Three Linux command line tools allow you to pretend to be busy

Sometimes you are busy. And sometimes you just need to look busy, like a hacker in a movie. There are some open source tools that do this.

If you've seen spy movies, action movies, or crime films while you're spending time, you'll clearly see the hacker's computer screen in mind. It's like in the Matrix movie, the code-like stream of hexadecimal digits, or rows of fast-moving code.

Perhaps there is a map of the world in the movie, which is filled with flashes of light and some rapidly updated charts. Indispensable, there may also be a 3D rotating geometry. Even all this will show up on a number of ridiculous displays that are completely out of human habits. In the "Swordfish Action" movie, hackers used seven displays.

Of course, those of us in the computer industry suddenly understand that this is totally nonsense. Although many of us have dual monitors (or more), a flashing data dashboard, refreshed data, and conflicting work are often contradictory. Writing code, project management, and system management are different from day-to-day work. For most of the situations we encountered, in order to solve the problems, we needed a lot of thinking. We communicated with the customers to get some research and organization information, and then it was a little knocking code.

However, this is not inconsistent with the effect we want to pursue in the film. Maybe we just want to look "work busy."

Note: Of course, I'm just here. If your company is actually assessing your work based on your busyness, whether you are a blue-collar worker or a white-collar worker, you need to address this work culture urgently. Pretending to be busy is a toxic culture that is bad for companies and employees.

That said, let's find some fun and fill our screens with old-fashioned, meaningless data and code snippets. (Of course, the data may make sense, but it's not in this contextless context.) Of course there are some interesting graphical interface programs for this purpose, such as hackertyper.net or GEEKtyper.com (LCTT) Pretend to be a hacking site) Why not use standard Linux terminal programs? For the older look, consider using a cool retro terminal, which sounds like this: a cool retro terminal program. I will use a cool retro terminal in the screenshot below as it looks really cool.

Genact

Let's look at the first tool, Genact. The principle of Genact is very simple. It is slowly and endlessly looping through a sequence of your choice, allowing your code to "compile" while you're on the go. It's up to you to decide the play order, but it includes tools like the digital currency mining simulator, Composer PHP dependency management tool, kernel compiler, downloader, memory dump and so on by default. One of my favorite is the similar "Simulated City" loading display. So as long as no one checks carefully, you can spend the whole afternoon waiting for your computer to complete the progress bar.

Genact has released versions that support Linux, OS X, and Windows. And its Rust source code is open source on GitHub (following the MIT license).

Hollywood

Hollywood takes a more direct approach. It essentially creates a random number and configuration of split screens in the terminal and starts those seemingly busy applications like htop, directory tree, source code files, etc., and switch it every few seconds. It is organized into a shell script so it can be easily modified on demand.

Hollywood's source code is open sourced on GitHub (follows the Apache 2.0 license).

Blessed-contrib

Blessed-contrib is my personal favorite application. It is not actually a specially designed application for this kind of performance. Instead, it is a demo file for a building library for Node.js-based terminal dashboards. Unlike the other two, I actually used Blessed-contrib's library at work instead of pretending to be busy with work. Because it is a very useful library, and you can use a set of widgets that display information on the command line. At the same time it is easy to populate the virtual data, so it's easy to realize your idea of ​​simulating "war game" on your computer.

The source code for Blessed-contrib is on GitHub (following the MIT license).

Of course, although these tools are easy to use, there are many other ways to enrich your screen. One of the most used tools you see in movies is Nmap, an open source web security scanning tool. In fact, it is widely used as a tool to show Hollywood movies in the hacking computer screen. So Nmap's developers created a page listing some of the movies it appeared in, from "Matrix 2: Reloading," to "Spiriage 3," "Dragon Tattoo Girl," and even "Tiger Long Wei 4".

Of course, you can create your own combination and use a terminal multiplexer (such as screen or tmux) to start any data slicing program you wish to use.