13 comments

  • mh- 2 hours ago
    This is great. Small, trivial suggestion: the gif that loops in the README should pause on the screen w/ the output for a few seconds longer - it disappears (restarts) too quickly to take in all of the output.
    • rzzzt 19 minutes ago
      Also the pause button seems to take the GIF back to its first frame, then resume from where I paused... either that or I need a good sleep.
    • Neywiny 2 hours ago
      I would also argue it shouldn't be a gif. It's nice that it shows the command is fast I guess but it's one command that's still visible in the final frame. Not as bandwidth efficient and agreed I can't read it all in time
    • stavros 2 hours ago
      https://github.com/charmbracelet/vhs is a really good utility for automatically making these gifs.
      • sestep 1 hour ago
        I'm a big fan of svg-term myself: https://github.com/marionebl/svg-term-cli
        • stavros 1 hour ago
          Hm, very interesting! This only converts asciinema recordings, though, right? It doesn't automatically record anything?
          • sestep 59 minutes ago
            If you have asciinema already installed then you can invoke it through svg-term like this!

              svg-term --command 'cowsay hey there'
            
            But that has the aforementioned issues about not pausing enough, so I usually just record with asciinema first and then invoke svg-term.
  • pranshuparmar 9 hours ago
    A quick note on scope: this is not meant to replace existing monitoring or observability tools. It’s designed for those moments when you SSH into a box and need to quickly understand “why is this running” without digging through configs, cron jobs, or service trees manually.

    Happy to answer questions or adjust direction based on feedback.

    • dcminter 5 hours ago
      This is very clever. I've often needed to figure out what some running process was actually for (e.g. because it just started consuming a lot of some limited resource) but it never occurred to me that one could have a tool to answer that question. Well done.

      ---

      Edit: Ah, ok, I slightly misunderstood - skimmed the README too quickly. I thought it was also explaining what the process did :D Still a clever tool, but thought it went a step further.

      Perhaps you should add that though - combine Man page output with a database of known processes that run on various Linux systems and a mechanism for contributing PRs to extend that database...? Unlesss it's just me that often wants to know "what the fsck does /tmp/hax0r/deeploysketchyd actually do?" :P

  • DougN7 2 hours ago
    What does this means for context: “Git repository name and branch” Does this mean it detects if something is running from within a git repository folder? Couldn’t find the code that checked this.
  • properbrew 51 minutes ago
    This is extremely useful, will be added to the toolbox. Thanks for sharing.
  • techsystems 3 hours ago
    I'm really loving this!

    'Responsibility chain' will become a trendy phrase.

  • be_erik 2 hours ago
    If you're looking to build and install this from source, here's the incantation:

    CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -ldflags "-X main.version=dev -X main.commit=$(git rev-parse --short HEAD) -X 'main.buildDate=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)'" -o witr ./cmd/witr

    Call me old-fashioned, but if there's an install.sh, I would hope it would prefer the local src over binaries.

    Very cool utility! Simple tools like these keep me glued to the terminal. Thank you!

  • 4ggr0 5 hours ago
    i definitely see the use for it, lots of moments where i wonder how or why something was started.
  • TheCraiggers 4 hours ago
    This is amazing. Thank you for sharing this.

    Do you have any qualms about me making an entry in the AUR for this?

    • giancarlostoro 3 hours ago
      Im not the author but I would love for an AUR made for this ;)

      My favorite thing about arch is how insanely quickly AURs pop up for interesting tools.

  • wyldfire 1 hour ago
    `ps uaxf` gives me pretty similar output.
  • q2dg 4 hours ago
    pstree doesn't answer the why?
  • dontdieych 4 hours ago
    Nice and installed then starred.
  • Saris 5 hours ago
    This looks very handy to have around!
  • canxerian 5 hours ago
    Great idea!