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Topic: Anyone interested in an ncurses bitcoind fronted? (Read 3698 times)

newbie
Activity: 10
Merit: 0
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
legendary
Activity: 1708
Merit: 1010

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.
hero member
Activity: 490
Merit: 500
Ncurses client would be really cool, as many people using linux and many bitcoin clients will run on servers without X.
sr. member
Activity: 322
Merit: 251
FirstBits: 168Bc
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)
hero member
Activity: 742
Merit: 500
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!
sr. member
Activity: 396
Merit: 250
Send correspondance to GPG key A372E7C6
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."  Grin
sr. member
Activity: 285
Merit: 250
Finally! Smiley
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 Smiley

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.
legendary
Activity: 910
Merit: 1000
Quality Printing Services by Federal Reserve Bank
Finally! Smiley
Good idea and keep us posted. Thank you.
sr. member
Activity: 392
Merit: 251
Hell yeah I'm interested! As a keyboard person I would definitely prefer using the ncurses frontend.
sr. member
Activity: 322
Merit: 251
FirstBits: 168Bc
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.
hero member
Activity: 938
Merit: 1002
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)
hero member
Activity: 616
Merit: 500
Firstbits.com/1fg4i :)
Would be nice to have somthing like this for the N900 as well
hero member
Activity: 812
Merit: 1022
No Maps for These Territories
I'd be interested in an ncurses bitcoind frontend.
Yes, it'd be nice in some cases...
newbie
Activity: 56
Merit: 0
Very nice, I like it!
newbie
Activity: 51
Merit: 0
I'd be interested in an ncurses bitcoind frontend.
newbie
Activity: 29
Merit: 0
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
sr. member
Activity: 252
Merit: 250
I'd like such an interface, too.
sr. member
Activity: 275
Merit: 250
Looks good.
newbie
Activity: 47
Merit: 0
I think it might be really cool. Keep it up, there's never too much nerdness on the world! Smiley
sr. member
Activity: 285
Merit: 250
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.

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