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Hi! Happy to see explainshell on HN again, thanks for all the compliments! I agree about large commands being hard to follow. I tried solving this by adding th

by idank 13y ago

Hi! Happy to see explainshell on HN again, thanks for all the compliments! I agree about large commands being hard to follow. I tried solving this by adding the ability to navigate between commands. Right now clicking the command takes you to a page that displays that command options, but I can change it to the equivalent of navigating to it with the arrows at the top. There might be something better to do UI wise, though.

brandall10 13y ago
Hi, I love this. I bookmarked it and plan to use this often. Possible additions: - Something that users of the service could add commands to and the community could up vote for grading on technical difficulty. - Also a "shell command of the day" type of mailer service would be amazing :)
- idank 13y ago
  I can scan the access logs for the top explained commands, and show those on the home page (although that will probably only further increase their popularity ;).
  - JonnieCache 13y ago
    Weight them by a power of their age or something like that.
  - robryk 13y ago
    You can also count how often they are requested from the links on the home page. Granted, the additional popularity will probably cause people to share those more often.
- vram22 13y ago
  > Also a "shell command of the day" type of mailer service would be amazing :) See: https://mobile.twitter.com/climagic https://mobile.twitter.com/climagic http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse
shawndrost 13y ago
Put the command in a sticky header.
err4nt 13y ago
You made ExplainShell? If so great job. I tried some of my favorites `$ du -sh | sort -nr` and `$ grep -nr` and found the output very smart. I second the idea in here that the command should somehow stay visible on screen as you scroll down, but is had an even crazier idea: what if you translated a command into paragraph form at the top as a summary? I might explain `$ grep -nr` to another person as: "search recursively within all files and subdirectories in the current folder and display the results with line numbers" or I might describe `$ du -sh | sort -nr` as ”display the disk used by files and folders in the current directory using human-readable file sizes and sort the output from largest to smallest" Your tool provides all of this information already, I wonder what it would take to get it that final step to put it into laymans terms while still showing the breakdown of the actual command (which is truly the only way to learn to use it). Congrats on making such a great tool, I can't wait to tell my friends tomorrow :)
- roryhughes 13y ago
  A friend and I are working on a project that not only does what you just described but also allows to go from any programming language to any spoken language (not just shell to english). We will accomplish much of it with the help of the community who can both add natural language representations of code and also help write programs that will enable more programming languages to be explained. It should be released in the coming weeks...(hopefully)
  - err4nt 13y ago
    Oh sweet! How can I stay in the loop? I can't wait to see this in action once you have a release :)
    - roryhughes 13y ago
      Hopefully when we post it on HN it will get similar kind of popularity as this post. Otherwise you can follow me on twitter https://twitter.com/RoryDHughes https://twitter.com/RoryDHughes
nikhilalmeida 13y ago
Maybe add the ability to expand and minimize explanations like the ones used in code editors to minimize blocks of code. Love the tool

by idank 13y ago

brandall10 13y ago

Hi, I love this. I bookmarked it and plan to use this often. Possible additions: - Something that users of the service could add commands to and the community could up vote for grading on technical difficulty. - Also a "shell command of the day" type of mailer service would be amazing :)

idank 13y ago
I can scan the access logs for the top explained commands, and show those on the home page (although that will probably only further increase their popularity ;).
- JonnieCache 13y ago
  Weight them by a power of their age or something like that.
- robryk 13y ago
  You can also count how often they are requested from the links on the home page. Granted, the additional popularity will probably cause people to share those more often.
vram22 13y ago
> Also a "shell command of the day" type of mailer service would be amazing :) See: https://mobile.twitter.com/climagic https://mobile.twitter.com/climagic http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse

shawndrost 13y ago

Put the command in a sticky header.

err4nt 13y ago

You made ExplainShell? If so great job. I tried some of my favorites `$ du -sh | sort -nr` and `$ grep -nr` and found the output very smart. I second the idea in here that the command should somehow stay visible on screen as you scroll down, but is had an even crazier idea: what if you translated a command into paragraph form at the top as a summary? I might explain `$ grep -nr` to another person as: "search recursively within all files and subdirectories in the current folder and display the results with line numbers" or I might describe `$ du -sh | sort -nr` as ”display the disk used by files and folders in the current directory using human-readable file sizes and sort the output from largest to smallest" Your tool provides all of this information already, I wonder what it would take to get it that final step to put it into laymans terms while still showing the breakdown of the actual command (which is truly the only way to learn to use it). Congrats on making such a great tool, I can't wait to tell my friends tomorrow :)

roryhughes 13y ago
A friend and I are working on a project that not only does what you just described but also allows to go from any programming language to any spoken language (not just shell to english). We will accomplish much of it with the help of the community who can both add natural language representations of code and also help write programs that will enable more programming languages to be explained. It should be released in the coming weeks...(hopefully)
- err4nt 13y ago
  Oh sweet! How can I stay in the loop? I can't wait to see this in action once you have a release :)
  - roryhughes 13y ago
    Hopefully when we post it on HN it will get similar kind of popularity as this post. Otherwise you can follow me on twitter https://twitter.com/RoryDHughes https://twitter.com/RoryDHughes

nikhilalmeida 13y ago

Maybe add the ability to expand and minimize explanations like the ones used in code editors to minimize blocks of code. Love the tool