Command Line Fu

I decided to recreate an old iOS app for fun and nostalgia.

The nostalgia

Believe it or not, but I made iOS apps in 2011. Back then the iPhone was relatively new, and it felt like a new frontier to explore. The web was also incredibly experimental compared to today. Specialty sites were popping up everywhere. "Log your teas with us" and "Check in on your locations with our app" - it was all very confusing and fun. Nowadays everything revolves around a few big players. Less dynamic, and definitely brings with it the usual consequences.

One of the sites I felt drawn to was commandlinefu.com. It was a cool place were people shared their neat command line tricks. As an aspiring developer that was really fun to browse. More than once I thought "how do I do X on the command line?", searched Command Line Fu, and then pieced together a command that did what I was after.

I learnt a lot that way. So when I started hacking together crude apps I started tinkering with their API. And lo and behold - I could suddenly browse their archive in a dedicated interface! I published that one to the App store. It was incredibly rough, but I was proud. Here's what it looked like.

It was alive for two years, along with a few other small apps. They all died sometime during 2013, when they had to be updated to comply with one thing or another. At that point I hadn't touched them in a long time, was focusing on my web development company and had some life issues to focus on. There were no time for "fun" or "experiments", sadly.

Remaking the app

Fast forward to 2024. After Johannes and I made Kontroversiellt I was still on an app dev high. It felt awesome to build a small, fun app and release it into the wild. As part of that journey I had reactivated my Apple developer account - and in it I could see statistics and reviews for my old apps. I remembered the fun I had building them, and started looking into the state of commandlinefu.com after all these years.

Whoah. It still existed! Sure, filled with spam comments, but people still used it to store their commands. And more than that - the archive consisted of 14 000+ commands now.

I couldn't help myself. I had to rebuild the app.

Since I didn't have access to the old codebase (and probably couldn't use it even if I had), I rebuilt the app from scratch. I tried to honor both the original application and the site as much as possible but make it slightly better and more fun to use. I updated the color scheme for better contrast, added favorites (which was something that was requested by several old reviewers) and made a fun typing animation to be used here and there.

I'm quite happy with how it turned out. It feels fun to browse. And you know what? I've actually started using it the same way I did with the old one. Whenever I wonder how to do something on the command line, I search for it in the app. And many times I find something that leads me closer to figure it out.

A nostalgic throwback to a more interesting time and practical? A win in my book.

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