Hey HN! I'm Matt Schrage, one of the cofounders of Fig.

We were planning on launching on HN later on, so this caught us a bit off guard. (As someone noted, our 'Fig' icon is, in fact, an emoji pear). Still we're super excited to share what we've been working on.

Fig lets you connect web apps directly to your terminal. You can use Fig like a browser to get quick access to sites like Github, Stack Overflow, or Notion. You can also run apps built on the Fig.js runtime that integrate directly with your terminal. We want to be a low-cost abstraction. Use a Fig app when it's useful, drop back down to the shell when it's not.

I just wanted to respond to a couple of points.

The app is actually written in Swift: we're using a WKWebView under the hood but the majority of the codebase is native. Also because we aren't built on Electron, we don't need to bundle v8 and node along with the app, so the binary is pretty small (12mb).

Fig is extensible. The apps shown on the website (git, curl, and finder) are just a few examples of what is possible. You can check out the documentation at https://withfig.com/docs and build your own.

Fig works with the tools you already use - we integrate with any terminal emulator (iTerm, Terminal.app, Hyper, Alactritty, etc.). Previous attempts at building GUI terminals have required throwing away 50 years worth of tooling and transitioning to a new application entirely. Fig is built around the premise that in order to upgrade the terminal, changes must be backwards compatible.

Happy to answer any more questions and really appreciate the feedback we've gotten so far.

Wow, HN is really harsh on the idea of merging CLIs and GUIs...

I think that merging CLIs and GUIs have a great potential.

GUIs are superior than CLIs on interaction because it gives context of the current state and visual cues. (And no, TUIs aren't CLIs nor are they better than GUIs.) However users still use CLIs - the biggest advantage that CLIs have is that it allows various programs interact with each other, e.g. via piping. That's why we have CLI programs that's sole purposes that are communicating with GUI programs, for example almost every programmer's text editor ships with a binary that can i.e. reading from stdin, opening an temporary file, and spitting out to stdin (or at least gives the capability of doing that) so that we can use it in e.g. moreutils vipe.

It seems Fig is an product that allows the reverse, e.g. tying GUIs to CLIs so that people can use git, curl or other CLI programs in a more interaction-friendly way. I think this is has a great potential, if it's rightly executed (i.e. hopefully doesn't use Electron...?)

PS: The argument that 'every programmer knows how to use CLI, so this isn't needed' is just proving the point - programmers deserve better than an plain-text 1970-era interaction, yet we have to use the Terminal daily to accomplish something.

The initial example with curl looks very compelling. I like that it's not a replacement for the CLI, just a graphical way to build the CLI commands. Seems like a much better way of learning arcane command line arguments than the searching through man pages that I do now.

Some of the other examples like changing directories and the git client are less interesting for me - if I wanted to actually replace the CLI with a GUI there are better options.

I signed up for early access.

I have no idea what it is. The main page is really terrible in telling me how it even looks like, I don't even know why I would want this.

Is it a small web browser embedded into the terminal window? Or it's a different thing? No idea.

GUI wrappers for common tools? How do you create a GUI wrapper for 'bg'? With a form and 1 button named "Run"?

"TRUSTED BY ENGINEERS AT WORLD CLASS COMPANIES". This is embarrassing. Please stop doing this - just because a friend from a FAANG company installed your app, doesn't mean its trusted by any company, or that anyone would use it on their internal codebase.

I should have closed the tab when I saw the boast of Facebook/Google/Microsoft logos and the words "trusted by". But I thought I'd join the waiting list to see the product in action. So I give my email, I'm then whisked away to TypeForm's website and I have to fill out a fucking form which starts by demanding my full name. I'm not giving an "online survey service" any of my details just to join a waiting list.

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I use a terminal because it is NOT a GUI, significantly improving productivity once learned. I cannot grok this, it feels like a step in precisely the other direction.

I can see the power in a future OS interface that really combined the terminal and GUI in a powerful way. Maybe this is a good start to thinking about that.

To me the logo looks like a pear instead of a fig

Just a reminder that Dialog/Zenity/KDialog can be used to create "friendly" user interfaces to scripts.

MPW (Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop) had a feature like that, called commandos IIRC, over 30 years ago. It did not set the world afire.

Furthermore, a closed-source solution is a non-starter.

The fish shell has an interesting feature where it parses man pages to autocomplete commands.

I personally don't see the point. If you want a GUI for some commands, why not just get GUI apps which do those things? Why try to bolt a GUI onto a CLI, especially one that works by pasting commands back into a CLI? You're relying on fig to develop UIs for all of your frequently used commands, and if you don't like fig's UIs for certain commands, you're SOL until they let you make your own UIs, and at that point it's basically an OS with an App Store. If you want a productivity boost from eliminating repeated commands, you're better off writing aliases or bash scripts for your personal use, in my opinion.

Side note: I think the title should reflect the name of the service, Fig.

I really like this idea!

There are tons of CLI tools for which I've burned pretty much every flag that I'll ever need into my muscle memory. But there are far more tools that I use only ocassionally -- like mysqldump -- where I have to dig through a manpage or tutorial just to get basic tasks done.

Something like this built into my terminal would make my life so much easier. It's almost like a quick reference card or cheatsheet, except it's totally interactive.

So this is basically just an Electron terminal emulator with some shortcuts included? You can already do all this in a fair few existing terminal emulators, not to mention shell aliases et al. I mean I get the problem space they’re trying to solve but the landing page is so hyperbolic I’m put off investing any time to see if this actually has usability gains over what the team already do use

It might not be directly related to this, but I think it's way better for learners to actually read the docs/manpage and then try to craft the command themselves (getting it wrong a couple of times as well). This is kind of like copy/pasting the answer, which solves the immediate problem but is terrible for learning what's going on or how it works.

For whatever hate this is getting, I like the idea a lot and signed-up and hope to be able to play with this. I can already think of a ton of apps I would build/use with something like this -- not just for me, but for demos/tutorials/documentation I make for other users.

Keep doing your thing! It's a good idea!

Unfortunately, it's gotten to the point where adding anything proprietary to the workflow is a liability.

Should call it Fig leaf, because you're hiding the best bits.

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Firstly, the webpage bluescreened my Windows 7 box in Firefox ESR twice with Javascript disabled.

Secondly, this is a stupid idea. If you want to do something like this to help folks learn the CLI, a tool like SMIT/smitty (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Management_Interface_To...) is the way to go.