Minimalist Website with built-in Command Console UX
While rebuilding my personal site I wanted to experiment with some new libraries and frameworks. I had been pining for my web development roots, when it seemed like I had a better grasp of the technology underlying what I was building. Modern frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue are powerful, but have so many dependencies, opinionated abstractions, syntactic sugar, and build requirements… it all seems like a lot of cognitive and computational overhead, especially for low to moderately complex applications.
I found ArrowJS – a small, powerful reactivity library which reminded me of a super-simple React or a Lit without the Web Components and build requirements1, so I decided to see what I could do with it.
This is when I had the idea for a website command console, similar those found in PC games, opened with the backtick (`) key which would overlay the page with a REPL-like CLI that could run functions, change the page state, and displays information.