Less Distracting Command-line Versions of Modern Applications

Tate Galbraith
Geek Culture
Published in
4 min readMar 25, 2021

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Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

Living on the command-line is both a blessing and a curse. You might not get all the fancy visual elements of a slick Electron app, but what you lose in beauty you gain in speed and efficiency. Spending 100% of your time on the command-line might not be a possibility in today’s bloated web and desktop application environment, but you can get pretty damn close.

Stripping away the shiny wrappers on popular apps and using a plain, albeit clunky, CLI version removes a few distractions. Sending an email or Slack message doesn’t become an hour-long adventure into choosing the best formatting or ensuring you’ve included the most hilarious GIF.

In this article we are going to peel back the beautiful, elegant apps and reduce them to pure, basic functionality. Send emails, browse the web and listen to music without ever leaving the command-line.

Slack — slack-term

Using slack-term.

Slack. Love it or hate it you’re probably using it or have in the past. This messaging platform is ubiquitous. A lot of companies use this not only as a simple messaging platform but for more complex functions like alerting and…

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Tate Galbraith
Geek Culture

Software Engineer @mixhalo & die-hard Rubyist. Amateur Radio operator with a love for old technology. Tweet at me: https://twitter.com/@Tate_Galbraith