Stress-Terminal UI

We just can't get enough of system monitors that run from the command line. They just seem like such a natural fit, not only aesthetically, but also functionally. From a design perspective, the command line forces the developer to put usefulness up front rather than hidden behind endless tabs or options. ASCII's limitations help enforce this, because there's only so much you can do. Use of color can't be superfluous, and you need to be careful about the number of words or amount information you present, as well as making it obvious how the user interacts with your application. Plus, you're effectively working toward a fixed resolution. Of course, there are exceptions – Vim springs to mind – but most command-line developers understand the advantages that come from environmental limitations.

Stress-Terminal UI (s-tui) is a great example of this. It monitors your system's CPU utilization, but also shows its changing frequency and temperature alongside power consumption in watts. This is perfect for monitoring the effectiveness of your system cooling, as well as the kind of power consumption you can expect from your system under load. What's even better is that stress-ng, a popular stress tester, can be run directly from within s-tui, so you can monitor the effects of high CPU usage directly. You navigate around the user interface using the Vim direction keys, which allow you to toggle stressed and regular operation and select different temperature sensors, as well as provide a toggle for each chart. You can even output the statistics to a JSON or CSV file with a launch argument. s-tui is a tiny tool that does everything you require, and it's just as good monitoring your local system as it is checking over a remote machine – just be careful that the stress test doesn't cause a remote crash!

Project Website

https://amanusk.github.io/s-tui/

Thanks to being a terminal application, s-tui lets you easily monitor how much power your system is consuming even over a remote connection.

Task management

Taskbook

Soon we'll be able to give up our OpenGL-accelerated desktops entirely and return to the framebuffer from whence we came. It will solves all kinds of problems, from needing to upgrade your machine because you need to run Slack desktop, to being more productive because YouTube isn't nihilistic when watched as ASCII. One thing we won't be short of is tools to keep us productive. Vimwiki is excellent, for example, if you want a quick and easy way to create a small wiki directly from your editing environment (Vim). With a simple shortcut key, you can switch from whatever document you might be editing to your own note and linking environment using simple markdown language. Press Enter on a title, and it becomes a link to a new page where you can continue, and all of this can easily be exported as HTML or accessed directly.

Taskbook is a little like Vimwiki in that is uses a minimal syntax to add and manage notes and tasks. Unlike Vimwiki, it doesn't have a steep learning curve, because you don't need to learn Vim first. Instead, you run it as a single command from the terminal. To add a task, just type tb -t Save for a synthesizer. As your reward, you'll get a little green tick and a quick message to say the task has been added. What's particularly clever is that you can pin tasks to specific "boards," which work like categories or tags. tb -t @music Learn notation will add a task to a "music" board, for instance. Type tb to lists your tasks, or add -i to see them on a creation-date timeline. It's easy to create huge lists of these, but tb is quick and simple enough to make managing and navigating between them a breeze.

Project Website

https://github.com/klauscfhq/taskbook

If you work on the command line, it makes sense to bring as many tools as possible to the same environment.