are smart enough to query the terminal type and adapt the graphics to whatever capabilities it supports.

But you can use emojis with different colors to indicate status and success/failure.
⚪⚫🔴🔵🟠🟡🟢🟣🟤
⬜⬛🟥🟦🟧🟨🟩🟪🟫
⚠⚡⚙️✔️❌❗🔥

Cute, but what I actually do is just print the exit code of the last command in my prompt string. I suppress it, if 0. And the only thing I do with color is to print it in bold red, if nonzero.

It's really useful to know when a command fails, because they don't always tell you. I'm surprised the default prompt string doesn't do something like that!

[skeevy420]

No matter how much they ruin normal GUI's with CSD, hiding scrollbars and other insanity I have always found a safe haven in my terminal. God old trusty things that work as I expect them to. Now this era seem to be threatened as well by a horde of 20 years old that has grown up with their cellphones and think stuff is better just because it has a new colour or something.... I curse you all!!!

I'm more peeved by the trend of removing the Oxford comma. Your first sentence is a prime example of why they need to stay.

My Zsh/Yakuake setup is very colorful so I see something like this and think "Cool, more programs will have neat things like syntax highlighting, colored links, animations, and more to help make the terminal's wall of text less like a wall and more informative." Yeah, crappy bling will creep in, but we have to take the good with the bad. That said, the day I hit F12 to drop down my terminal and instead of "skeevy420@domain" I get a picture of a house on a street corner, skeevy420 wrote on a mailbox, and the street signs above the stop sign are my distribution and domain names that view might very well change.

This isn't some BS like (GNOME implementation of) CSD where they remove information to attempt to make it more usable. Here, they're adding more information to make information more readily available and readable and bling just happens to come with it. Granted, to me GNOME CSD looks like a crappy compromise to make UIs compatible with Handheld and Desktop which is why they're chalk full of space wasting hieroglyphics and pictographs...a picture of a printer instead of the word print. It only takes at least twice the amount of pixels to draw the printer icon. Here's an example (trying to match their width...sorry if the formatting doesn't work for y'all like it does on my screen):

PRINT

?u=https%3A%2F%2Fmaxcdn.icons8.com%2FShare%2Ficon%2FPrinting%2Fprint1600.png&f=1&nofb=1.png

And that's why CSD sucks. Quit wasting muh screen space.

[coder]

I'm more peeved by the trend of removing the Oxford comma. Your first sentence is a prime example of why they need to stay.

Could be a branding problem. I think Oxford no longer has much cultural cred, outside of the elite circles already likely to employ your preferred punctuation convention. Maybe it needs some hot Tick Tock influencer to push it.

[jeoshua]

Could be a branding problem. I think Oxford no longer has much cultural cred, outside of the elite circles already likely to employ your preferred punctuation convention. Maybe it needs some hot Tick Tock influencer to push it.

Or you could punctuate like you're a sane, reasonable, and competent writer of the English language. You know, people don't use the Oxford comma because they're in love with Oxford as an institution. It's about clarity.

Let's eat kids.
Let's eat, kids.

Punctuation matters.

(Not an Oxford comma, but still...)

[jo-erlend]

Bling is one thing, but if you take things like Byubu and Midnight Commander, there is really no reason why you shouldn't use them. I would actually love to see more actually useful, mouse driven text-based apps. They don't have to be bad, but the efficieny simply cannot be matched.