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Comment by unknown2374 | Hacker News Reader

Google Docs is not for development, perhaps I should have been clearer about that. The vast majority of tools for development, devops, system/network administration are consistent, or at the very least consistent enough that it helps towards making the workflow more productive.

Not all software is suited for the terminal, that should be obvious. Like you would not want to play a graphically intensive game on the terminal because... graphics.

Since you brought it up, what use-case do you have with piping Google docs exactly?

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I mainly brought up Google Docs because it's something that many of us use that breaks us from "living in the terminal". Someone who "lives in the terminal" would want all of Google Doc's functionality, but in a terminal. In theory, I should be able to grep & sed a Google Docs page for some things.

> Not all software is suited for the terminal, that should be obvious

Like wtfutil, the very thing that's linked here on HN???

What exactly is the alternative to the tool linked here? I am really curious to see because I have never come across an open source resource-lite customizable dashboard such as this. As someone who has his entire workflow on the terminal, this tool is of great interest to me.

> I mainly brought up Google Docs because it's something that many of us use that breaks us from "living in the terminal". Someone who "lives in the terminal" would want all of Google Doc's functionality, but in a terminal.

People who live in the terminal does not literally mean that they spend 100% of their time on the terminal fyi. I doubt anyone does in this day and age, I was under the impression that that fact was implied.

> > Not all software is suited for the terminal, that should be obvious

> Like wtfutil, the very thing that's linked here on HN???

IMO the only significance of it running in the terminal is that you can assume it's reasonably performant without digging into comments to see if people are saying 'Cool but Oh God, Electron?'.

If I were creating it, I would be choosing between Electron and ncurses-wrapping library for whatever language I wanted to use. Then I'd choose the ncurses-wrapping library, because, well Oh God Electron.

Sure, it could be a native GUI, but then I'd have to learn about that for every platform I wanted to release on.

Sure, it could be Qt or GTK, but I've only used them once each briefly and in anger, and again, no desire to learn.

Point is it doesn't need to be in the terminal because no you're not going to feed stuff in and redirect its output, but it certainly does it no harm, and the terminal's an easy development target.

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