Show HN: Pianoterm – Run shell commands from your Piano. A Linux CLI tool

smokel

Ooh, let's spend next weekend doing this with my acoustic piano!

runamuck

So I can run shell from a Miracle Piano connected to a NES running Linux?

sigseg1v

This is one of those projects that would be 10x better with a video demonstration!

ctoth

How about chords? Melodies which are paths? Passwords? Lots of great potential here!

matthew_hre

My Claude Code sessions are about to sound like the Breath of the Wild soundtrack

vunderba

Nice job. Feels like there's a bit of misunderstanding of what this project is. It has nothing to do with audio - it's purely a means of mapping MIDI to shell commands. There was (still is) a very popular program called BOME Midi Translator that did something similar - think of it like AutoHotKey but specifically for midi. Back when I made heavy use of Kontakt libraries I got frustrated at the lack of an easy way to audition the patches (of which there could be hundreds on a single sampler). To get around it, I created a Bome script so when I pressed an unused button on my midi controller it would trigger a mouse click to advance to the next patch in my DAW and then send a note-on / note-off for C4 for half a second. Made previewing the sounds much easier.

gchamonlive

This reminds me of the Symphonic which is featured in the show Halt and Catch Fire

Arkanosis

That's nice! That may not seem like an obvious use-case when only thinking about a piano, but since it's mapping MIDI keys to commands, I guess it should be able — or at least no very far from being able — to map ergonomic MIDI controllers to actions that are not as ergonomic with the usual keyboard / mouse / trackball / touchpad most people use. I wrote what I believe is a similar tool but with completely different goals initially: https://github.com/Arkanosis/smhkd ; I use it with a cheap MIDI controller (namely the KORG nanoKONTROL2) and was considering using another one with motorized faders (namely the Icon Platform M). MIDI controllers are great for all kinds of non-musical things like: - setting the volume / balance / solo / mute for speakers / multiple headsets and mixing multiple applications (eg. using pactl); - setting the zoom level / brightness for camera / webcam (eg. using v4l2-ctl) ; - setting the source / brightness for monitors (eg. using ddcutil)…

shrubble

I thought you might have “composable” pipelines!

pimlottc

Some other existing utilities for triggering commands with MIDI signals: - https://gitlab.com/enetheru/midi2input - https://midimonster.net/

alana314

This would pair well with Midicard, the tiny credit-card-sized MIDI keyboard I make: https://midicard.com