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I want to throw out something I had thought about while deep (deep) into fixing a broken server yesterday and having had a few thousand tabs opened over the cou
by nwienert 5y ago
I want to throw out something I had thought about while deep (deep) into fixing a broken server yesterday and having had a few thousand tabs opened over the course of 24 hours searching for every possible Linux command under the sun.
Here’s what I’d like, and it’s not really autocomplete. It’s more of a spotlight/Alfred combined with documentation and status panes.
Imagine someone frantically debugging two things: why a lot of their server is broken, and also why a disk is suddenly going slow but only sometimes, and only within docker. In fact, go ahead and just set up an Ubuntu server, run a small stack on it, plug in a slightly failing HDD, and then mount it to /var, wiping out the folder (and then only recovering part of it). Then, try and fix it using only Google.
I want a binary I can install that acts as a spotlight that lets me fix it without needing to leave the CLI. It’s not autocomplete, it needs to be much better. I could see a bin that basically pulls up a full screen search, where I can type natural language and see not just commands but specific usages. If it used data from StackOverflow that’d be great. If it also just helped debug the system health that’d be even better.
Anyway, I went on this little odyssey over the weekend and I’ve convinced myself something like this would be incredibly valuable. There’s a real cost switching to the browser and waiting for long network times. Plus history | grep + copy pasting is a lot slower than if I had a HUD with fuzzy search across historical commands + a database of all useful commands.
Of course once you add in the cost of supporting every platform it gets enormous, but then again you’d have really specific info on the platform to make it much easier to customize.