We automatically configure ssh on the servers to auth against our own internal api for serving up the keys. This way, customers can add to authorized_keys and also use our TUI for management as well.
This gives me another thought though, a "server-rendered" CLI. A tiny shim binary that just sends argv to the server, and the server sends back stdout/stderr. Haven't seen anyone try that.
It's meant for inherently server-based CLI's like Github, Stripe, Fly, Heroku, or any other SaaS and can be plugged directly into web frameworks. My thinking is that more companies would ship command-line interfaces if they didn't have to maintain APIs for them, deal with distributing binaries (and all the compatibility issues that come with that), or deal with all the configuration involved in hooking up SSH to their app servers.
It's in beta at the moment, and I'm currently focused on Rails apps to get the ergonomics dialed-in. My goal is to make it possible for people in any web framework to build and ship a CLI to customers in under an hour and never have to touch an API or worry about binary distribution for as long as their CLI exists.
Terminalwire will handle the builds for all the different platforms, signing, etc. so companies can instead focus on shipping their unique features to customers.
I’m also going to ship clients that automatically update to match the version of the client that’s compatible with the server in a way that the client won’t even notice.
Having some my-company.terminalwire.com as the signing identity could work; I bet most SMB wouldn't bat an eye to ship like that.
`Wish` and also `terminal.shop` were both great sources of inspiration. I hope to see many more ssh apps in the future. I'm already working on the next one
I honestly don't get the point of TUIs...
A real command-line interface is extremely useful - it's trivially scriptable, works direct or with ssh, scroll-back buffer logs what happened, commands stay in my shell history, I can copy-paste commands to a friend over chat system, or into shell script, and it's easy for app authors too. Its my first choice for my apps.
If low-color fixed-width character grid is not cutting it, then native app or web app is a great second step, or even intermediate solutions, like generating HTML files from CLI tool and opening them in default browser. You have to invest some effort, but you have infinite ways to design your interface, and it's still in user's familiar environment.
But those charm.sh TUI applications seem utterly useless and highly annoying. They give up all of the terminal advantages: my shell's history is useless, my favorite ways to edit commands does not apply (as they have their own editor), I cannot scroll back and see what the program just printed, I cannot script it, I cannot log it, I cannot search it, I cannot redo the previous action, the color scheme is not the one I've picked... At least with web apps I can parse html and/or hit underlying API directly - no such luck with TUI apps.
At least the good news is that TUI apps are not getting any traction, and I can completely understand why.
lazygit (54k stars on GitHub) and k9s got a lot of traction and are very popular:
There are one or two advantages over regular GUIs, but that's it.
The biggest is probably that they are lightweight since there are no GUI library dependencies (and if there are TUI ones, they are usually much lighter than their GUI sisters). This also means there are fewer (if any) dependencies to distribute compared to a GUI.
The only other advantage I can come up with is that a TUI will have to be usable by keyboard only (in almost all cases). This is not a given for regular GUI libraries.
I'm not a fan of TUIs either. I think the only one I am using regularly is `tig` (https://jonas.github.io/tig/). I guess the reason is that I don't have to remember the git revision list syntax that way and that `tig` allows for easy commit searching with `/` ...
Also, TUI's have their place. I haven't looked much at GUI alternatives, but k9s is really great.
Would also assume that interactive apps are simpler to implement if it's a TUI.
* lf (file manager) * vim * htop * moc and ncmpcpp (music) * emacs (which is its own world)
TUI apps are great for one-time actions that needs feedback, especially having a list of something, filtering it, and applying an action on one or more items.
But, I still like to have a CLI version so I can script any reccuring workflow.
As a useful comment for messh, it looks like you've committed the ssh_server binary file to git; you may want to add that to gitignore, as binary file handling isn't a traditional git strength. I _think_ it's better than it was a decade ago when I last investigated this, but I can see that Pro Git still recommends explicitly setting gitattributes to mark a file as binary https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Attribute...