Anyone interested in an ncurses bitcoind fronted?

[Sp0tter]

I am throwing together a little ncurses fronted for bitcoind (or any fork) because it fits nicely into my xmonad desktop without that harsh graphical background of the gui cilent, but quicker to use than typing commands.  

Is anyone else interested in this?  I just started today, if anyone is interested I can throw it up on github as soon as its usable.  I dont know if this already exists or not, I didn't really search for one.

[d33tah]

I think it might be really cool. Keep it up, there's never too much nerdness on the world!

[DannyM]

Looks good.

[ovidiusoft]

I'd like such an interface, too.

[J.P. Larocque]

I run Bitcoin as a daemon on my laptop, and because building the GUI on stock Debian is a chore (and I guess I can't be bothered to take a look at the possible RPC-based frontends), I use bitcoin through RPC calls on the command line through a wrapper script I named bitcoin (with the actual Bitcoin binaries living outside PATH):

Code:

#!/bin/bash

set -e

# Avoid accidentally starting the server.
if [ "$#" -eq 0 ]; then
	set help
fi

exec sudo sudo -u bitcoind ~bitcoind/bin/bitcoind "$@"

This of course makes a lot of assumptions about my system: that Bitcoin is restricted to the bitcoind system account, the location of the binary, and so on.  Adjust to suit your needs.

Reading the output of listtransactions is not pleasant.  More interesting to this topic and building upon the trivial bitcoin script is a Python script I wrote to print transactions in a tabular format.

• BTC amounts are converted to USD in a separate column
• Separate actual and available account balances are tracked and printed (due to transaction confirmation and generation maturity times).
• The decimal point lines up correctly.  Compare:

Code:

   +9.87654321   -vs-   +9.87654321
+1234.5                 +1234.5

Example output:

Code:

Time                 Conf.  Amt. BTC     Bal. BTC    Amt. USD  Bal. USD

                                         0                     0       
  Initial balance

2011-06-10T20:28:38  15752  +0.52        0.52        +2.51     2.51    
  Received with 1GFiqyGUYpMxD2xummYMMXd2BEWyLTHom5

...snipped...

2011-06-29T02:23:57  11873  -1.62        0.01840998  -7.84     0.08    
  Sent to 1FEEwKSGutzbz5be3YE1mjjd3wCFCRognN

2011-06-29T02:23:57  11873  -0.001       0.01740998  -0.00     0.08    
  Fee for above transaction

...snipped...

2011-07-27T21:03:02  7273   +0.00009596  0.03053736  +0.00     0.14    
  Generated

                                         0.03053736            0.14    
  Final balance

(Final/available balances combined to one line since in this case they are the same.)

There are some rough edges: the table formatting code is heinous, a request to MtGox is made on each execution for the exchange rate, there's currently no paging or limitation on the number of output rows, the fiat currency shown is hard-coded for USD (get_mtgox_price()), and it assumes the presence of a bitcoin command which takes RPC arguments and prints a JSON response (bitcoin_request() could easily be adjusted to use a different command name, or to make a JSON-RPC request directly).  Python 2.6 or higher (prior to 3) required.

If anyone is interested, the code is available here: http://www.thoughtcrime.us/software/etc/bitcoin-transactions.py

[Valhalla1]

I'd be interested in an ncurses bitcoind frontend.

[naturallaw]

Very nice, I like it!

[wumpus]

I'd be interested in an ncurses bitcoind frontend.

Yes, it'd be nice in some cases...

[TiagoTiago]

Would be nice to have somthing like this for the N900 as well

[memvola]

Would be nice to have somthing like this for the N900 as well

+1 (Someone had built bitcoind for N900, I've been running it but keeping all the blockchain is kind of a pain. Also, are there binaries for 0.4?)

Either way, a well maintained ncurses frontend would be pretty cool (with wallet encryption and whatnot), I'd prefer that over the current one (yeah, for my xmonad desktop as well, but also for running under screen). I sent a small donation your way, Sp0tter. (to 1MWD2aAQYMUNBB2sBcMv8vGp43q4BcA7w5)

[netrin]

I also think this is great and would try to help. Please publish the git repo. If possible, I would like to see small utilities in the unix tradition that individually work well, are easier to maintain, and can be chained to make better customized scripts and work flows.

[JohnDoe]

Hell yeah I'm interested! As a keyboard person I would definitely prefer using the ncurses frontend.

[EskimoBob]

Finally!
Good idea and keep us posted. Thank you.

[Sp0tter]

Finally!
Good idea and keep us posted. Thank you.

Alrighty,  I have been working on a gox bot but will get back to this project soon since there is interest

I will post here when I have a beta ready to test, and add a section for it on my website http://allchains.info at that time.

[Andrew Bitcoiner]

I admit that at first I laughed, "who on earth needs ncurses for bitcoind?" but then I saw your picture and thought "oh, very nice." 

[Red Emerald]

Looks awesome. I'm setting up a hardened little server with just the bitcoin client and sshd running.  I have been using X11 forwarding to open the GUI on my local machine, but it would be nice to not need xorg.

Throw it on github!

[netrin]

I'd like to see a little microlinux server with ncurses client packed into 10 mb + (well, we need to do something about this blockchain)

[pent]

Ncurses client would be really cool, as many people using linux and many bitcoin clients will run on servers without X.

[MoonShadow]

Is anyone else interested in this?

Not only am I interested, I've an old thread that actully calls for exactly this.  Alternatively, a set of command line POSIX tools that can replicate functions of the bitcoind itself are desired.  For example, a CL tool that can create a transaction from a local wallet.dat and then pipe that transaction to a file, another that can pipe in that file and interact with the bitcoin p2p network, another that can pipe received blocks to a file, and another that can pipe those block files into a local bitcoind as if it was connected to a network node directly.  These are the minimum tools necessary to build a completely network isolated bitcoind, unreachable from the Internet by any other method than a USB-drive sneakernet.  This is one lower tech way of ensuring a secure bitcoin savings account that doesn't touch the Internet ever.

[zoktar]

I am throwing together a little ncurses fronted for bitcoind (or any fork) because it fits nicely into my xmonad desktop without that harsh graphical background of the gui cilent, but quicker to use than typing commands.  

Is anyone else interested in this?  I just started today, if anyone is interested I can throw it up on github as soon as its usable.  I dont know if this already exists or not, I didn't really search for one.

http://allchains.info/img/client.png
[/quote

So many altcoin qt clients now. And i don't trust most of my computing locations, nor any online wallets. A secure shell with tmux/screen ncurses clients would be extreemly nice

If you have started this or you know of such a project please do tell! I have not found any ncurses or otherwise terminal client.]

Edit: ofcourse as usual I find one right after the post. termcoin on githib