I've been dreaming with a sci-fi world where at some point the web get's so awful, that a small group splits to an alternate hypertext reality that is only text based.
I dunno. I have little problem with images etc. The problem i have is the attempts to "app-ify" by turning every site into a GUI via JS.
The initial idea of the web as a source of linked static documents were fine. Heck, even early CGI sites may have been fine. It was AJAX(?) that brought the madness.
And btw, late gen terminals from DEC could show images (and perhaps even videos by abusing the protocol).
Some people keep Gopher alive, apparently -- so maybe that's where survivors will take refuge after the JavaScript ad tracking apocalypse finally comes.
In the post-JavaScript apocalyptic nightmare, the few remaining working terminals will be green-on-black CRTs with nuclear launch instructions burned in the screens. Gopher is a good fit.
While I'm super happy with today's web technologies, I think there would be indeed room for an alternative, typography centered approach that would dare to try new paradigms.
The crucial thing is to avoid reinventing teletext :)
It's pretty great to see so many different takes on these visual prompts! Going through the source, it looks pretty similar to an early version of one of my projects - have you ran into any issues with chyzer/readline? I can't remember the exact reason I had to ditch it, but I think there were problems with its support for Windows
I think of Emacs as a program with a great text interface. I think that something like this should be easily done in Emacs. However, I don't think this is the case today, as per some research I've done this summer. Anyone has ideas on what set of packages could be utilized with elisp in order to achieve rich UI elements for emacs?
I'd recommend people also check out ishell https://github.com/abiosoft/ishell
I've used it in a project before and absolutely loved the API + autocomplete functionality.
I've published a package that exposes a few convenience methods written using it, including a cool one for printing a table (which detects the width of the terminal window and hides extra columns automatically). Check it out https://github.com/fabiospampinato/inquirer-helpers
It's the C library behind whiptail, a reimplementation of dialog, which is a cli app for making menus. Incidentally, dialog is usually what you see when you get a semi-gui install with many Linux distributions.
Being C, you can use it with just about everything.
While not quite the same, the REPL of the Julia programming language supports modes as plugins. Out of the box there is the Julia mode for writing julia code, shell mode for shell commands and help mode for getting help on functions. But I've seen lots of interesting ways of extending this.
E.g. one of the debuggers for Julia, Gallium simply adds some new modes. So you can be in stepping-through-code-mode and then at any time switch back to Julia mode and inspect variables at that point in the execution stack.
Another mode is a package mode being developed for the new Julia package manager. So when adding, removing, updating, creating etc packages you can go into package mode and get behavior relevant to working with packages.
I had the idea of creating a mode for a board game, e.g. a Settlers of Catan mode, which is focused on issuing commands relevant to that game.
