Show HN: Pianoterm – Run shell commands from your Piano. A Linux CLI tool
30 points
2 hours ago
| 8 comments
| github.com
| HN
A little weekend project, made so I can pause/play/rewind directly on the piano, when learning a song by ear.
Arkanosis
20 minutes ago
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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)…

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vunderba
48 minutes ago
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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.

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gchamonlive
29 minutes ago
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This reminds me of the Symphonic which is featured in the show Halt and Catch Fire
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ctoth
1 hour ago
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How about chords? Melodies which are paths? Passwords? Lots of great potential here!
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lysp
50 minutes ago
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Password is 3rd movement of Moonlight Sonata without "typos".
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vunderba
59 minutes ago
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Goonies scene where they have to play a sequence correct to avoid triggering a trap:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUO7Ip0Xc10

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sigseg1v
1 hour ago
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This is one of those projects that would be 10x better with a video demonstration!
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smokel
2 hours ago
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Ooh, let's spend next weekend doing this with my acoustic piano!
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matthew_hre
1 hour ago
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My Claude Code sessions are about to sound like the Breath of the Wild soundtrack
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runamuck
1 hour ago
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So I can run shell from a Miracle Piano connected to a NES running Linux?
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