george

TUI sort of a "control center" that nobody needs at all for your Debian desktop because why the hell not. One python process (stdlib + urwid only, ~30 MB RAM, ~0% idle CPU) that opens fullscreen at X login and gives you:

george in X

george in a tty:

• LAUNCH column — config-driven buttons that launch whatever is on your $PATH (your own scripts, apps, system tools). Configure in buttons.toml (a portable demo ships; copy it and point GEORGE_CONFIG at your own copy to keep your personal button set out of the repo). Press r to reload.
• SYSTEM & STATUS center — live CPU / MEM / LOAD / NET / DISK / BATT / TEMP panes read straight from /proc + sysfs every 2 s (left of the block) beside the scrolling status log (right). Arrow onto a pane and press enter to open the matching tool (iotop, iftop, ncdu, btop...) in a new terminal; mapping is in [click] of buttons.toml. Keyboard-first: mouse input is disabled, arrows + enter drive everything.
• SHOWCASE + THIS BOX lower center — left block is a wicked handy scratch space that you can save as a note or send off as an email, and, you may keep doing it ([showcase] lines in buttons.toml) — and the buffer persists: it is saved as you type and restored at the next start, so a stray q (or a machine that fell asleep on you) never costs your notes; right block is a fastfetch-style THIS BOX readout (PC, OS + kernel + uptime, WM + GTK theme + package count, init, date, load, processes, memory, partitions) — all built from george's own /proc + /sys + /etc reads, zero subprocesses, same numbers fastfetch would show. The channels themselves are plain launcher buttons in the LAUNCH column: CH 57 plays random public-domain Leave It to Beaver episodes, CH 59 a silent-comedy/cartoons/oddball-docs lineup ([tv] / [funny] in buttons.toml; the lineup maps are in tv/*.m3u, regenerate with tools/mktv.py / tools/update-funny.py). Each chip opens mpv in its own separate window (shuffled, looping, tiled ~60% top-right so george stays visible behind it — f fullscreens it if you want) — alt-tab back to george whenever, close the mpv window to stop. No docked or embedded video, no focus tricks, nothing for george to babysit. Listen, I know this is weird, but, random Leave it to Beaver episodes is hilarious so it's in and it's staying. The george window itself starts undecorated and maximized if you give openbox a rule for it (<application class="georges"> <decor>no</decor><maximized>true</maximized></application> in ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml) — the maximized part also covers a second launcher run attaching to the running session (an attached window has no george process inside it to place itself).
• Built-in terminal — one alacritty window is split by tmux into two panes: george on top, a real shell below (bin/george does this; Ctrl+t, wired as a tmux no-prefix binding, flips focus between them, or click a pane). The terminal pane runs your shell in a loop that never exits, so Ctrl+D, exit, or even a failed command followed by Ctrl+D just gives a fresh prompt (a dirty exit adds a 1-second anti-spin pause) — the terminal cannot take itself or george down. Enter the terminal with Ctrl+t or a click; come back to the dashboard the same way. The ▶ TERM chip in the LAUNCH column (same row style as the radio and channel chips) focuses the terminal, respawns it if it somehow died, or creates it if it's gone — no keybind to remember; killed panes stay visible (tmux remain-on-exit) so the chip always has something to bring back. A console (tty) george gets the same terminal and loses the chip: tmux needs no X — the console itself is the terminal — so bin/george on a bare tty builds the same two-pane session (george 70% top, shell 30% bottom, Ctrl+t flips, remain-on-exit), under its own session name so an X george on the same tmux server is never touched. No ▶ TERM chip there: the pane is built in, the shell loop never dies (Ctrl+D just gives a fresh prompt), and the only way to kill it is a deliberate tmux kill-pane/kill -9 — whose recovery is simply quitting and relaunching (the launcher sees the dead pane and rebuilds). george quits by killing its own tmux session (clean exits only; a hard kill leaves a corpse the next launch rebuilds over). term: buttons work on the console too — the script runs in george's pane region while the terminal pane survives underneath. gui: buttons still need X. If george.py is started WITHOUT the launcher (bare python3 george.py on a console — no tmux pane exists there), the ▶ TERM chip comes back and falls back to a command line inside the dashboard: type a shell command and enter runs it on a fresh page (exit footer, q closes, Ctrl+c kills the command — never george), then the line reopens like a mini shell session. A trailing & runs the command detached instead: george stays on screen and the line closes — e.g. ttysnap& screenshots the live dashboard (ttysnap names the shot by whatever console is on screen, and warns instead of saving when the framebuffer didn't match the console — X owns a vt's scanout, so fbcat sees black there). A bare console has one screen, so george's render and a command's output can't both be visible at once — enter for readable output, & for side-effect commands.
• Random Nina chip ([nina] in buttons.toml) — one-audio rule: starts by freezing the radio (SIGSTOP, so it resumes where it left off), then streams the whole shuffled Nina Simone archive pool (208 songs + 2 whole albums, looping) until the chip is hit again — not a one-track stop. The picker answers --playlist with a fresh shuffled playlist; the repo ships cmd = "nina.sh" as an example. Standalone nina.sh (outside george) also toggles: run it again to stop, no need to find the window for q.
• Top bar — clock plus a chip per running/minimized window (via wmctrl). Display-only since going keyboard-first; alt-tab / your WM's keys manage windows as always.
• Right column — month calendar with today boxed (</> page months), nag 15m button (your nag script), event form (light-surface modal, focus starts on the date field) writing to ~/.local/share/george/events.txt; due events fire a critical notify-send plus a terminal bell, then move to events.fired.log; upcoming list, and up to 12 RSS/link slots (stdlib parser, cached under ~/.cache/george/, refreshed every 15 min).
• find & replace (f) — literal or regex replacement across a directory tree with dry-run preview, hit counts, glob filter, binary/git skip, and *.bak-fr originals kept.

Run

bin/george            # opens its own terminal, class "georges"
# or, once installed on your PATH:
george

Run it from an interactive terminal and the prompt comes straight back — george spawns detached (its own session; closing the launching terminal never touches it). Login-hook and menu launches behave as before. If the tmux build ever fails (stale server, broken socket), the launcher degrades to a plain george dashboard instead of vanishing, and says so via notify-send.

Keys: 1-9 quick-launch, n nag, e event, f find&replace, g greet, r reload config, ? help, esc hide (alt-tab to raise), q quit. CH 57/59 launch mpv in their own window (close it / alt-tab back); the built-in terminal is the tmux pane below — Ctrl+t or click to enter/leave, Ctrl+D in it only spawns a fresh prompt.

Term buttons hold their window open after the command exits (exit code + "enter closes"). Per-item hold = false in buttons.toml restores close-on-exit.

Configuration

Config resolution, in order of preference:

1. $GEORGE_CONFIG — if set, used verbatim.
2. ~/.config/george/buttons.toml — your personal copy, if it exists.
3. buttons.toml in this repo — the portable demo with common on-PATH commands, used only when you have no personal config yet.

So the demo ships and works out of the box, but as soon as you create a personal config at ~/.config/george/buttons.toml george uses that instead (keeping your button set out of any public fork). To make your own:

mkdir -p ~/.config/george
cp buttons.toml ~/.config/george/buttons.toml

Press r inside george to reload after editing either file.

Install at login (WM-agnostic)

Add to your X-session startup (e.g. ~/.xinitrc), adapting the path to wherever you cloned george:

if ! pgrep -u "$USER" -f '/george\.py' >/dev/null 2>&1; then
    (sleep 5 && /path/to/george/bin/george) &
fi

george maximizes itself at startup via wmctrl (EWMH), so no window-manager config is touched. Works under any EWMH-compliant WM.

Self test

python3 george.py --self-test

Covers cpu/net math, wmctrl parsing, calendar grid, RSS+Atom parsing, the full find&replace engine against a scratch tree, event round-trips.

Requires: python3-urwid (Python ≥ 3.11 for stdlib tomllib); on X: alacritty, wmctrl, xdotool, xprop (x11-utils), and tmux (for the built-in terminal panes — Ctrl+t flips focus; already present on most Debian installs). On a bare console tty only tmux is needed — the console itself is the terminal, and the launcher builds the same two-pane session there. Running python3 george.py bare (no launcher) needs nothing but urwid. The CH 57/59 buttons additionally need mpv. Nothing else — the embedded-video helper is long gone; channels are plain launcher buttons.