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KN-86 Deckline

terminals-are-sexy

What it is

Section titled “What it is”

terminals-are-sexy is a long-running curated “awesome list” of terminal-adjacent software: terminal emulators, multiplexers, TUI libraries and apps, shells, command-line tools, dotfile collections, blogs, books. The list is large and has aged in spots (some entries point at abandoned or deprecated projects); the value is the discovery surface, not the curation freshness.

For KN-86 this entry serves as a “further reading” appendix — the long list of TUI-adjacent projects worth at least knowing about as KN-86 evolves past Batch 4. The most directly KN-86-relevant items pulled out below.

KN-86-relevant items from the list

Section titled “KN-86-relevant items from the list”

Pulled by direct review of the list, filtered to items that would be useful as further reading specifically for the KN-86 build / inspiration corpus:

TUI applications worth knowing about

Section titled “TUI applications worth knowing about”
  • cointop — terminal cryptocurrency price tracker; similar UX shape to mop for a different domain
  • glances — system monitor TUI; comparable to NetWatch at a smaller scope
  • htop / bashtop / bpytop — process viewers; canonical references for “dense data update at refresh rate”
  • ranger — file manager TUI with vim-style navigation; structural reference for KN-86’s cart manifest browsing
  • fzf — fuzzy finder; reference for command-bar completion idioms
  • asciinema — terminal session recorder; useful for KN-86 cart demos and bug reports
  • lazygit / tig — git TUIs; reference for “wrap a complex domain in an approachable keyboard surface”
  • vifm — file manager with vim keybindings; another ranger sibling
  • mc (Midnight Commander) — the original two-pane file manager; historical reference

Terminal emulators worth knowing about

Section titled “Terminal emulators worth knowing about”
  • Alacritty / Kitty / WezTerm / Ghostty — modern GPU-accelerated terminals; relevant to the KN-86 desktop emulator’s choice of host terminal during cart-author dev
  • iTerm2 — macOS terminal with image-protocol support; useful for cart-author dev workflows that need pixel-precision rendering
  • st (suckless) — minimal terminal emulator; reference for what “minimal” means in this domain

Shells / multiplexers

Section titled “Shells / multiplexers”
  • tmux — multiplexer; reference for session-management UX KN-86 doesn’t need on-device but might in dev tooling
  • fish / zsh — modern shells; reference for completion + history UX

TUI libraries (already covered elsewhere in the inspiration corpus)

Section titled “TUI libraries (already covered elsewhere in the inspiration corpus)”

Resources

Section titled “Resources”
  • awesome-cli-apps — adjacent curated list, similar curation gap caveats
  • command-line-text-processing — book-length resource on command-line text manipulation

Key takeaways for KN-86

Section titled “Key takeaways for KN-86”
  • Use as a discovery surface, not a current-state reference. The list is large and old; expect dead links and deprecated projects. Treat it as a starting point for “I want a TUI app for X; what already exists?” rather than as an authoritative inventory.
  • No single takeaway worth promoting. The value here is the long tail of projects that are almost-but-not-quite worth a dedicated entry — items like cointop, glances, ranger, htop. None of them rise to the level of a Batch-X north star, but together they sketch the broader TUI ecosystem KN-86 is shipping into.
  • CC0 license = freely citable and quotable. The list itself is public domain. KN-86 documentation can pull items directly without attribution concerns (though attribution to the list’s curator, Nikolaos Kamarinakis, is the right ethical move).

Image

Section titled “Image”

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Notes

Section titled “Notes”
  • Light reference. Cross-link this entry from the inspiration index as the “further reading” pointer.
  • Worth re-scanning quarterly during KN-86 active development. New entries land; old ones get pruned. The curation isn’t continuous but it’s not abandoned either.
  • The terminal-emulator section is the most KN-86-relevant slice if/when the desktop emulator needs to pick a recommended host terminal for cart-author development. Likely answer: Ghostty or WezTerm (modern, fast, image-protocol support).