Never leaving the terminal
Technical · October 2024
HackOHI/O 2024
At HackOHI/O, Raihan, Kaaustaaub and I built the terminal you never have to leave. Spotify, GitHub issues, your to-do list, a GPT chat, and YouTube, all inside a curses interface and VIM. No browser, no app switching, no mouse.
It started as a bit and then kept being useful. The YouTube part renders video as ASCII in the terminal, which is objectively worse than watching the video, and we kept it anyway because it's funny and because the point of the project was never leaving.
This one isn't on Devpost. It took Most Original, and the demo is three minutes of ASCII video in a terminal.
the commands
Everything is a dollar command. The design question was how many context switches a normal hour of work actually contains, and how many of those survive if the answer is always in the same window.
Technical
$sp plays, pauses and skips Spotify. $git creates, closes and comments on GitHub issues against whatever repo you've set. $todo talks to Todoist. $chat is the GPT line, with a long-form flag when you want a rant. /yt is the ASCII video player and /set env drops you into VIM to edit your environment. All of it is python curses over the respective APIs.
The real cost of an app switch was never the seconds. It's that some fraction of switches ends with you on a different website than you intended.