https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html

This paper explores a novel interface to a system administration task. Instead of creating an interface de novo for the task, the author modified a popular computer game, Doom, to perform useful work. The game was chosen for its appeal to the target audience of system administrators.

The Doom process manager (PSDoom) is a modification of the game Doom [8] that displays representations of the processes running on a machine. Rather than using standard text-mode UNIX tools to view and manipulate processes, one surveys and shoots at a room full of bloodthirsty mutants, as shown in Figure 1. When a user starts PSDoom, currently running processes are instantiated as “process monsters” in a single room in a “dungeon.” These monsters have their associated process’ name and id printed on them. The program periodically polls the operating system to add newly-created processes to the game. The user may choose to view the processes from a balcony above the room, as shown in Figure 2, or to enter the room to interact with them. If the user inflicts a wound upon a process monster, the corresponding process’ priority is lowered to give it fewer CPU cycles. When the monster accumulates enough damage and is killed, the associated process is also killed.

More verbose, but also more emotive:

$ killall -KILL kitten

That’d be equivalent. Emacs has a number of way to input arguments to functions.

$ git clone https://github.com/sharkdp/vivid.git
$ cd vivid && cargo build && cd ..
$ grep -v "^  nord" <vivid/themes/nord.yml >theme-template.yml
$ csplit theme-template.yml /^colors:/1 -f "theme-template"
$ sudo apt install cimg-dev
$ git clone https://github.com/ImageProcessing-ElectronicPublications/palette.git
$ cd palette
$ mkdir build && cd build && cmake ../ && cmake --build .
$ wget https://titis.org/uploads/posts/2022-01/1641518772_4-titis-org-p-nude-breasts-close-up-erotika-4.jpg
$ convert -crop 2298x1041+1878+1560 1641518772_4-titis-org-p-nude-breasts-close-up-erotika-4.jpg cropped.png
$ ./build/cpluspalette cropped.png 16 -k|tail -n+2|tr -s '[:cntrl:]' '\n'|sed s/^.//|awk "/.*/ {print \"  nord\"NR-1\": '\"\$0\"'\"}" >../titty-colors.txt
$ export LS_COLORS=$(../vivid/target/debug/vivid generate <(cat ../theme-template00 ../titty-colors.txt ../theme-template01))
$ clear
$ ls

Works for that too.

The default ones are the same as in emacs, so if you know emacs, you probably know them too, but Control-U kills (roughly equivalent to “cut” for non-emacs people) from the cursor to the beginning of the line, which emacs doesn’t do; that defaults to something like M-- M-1 C-k in emacs.

If you’re a vi person, you can do set -o vi and use vi functionality. Hit Esc to go into vi-style command mode.

If you haven’t used them before, there’s also ! and ^.

! invokes the last command starting with the following string.

^ searches for the last command containing the first string, replaces that string with the second, and invokes that.

$ ls *.mp4
Episode_One.mp4  Episode_Two.mp4
$ !l
ls *.mp4
Episode_One.mp4  Episode_Two.mp4
$ ^mp4^mp3
ls *.mp3
music.mp3
$

You can list your aliases in bash pretty readily.

$ alias
alias emacs='emacs --no-site-file'
alias ls='ls --color=tty -v'
$

CDE

Oh, could be. Looks like CDE and MWM looked the same.

I mean, you can build a render farm on a single Raspberry Pi if you want, technically.

But the the requirements for a server that “does it all” remains a mystery to me.

“All” can include anything. I mean, you can include a home parallel compute render farm that will cost millions of dollars.

You’re going to have to narrow it a bit down. You can have people maybe suggest some of the things that they use their systems for. Maybe it’s hosting services for a cell phone that some people use cloud-based services for. Maybe it’s home automation. Maybe it’s a webserver. Maybe it’s AI image generation.

EDIT: To put it another way, a self-hosted server is just a computer, often without a monitor and keyboard directly attached, that you have in your physical possession. The range of things that that might be used for and capabilities it might have is really broad. It’s like saying “I want a vehicle. What is a vehicle that can do everything?” I mean, that might be a bicycle or a three-trailer road train, depending upon what you’re going for.

The artist:

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/EV2ooN

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/9e1rgy

I used the thing here a while back to take a screenshot of running gopher on some of the remaining gopher servers in gopherspace (note that the sdf.org guys shown here also run a lemmy server, nicely linking the past and today). Its default settings in amber were a not-wildly-unreasonable match for some of the VT terminals connected to a VAX/VMS system that I used in the 1990s. More noise added by default, but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a replica to that era that one’s likely to see short of getting an actual CRT VT terminal and plonking it on your serial port (well, these days, probably a USB-to-serial adapter).

EDIT: Apparently this guy set up docker images on Debian to emulate old computing environments and then rigged that to a VT420 and ran gopher on that:

if I can (and I expect so) change the background to the aperture logo

You cannot in the current mainline branch, but it looks like someone has a pull request open for the past couple months to add a background image.

https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term/pull/868

In terms of window decorations, looks like twm with default settings. Standard window manager to ship with what is now Xorg.

EDIT: For emacs, those are also default colors, I think, for at least some point. X11 color names HarvestWheat and ForestGreen, if memory serves aright.

EDIT2: No, that’s probably not a graphical emacs instance, because the title is “sh”. They’re probably running sh and then running console emacs (or vim or something else, I guess, can configure either to look like that) and don’t have their shell set up to pass the escape sequences to tell the virtual terminal program to update the window title.

EDIT3: Also, the color’s the default twm color, but that’s not the default twm decorations. That’s…damn, I can’t remember the name of that widget set.

goes poking around

Motif. And apparently mwm used Motif widgets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_(software)

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

Just out of curiosity, because every time I see your username, I wonder…does your username derive from Zork or from the Parahumans series?

One eye-candy thing it can’t do is animated cursor movement. Not sure how to describe this, but basically, when the cursor moves, you draw a trail behind it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/KittyTerminal/comments/1g7vkwt/neovide_like_cursor_animation_in_kitty_terminal/

According to that, KiTTY got support for it six months ago.

EDIT: That being said, that’s not really “retro”, so might be out-of-scope for the project.

looks at a screenshot of neofetch

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/fetches_all.jpg

It could support Unicode distro logos. Or sixel. Or Kitty Graphics Protocol. It could try rendering text using 24-bit color, rather than just the 16 ANSI colors.

EDIT: Looking at the fastfetch (1) man page, it looks like it supports Sixel, Kitty Graphics Protocol, and 24-bit color, though given that it doesn’t use them on foot, I assume that it doesn’t try to detect terminals that support them and use them by default.

Doesn’t ship with Unicode distro logos either, but it apparently supports user-specified logo files, so I imagine that one could obtain a Unicode logo from somewhere and use that.

EDIT2: Yeah, doesn’t detect and auto-use them on kitty either.

EDIT3: Oh, wait. neofetch has to support some kind of graphics protocol too, even if it doesn’t use it for the distro logos, since you can see it using it for the sexy anime girl on the example image on the GitHub project page:

The consensus middle ground was an anime catgirl.

You’re right…just checked, updated my comment, and then saw yours. :-)