An Ode to Inconsolation
Curator on April 30, 2026
1 month ago • 3 min read 1777507200000
"And there it is: The end of the end. Everything I know and ever got, whether through my own efforts or through the kindness of contributors, is now somewhere on this site. All the 400 original tools and the 2000 or so that followed are public record. A treasure trove, for generations to come." - K.Mandla, Inconsolation
At Terminal Trove we don’t often look back, most of the time we are looking forward to curating new terminal tools that we come across. But just for today, we made an exception.
We were inspired by Inconsolation, K.Mandla's blog about terminal-based Linux apps and especially tools for low-powered machines and older hardware. It was a blog that gave terminal programs the kind of attention they rarely got.
11 years ago today, on the 30th of April 2015, Inconsolation came to an end. K.Mandla closed it with the same spirit that ran through the whole site: keep trying new things, keep looking for simpler solutions, and keep using the programs you like best.
Terminal software has a strange kind of staying power. The old UNIX ideas still works even after 50 years since it's first public release: small tools, plain text, composable parts, and fewer promises. A good terminal tool can sit quietly for years and still do its job.
At the same time, the terminal ecosystem did not stay frozen in 2015 and a lot has changed since then.
Today there are newer and modern CLI and TUI tools built with frameworks that go far beyond ncurses and curses. PyTermTk, Rich and Textual for Python, Bubble Tea for Go, Ratatui for Rust, Ink and OpenTUI for TypeScript, Terminal.Gui for .NET, and countless more.
Inconsolation showed that terminal programs were worth showcasing. Terminal Trove is our continuation of that work in the present. It is more like picking up the baton where Inconsolation left off in a world where more developers are now building for the terminal.
We don’t really know who K.Mandla was, but maybe that was the point.
Everything about Inconsolation: The tools, the notes, the curiosity, the summaries, and the simple pleasure of spotlighting something useful in the terminal that you would not have otherwise known that existed was what it was all about.
So for today, we turn the spotlight towards K.Mandla and we say thank you for Inconsolation.
We’ll keep adding more terminal tools to the trove.
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