[HN Gopher] Just redesigned my personal site with a TTY-style in...
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Just redesigned my personal site with a TTY-style interface
Author : abdisaDev
Score : 213 points
Date : 2025-05-02 07:48 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.abdisa.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.abdisa.me)
| AndrewOMartin wrote:
| It's cute. Needs a pager ;)
| feisuzhu wrote:
| No tab completion!
| ale42 wrote:
| It needs a switch to enable a "true" terminal mode... e.g. with
| such a font https://caglrc.cc/~svo/glasstty/ and slightly blurred
| characters!
| jampekka wrote:
| I have two tabs at tty7 but the contents aren't in sync!
| altsyset wrote:
| Great job, I like it
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| On firefox mobile I neeed to double-tap Enter to run any
| "command"
| Daviey wrote:
| It's wonderful, great job. It looks like you used,
| https://github.com/bony2023/react-terminal which is an
| interesting project.
|
| 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:~$
| stuaxo wrote:
| "This terminal hates being squished. Deploy a bigger screen. "
|
| I thought 1920x1080 was acceptable on a laptop :(
| ineiti wrote:
| No ls and no cd?
| salter2 wrote:
| No matter what I'm doing in a terminal as soon as it opens I
| use ls. I always get so disappointed when these sites don't
| have it (none ever do). Please let me do terminal things in a
| terminal.
| Philpax wrote:
| I'm going to represent the critical opinion and say: this is cute
| and I like the idea in theory, but if I encountered this in the
| wild, I would just leave the page. I explore most informational
| websites with a mouse or a touchscreen - I don't want to type to
| navigate your website!
|
| 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.
| dgimla20 wrote:
| It's a cool looking site, but these terminal style sites (seen
| a few of them from web developers and software types) look
| terrible on phones and tablets (keyboard constantly present),
| which is well over 60% of web traffic now.
|
| 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.
| buu700 wrote:
| _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.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Agree. While I acknowledge the work that must have gone into
| this, and the playful quality of the result, with respect this
| is a frustrating way to present information.
|
| Personally I'd have gone for a 90s TUI-style hypertext
| presentation. But, like I said, nice work!
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| The front page of our early phreaking zine was an interactive
| cellphone- a certain famous model of Motorola- that you had to
| navigate to enter.
|
| 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 :)".
| Philpax wrote:
| Absolutely! I very much respect that; some things are meant
| for a specific audience, and that's OK.
|
| 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:
| uticus wrote:
| Agreed, a better option would be SSH / Telnet server in
| addition to a web page, perhaps with auth instructions given on
| the web page to keep the majority of bots out.
| febed wrote:
| now do telnet
| rckt wrote:
| Looks nice, but feels like it's not complete. No tab completion.
| The font styles are not terminal like. Looks weird with those
| headers. Would be also great to be able to click stuff. In my
| opinion this needs improvement in either way. Otherwise feels
| half-baked, you didn't go full terminal way at the same time did
| not give an easy way to navigate.
| JdeBP wrote:
| You are the second person, after feisuzhu, to talk of tab
| completion.
|
| 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. (-:
| Galicarnax wrote:
| Add a pager like `less` (e.g. `$ projects | less`). And `exit`
| should close the page.
| codeqihan wrote:
| It looks pretty good on my laptop, though the font doesn't quite
| look like a terminal's (especially the bold), but overall it's
| still pretty nice. It would be even better if some simple
| commands (like the most basic grep, less) could be added.
| quotemstr wrote:
| If you want to flex as a traditionalist, you might want to
| consider adopting the https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ aesthetic
| instead of the terminal one. The former remains browsable,
| whereas a terminal interface, however cute, creates enough UI
| friction to drive casual readers away.
| noduerme wrote:
| friction to drive casual readers away is actually what you want
| if you don't like casual readers.
| gr4vityWall wrote:
| I like it. It felt personal and non-intrusive.
| aligundogdu wrote:
| Recently, I've been working on my own website and spending a lot
| of time thinking about how it should look and feel. I have to
| admit -- I liked yours so much I'm almost jealous!
|
| Just a small note: It would be even better if the projects in the
| "Projects" section were clickable and led to their details.
| jarbus wrote:
| I like it as a fun experiment, but I definitely wouldn't require
| users to interact with my website so much in order to start
| viewing the content
| ssgodderidge wrote:
| Maybe the initial message could be enhanced with more content?
| maze-le wrote:
| Very nice, but if you want to use it professionally you should
| consider having an alternative "clear text" version for
| recruiters and the like. The technically minded will find it nice
| but most people won't know what to do or what any of this means.
| And you could consider adding `ls`, `cd` and `exit` just for fun
| -- it was the first thing I've tried.
| xtiansimon wrote:
| I've trained bookkeepers to run Python scripts on Windows, and
| ls/dir, cd are foundational, including the syntax for a script
| command's arguments.
|
| For the clear text version, it could be a hypertext document
| run by an app! Haha
| noduerme wrote:
| er, I assume that they made this site because they're far too
| good to work for anyone who doesn't want to take the time to
| find out how it works. In other words, recruiters need not
| apply.
| MOARDONGZPLZ wrote:
| I would love to hire this person (in theory), but every job I
| post gets hundreds of inbound applicants, and while hiring is
| one of the most important aspects of my job, it is second to
| delivering software with value. I really don't have time to
| seek out every person out there who may have a resume, much
| less a quirky resume, so I send recruiters who work for me to
| find good candidates for top of funnel. I don't think there
| is anything wrong with this.
| claiir wrote:
| Maybe just have commands auto-execute if you click on links in
| the existing text? That would allow someone to experience the
| entire interface on a touch device! :>
|
| E.g. there is **__contact__** in the page, bold and underlined,
| but you cannot click on it to do anything.
| hliyan wrote:
| +1 for ls and cd. I would also suggest numbered output for ls,
| so that the user can select using the numeric keypad. Or,
| up/down nav, TUI-style. I wish ecommerce sites could be more
| like this.
| doubled112 wrote:
| I miss real pages on eCommerce sites.
| aquariusDue wrote:
| Good point, another solution might be something similar to
| https://ysap.sh/ which gives you a nice "page" formatted for
| the terminal when curl'ed and your usual HTML and CSS on the
| browser.
| swyx wrote:
| also dont forget SEO...
| oriel wrote:
| I did something like this, in a much more limited form, when
| putting together my personal site a few weeks ago.
| https://1ps0.info/
|
| 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.
| 9dev wrote:
| Slightly disappointed my `sudo rm -rf /` wouldn't do anything.
| kmoser wrote:
| Check your local filesystem; you might be surprised :)
| emilfihlman wrote:
| Hah, I see exactly the same issues as I had when trying to
| implement TUI on mobile (autocomplete fail, no arrow keys,
| blocking view, ...). It's just so painful and actual seems almost
| impossible to leverage the virtual keyboard for input.
| dmd wrote:
| I just made mine _look_ terminal-ly. https://3e.org/dmd/
| kaishiro wrote:
| Cool! This is fun, and I love seeing people try out alternative
| website UIs.
|
| 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.
| _joel wrote:
| `- 'ls': command not found. use 'help' to list available
| commands!`
|
| err
| MelodyUwU wrote:
| few "commands" that id like to see: ls, cd, less (better
| reading), uname, echo. would be nice for sure! otherwise it seems
| some fonts are not really terminal-like. looks good and simple
| right now though.
|
| also: abdisaDev@chillSpot:~$ whoami
| visitor@linux_aarch64-CET
| noduerme wrote:
| I love it. This is really original. It's beautiful and entirely
| unnecessary, but that's what makes it good. Of course there are
| old BBSs and things on the web where you can have a TTY
| experience, but I can't remember ever seeing a person's portfolio
| site designed by hand like this to mimic that feeling. It's
| impressive for being so clean and minimal while at the same time
| obviously difficult to accomplish in such a polished way. Top
| notch.
| qiine wrote:
| no tab completion ? ;p
| BiraIgnacio wrote:
| Really cool, thanks for sharing. Very original indeed.
| fjfaase wrote:
| Maybe turn it into an adventure game. I recently though about
| making an adventure game about my house and the surroundings.
| Sparkenstein wrote:
| shameless plug portfolio (5+ years old): prabhanjan.dev
| sigilis wrote:
| I did something like this myself a little while back,
| knownothing.dev
|
| 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.
| netsharc wrote:
| > streaming in text
|
| Nowadays people would think your site is an LLM page, since
| ChatGPT implemented this and now every LLM apparently has to do
| the same...
| sigilis wrote:
| You know, I hadn't really considered that.
|
| 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.
| JdeBP wrote:
| I have. It's not _quite_ right, and its off enough to be in the
| uncanny valley for those who have seen this. Mainly the
| difference is in how the prompt should be streamed as well, and
| how the prompt does not re-appear until the command has
| finished.
|
| 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_ .
| o1o1o1 wrote:
| I really like it, well done!
|
| As 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 ^_^"
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Make it fully navigable by clicking.
|
| 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.
| kindawinda wrote:
| don't tell him what to do
| noshitsherlock wrote:
| Great idea a lot of military communication is still like this. I
| think efficiency and clarity.
| Bengalilol wrote:
| 1st second of my 1st visit: ls - 'ls': command not found. use
| 'help' to list available commands!
|
| Anyway, fun UI. I was a little less impressed by the 'projects'
| page, I would have loved being able to visit the projects.
| epasveer wrote:
| It won't let me pick up the axe.
| spookie wrote:
| wdym?
| drob518 wrote:
| Just FYI, it's not mobile friendly.
| jetbalsa wrote:
| reminds me of my own personal website at http://jrwr.sdf.org
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| Ironically, it doesn't work on a text-only browser. All you get
| in ELinks is: Link: preload Link: preload
| alkh wrote:
| Black screen in Lynx for me as well (:
| JadoJodo wrote:
| Very cool! Note: This doesn't work with Vimium installed, since
| only certain keystrokes make it through to the page. I think the
| input would need to be an input field in order for that to work.
| mtoohig wrote:
| You should be able to press 'i' to enter 'insert' mode then the
| site should work.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Introducing ReactRouterTTY
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| Nice! I did the same a while ago: HTTPS://BI6.US/ . I've been
| using the VT220mod and VT323 typefaces for various projects for a
| while. It just made sense to make my vanity site look like a
| terminal from the 80s. Links to the fonts can be found at
| HTTPS://BI6.US/A.HTML and the whole thing is creative commons
| licensed. Feel free to use the boilerplate for your own non-
| commercial projects, though I ask for attribution.
| ploum wrote:
| This is awesome. I should copy that for https://offpunk.net
| malablaster wrote:
| I did this like 15 years ago for my personal site too! Looks
| great.
| masswerk wrote:
| This is a dangerous path! I once did the same and it grew to
| become https://masswerk.at/jsuix ;-)
|
| (Historical note: pixels were bigger, in 2003. Feel free to zoom
| in / increase the text size.)
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Nice! It would be good if help <command> displayed specific help
| for that command.
| mjmsmith wrote:
| Nice work! abdisaDev@chillSpot:~$ whoami
| visitor@macintel-America_New_York
|
| Should be 'macarm' fwiw.
| BinaryPie wrote:
| There used to be tons of these and even turn key libraries that
| do all of this and much much more. Especially in the early to mid
| 00s. Did you do any research into them before you built this?
| Angostura wrote:
| i hope you are monitoring for how many people tried rm -rf /
| anthk wrote:
| I sse nothing under Links/lynx.
|
| Meanwhile, sacc/cgo, gem.awk, offpunk, just work like a terminal
| prompt under an atom n270 netbook.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Make ls work and have the commands listed in help show up as
| programs.
| sdsd wrote:
| Love it! I added a little terminal thing to my site awhile back:
| https://danbednarski.github.io/
|
| It's not really useful, just fun (for me)
| huhtenberg wrote:
| F12 is blocked. That's not nice.
| kmoser wrote:
| Right-click, then inspect
| RayJSeth wrote:
| Love seeing folks passion projects like this! Feels very old-web,
| not just stylistically, but also just the culture of folks making
| things that _they_ want to and just putting them out there.
|
| 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 :)
| conrs wrote:
| Awesome! We should talk, very curious about your implementation.
|
| 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 :)
| von_lohengramm wrote:
| I instinctively pressed ^W to delete a word and closed the tab.
| Nice.
| rezonant wrote:
| Obvious first command, "cat /etc/passwd"
| abaymado wrote:
| Good job! Make it more mobile-friendly (only tested on iPhone).
| Like many others suggested, make the segments clickable for non-
| technical people to navigate, and add commands like cd, ls, etc.,
| to make it more interesting for hackers. Gobez!
| rafram wrote:
| Fun! Though it shouldn't scroll down on every key press, only
| ones that input a character. Command/ctrl-clicking a link jumps
| down to the bottom right now.
| andrethegiant wrote:
| If you like this, you'll also like https://root.vc
| noufalibrahim wrote:
| Nice. One of the earliest examples of terminal style websites
| I've seen was jwz's www dot jwz dot org. (Linking from here
| produces a different site). I remember it being like this 20
| years ago and it still is.
| duxup wrote:
| Apparently that user doesn't want people linking from this site
| or something.
|
| I guess they don't like anyone who happens to click on a
| hyperlink here...
| noufalibrahim wrote:
| Wasn't aware of that. I'll edit my link
| conrs wrote:
| Link NSFW - props on style though.
| ryao wrote:
| You might as well add support for viewing this over telnet too.
| ge96 wrote:
| clear isn't a command? dang
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