Such things existed in the pre-GUI-everywhere days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview is probably the most well known example.

If you are not wanting a full windowing OS (just a windowing display) then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tmux may do the job for you in unix-a-like environments, with or without https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byobu_(software). In fact I sometimes have several log monitoring windows open in one tmux screen, essentially a dashboard like this and you describe. Done this way all that is running is console applications: almost any existing console application can work well and there is no need for extra development to interface a new windowing API.

You could use an existing CUI/TUI library to write such a condole-based windowing system, if tmux/similar don't quite do what you are looking for. For example https://github.com/chjj/blessed if node.js is your bag. Similar libraries exist for other languages too (go, .net, ...) - search for "Terminal UI <language>" or "Console UI <language>" and options should pop up.

For a modern *nix equivalent of DESQview take a look at Twin: https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/

Nice. I'll probably stick with tmux+byobu, but I'll have a play with that the sake of play at least! Thanks for the link.

Another commenter has mentioned Python's urwid [0], which is precisely that.

[0] http://urwid.org

This seems more like a python version of curses than a window manager

There are already curses bindings included with python; urwid is intended to be a higher level console UI library (widgets, text input boxes, dialogues, etc).

There's also Cursive if you're doing Rust stuff.

At what point do we just say why not 'install a modern GUI'?

I use TMUX to essentially create what this person has made. It's much more versatile than a GUI for me because I can kill any "widget" and reopen it with altered command line parameters. It's an incredibly useful and productive way to work. And if I realize that I want data that isn't present, I can just split a TMUX pane (or start a new TMUX window) and display it there.

There was a point where it was that simple to run GUI widgets on a desktop, too. The likes of xman and xclock were just that, programs that one could just run and stop.

Such things are not dead! I still use one for my clock (buici-clock) and another to show battery life (xbattbar).

Can you share how you create a certain window/buffer setup on tmux automatically?

tmuxinator

Someone mentioned it a few months back and it greatly simplified my life. You specify your layouts (and tmux will give you the information to copy a current layout). You can then tell it what programs to run in each window of the layout.

So I have a window broken into 5 panes (as an example). The top left runs emacs (via emacsclient) and opens my ledger.org file. The other 4 show various reports I want to see: Current cleared balance, current uncleared balance, current uncleared transactions, future transactions (out to a month), and a running balance sheet across the past several months.

In another two windows I just have a shell and an emacsclient instance (because I live in emacs). Then as I come up with other things I want to see (weather information, summaries of my todos, email inbox (tally at least) I can add new window and pane configurations to my tmuxinator configuration. When I restart it, everything is back as I had it (if I put them in the config).

I haven't done as much coding at home as I'd like lately (and it's all Windows at the office). But I have a couple other tmuxinator configs that will layout several windows and panes for development. Like launch an editor, and have spaces laid out like I want for debuggers and test monitoring scripts. As appropriate to the language and task.

https://github.com/tmuxinator/tmuxinator

For the constantly refreshed display, it's mostly `watch -t <some commands>` (modifying the refresh rate if necessary. `-t` removes the title text from the top of watch so it only shows the command outputs. Which is something it took me way too many years to realize.

I have yet to see a modern GUI that didn't put pretty little animations a higher priority than being modular and configurable and having as much or as little data density as I desire.

Command lines, on the other hand, do it natively if not intuitively.

Have you seen GKrellM? http://gkrellm.srcbox.net/

Their example demonstrates how cluttered the GUI is. I suppose you could change skins to something less gaudy but I bet that winds up looking like a terminal application.

You can set the width to be larger. I have it at 1000px. That makes a for a nice, light and informative status window.

My point was that at some point adding more desktop-like functionality to Terminal you essentially create a GUI.

I could argue that OSX / Ubuntu are modular and configurable and easily allow you to control data density too.

Ultimately it's obviously whatever tool makes you most productive. My comment was more of a flippant observation of the nature of human endeavour.

In my experience, OSX is not modular and configurable out-of-the-box. You need to install plugins.

Ubuntu is the red-headed stepchild of Linux which wants to be Windows. I use it at work. I hate it. I'd rather use Fedora.

> Ubuntu is the red-headed stepchild of Linux which wants to be Windows.

Eh. It wants to be Mac:

- broken alt-tab? Check

- menu bar on top? Check

- dock? Check

- window controls moved to the left? Check

> I use it at work. I hate it.

So do I. But now after they moved to Gnome I can fix the worst usabilty issues.

It still crashes hard once a day despite me trying everything I can think of wrt swap, reserved memory etc. Might just be my RAM sticks though.

> I'd rather use Fedora.

>> I use it at work. I hate it.

> So do I.

Forgot to remove the part about hating it. I don't hate Ubuntu at all, I just question some implementation details.

The mouse. It sucks. The latency too (over long thin pipes). I prefer to live in a textual universe anyways. I can't not use a GUI browser for a lot of things, sadly, and occasionally I end up using an IDE, but as much as possible I use tmux/screen + $EDITOR + cscope + scripts + ... as my UI/IDE. It's just better. It works great over mosh, over SSH, over long thin pipes, over short wide pipes -- it just works. Latency is low, and mouse use nil -- win-win.

EDIT: Also, it's a lot easier to organize and find my way around nested tmuxes than it is to organize tons of windows. Yes: I nest tmuxes.

or you can compromise with an ultra minimalist GUI that runs on top of xorg, such as openbox/fluxbox and similar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openbox

Archbang , which uses openbox, is a good example of a distribution to try in a VM if anyone wants to see an example in action.

Archbang is still around??

It is , to the best of my knowledge, though I am not a big fan of arch. Excellent wiki however. If I were going to run openbox I would install Debian to server like setup and then manually replicate the general idea of crunchbang.

+1 #!

That's an excellent idea! It could be called I don't know... maybe "tmux"? Or "screen"?

Hmm, let's also allow you to edit text in those windows. And it should be extensible, of course. With a dialect of LISP!

We could call it "emacs".

Hah, my first thought when I saw this - looks awesome, but I want to have less standalone programs in my workflow, not more. More than half of those things I already do within Emacs, all it needs is a little bit of elisp to set it up as a dashboard...

or "dvtm"

http://www.brain-dump.org/projects/dvtm/

Yes. Bonus: you can reuse plenty of existing applications.