Blessed-contrib
Version: GIT Web: https://github.com/ yaronn/blessed-contrib
blessed-contrib is an ‘activity simulator’ much like Hollywood Technodrama from Ubuntu’s Dustin Kirkland (see LXF195). This is an absolutely useless, fun and utterly brilliant amusement app intended to imitated mission-control-like dashboards similar to those seen in the background of Hollywood movies.
Blessed-contrib is built using a completely different stack of technologies to Hollywood Technodrama that mainly use Node.js. The results look deceivingly serious and technical. Here we have some charts, graphs, meters and of course a beautiful world map of fake servers, all rendered using ASCII symbols.
It fits in a single terminal window and doesn’t require terminal multiplexing. Resizing the window makes the content stretch accordingly, so you may want to find the optimal size for your display; a maximised Blessedcontrib window on a 4K display looks rather empty, whereas making it too small truncates some text.
Suprisingly, Blessed-contrib needs only few dependencies in order to draw all that beauty. You only need a recent Node.js installation with the npm package manager. Navigate to the directory with the application contents and run:
$ npm install
That’s it. Now run your hot steaming dashboard simulator:
$ node ./examples/dashboard.js
There are several .js files inside the examples
directory, enabling you to run certain parts of the dashboard separately.