eDEX-UI For Linux

There's something so beautiful about futuristic/fictional interfaces found in movies, even though most of them are not exactly functional in the real world.

Some good examples of movies with aesthetically pleasing and fascinating sci-fi interfaces are Her (even though the interactions are done by voice, similar to what we might find in today's Alexa, Siri, and Google Home), Iron Man, and Tron Legacy, just to name a few.

In short, it's not often we get to experience this type of art in our daily lives. Having said that, if you're a fan of sci-fi movie interfaces, and you particularly like the movie effects in TRON Legacy, then you should check out eDEX-UI.

As mentioned before, eDEX-UI is inspired from the TRON Legacy movie, more precisely, the Board Room sequence. eDEX-UI is a cross-platform, free, and open-source science fiction terminal emulator.

It's built on top of Electron, it bundles a few advanced system monitoring tools, and it even comes with touchscreen support (perfect if you want to shoot some futuristic movie scenes using your handheld devices and tablets).

Originally, the project was meant to be called "DEX-UI" and it was supposed to be a highly functional terminal emulator/system monitoring tool. eDEX-UI is, by all accounts, more focused on the "art," rather than anything else.

As its developer puts it, it might be better to "[...] think of it as a functional art project."

Even though the project has been archived on GitHub (meaning it won't be receiving any major changes and updates from now on), the app has a series of interesting features.

These include real-time system monitoring tools for the CPU, RAM, swap, and processes, as well as network monitoring (GeoIP, active connections, transfer rates, etc.).

It also features a fully-featured terminal emulator with tabs, colors, mouse events, and support for curses and curses-like apps, a directory viewer (that follows the CWD of the Terminal), and some nice customization options using themes, on-screen keyboard layouts, and CSS injections.

To conclude, eDEX-UI is not the most functional terminal emulator out there, nor is it the most hardcore system monitoring tool one could find. What eDEX-UI is, is a very nice functional piece of art that tries to bring sci-fi interfaces into the mainstream. If anything, it will at least inspire people who love sci-fi movie interfaces.

For more information, check out the project's official GitHub repository.