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.
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.
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.
+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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When I returned to college ~15 years ago, my main laptop was a ThinkPad T60 running some flavor of Debian. I spent a lot of time with a full-screen terminal open in some sort of green-on-black color scheme.
On several occasions some complete stranger would interrupt me - usually with a shoulder tap - and demand to know what I was doing hacking in the library/student union/etc. Never happened in the engineering buildings, though.
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 :)".
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:
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!
Exactly. I can appreciate the effort behind it, but if you want me to consume your content, you need to make it obvious and easy and not make me work for it.
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.
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.
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. (-:
Howdy, I took a stab at adding some of these features to my own implementation, the tab completion is pretty rudimentary though. Clickable things was a great idea, I have ls's output as a link that auto runs the corresponding command to view the content.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 :)
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.
Have a similar thing for my own personal website – https://tiulp.in/, with the important commands implemented, tab completion... and if you have WebGPU, something more :))
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.
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 .
I enjoyed navigating this, however, I would recommend that you make the various sub-pages linkable (maybe the TTY opens and runs the correct command if you follow a link to a sub page?) - it's hard to share anything about you from this site.
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.
On mobile, the viewport scrolls to the top of the page each time you type a character, moving the command line down and out of view. If the viewport must move when you type it should jump to the bottom.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.