Become Ultra Elite Hackerman With This Application

Key Takeaways

We've all seen these movies and TV shows with these utterly ridiculous hacking interfaces. Here is an article that goes and compiles some of them. Now, some of them are a little bit dramatic, but at least somewhat grounded like The Social Network. And then others like the uh the NCIS scene that has two people bashing away at one keyboard, well, you know what I'm talking about. But what if you wanted to be a super elite ultra hacker man yourself? Well, I have just the application for you. This is Edex UI. >> [clears throat] >> And it makes just the right amount of annoying noise to get the vibe perfectly across. Full disclosure, sadly the project has been abandoned for about 5 years now. We'll talk more about that a bit later. So, there's going to be bugs. There's going to be things that don't work the way they should. There's going to be missing features that are never going to be resolved. You're already seeing one right now if you're paying attention. My CPU is for some reason like bleeding out of the line. It should be going down to a separate line, but it doesn't do that. Do note that by default it will show your public IPv4 address and it will also show your location right here. I am running with a uh VPN specifically for that reason, but uh do note that is something that it will do. I understand it for the like the vibe of the hacking interface, but in like an actual interface where you're actually hacking things, maybe having your public IP and your location probably not the best of ideas. So, let's go over some of the functionality. This is a full-fledged functioning terminal. Now, it's a terminal written with electron, so you're going to get electron performance from it, and there's a lot of other nonsense going on around the side. So, do note this is not a fast terminal. This is not a terminal you actually want to daily drive. This is here so you can pretend to be a super elite ultra hacker man, but it is a functional terminal. If you run ls, it ls's. If I cd, it cd's. If we go Speaking of bugs, that's one of the bugs. If we run btop, btop is going to work. Most of the things you want to do in a terminal are going to function. Obviously, with some of the more esoteric software, some of the the weird things you could be running, I do expect some software to work. Anything that kind of breaks in a normal terminal will probably break here and break even more, but most things you're going to be good with. By default, it does use the bash terminal. If you don't want to use bash, that can be changed in the settings.json file. Either you can modify it as a file, or if you go and click it in the interface, because this is a file browser down here, it is going to open it up like this, and we have the bash setting right there. I'll talk more about the settings a little bit later. It's a 100% a meme terminal, but it still has some useful functions. For example, all of these empties here, these are additional terminals that we can go and open. These are additional tabs we can use, and again, they function exactly like you'd expect from a tab in any regular terminal. So, in a very, very tiny, minor way, compared to some terminals out there, this does have more functionality. Now, most of the functionality you don't care about, but at least it has tabbing, and that can't be said for everything. Frankly, I don't care about tapping, but if you like it, it is here. And yes, I'm sure you've noticed there is a virtual keyboard in the bottom right-hand corner. This is a fully functional virtual keyboard, so if I press L, S, enter, that is going to work. But you might have also noticed that when I'm typing, anything I press on my keyboard, it is going to go and Why is alt function? Let's You know what? We're not going to think about that. Anything I press on my keyboard is going to be emulated, is going to be mirrored on the virtual keyboard as well. So, again, elite super hacker man. If the sound does happen to be a bit much, we can go into the settings, go to the audio section, set it to false, or we can go and change the audio volume. Just for the sake of everybody's ears, I will go and disable it for the rest of the video. If we then save to disk, now that setting has been done and for some reason, not working. I think we need to do a restart. Okay, that certainly did fix it. That is just, again, some weirdness of this being a 5-year-old terminal which nobody is maintaining anymore and it has weird design choices like that. Over on the left-hand side here, we have some general system information. We have my local time, we have the date, we have the uptime of my system. This is hours and minutes, not 4 minutes and 46 seconds. We have the type, obviously for me, I'm on Linux, and obviously everything's powered on, which just some of the some of the extra stuff that doesn't mean anything, but obviously is going to be there. With type being there, you'd probably expect other versions, and yes, there is a macOS and a Windows version as well. I'm obviously running on Linux, I'm running the x86_64 app image. It works quite well. I don't know if there are additional problems in the macOS or the Windows version. You would have to go and check those for yourself. One thing you probably expect from most terminals is a zoom out and that is a thing you can do and it will resize some of the UI elements, but not all of them. Which again, weird, probably half-implemented feature. Anyway, we have the manufacturer of my motherboard that is ASUS. We have the model, system product. I don't know where it's getting that from or it's just making that up. Chassis, desktop. I don't know if this actually changes for a laptop. And if it does, I don't know how it would change for a laptop. >> [snorts] >> Maybe there's something I can use to guestimate. I'm actually not sure. As I said before with the CPU usage here, the A from AMD is being cut off by the E here. It should have gone down to a separate line. Also, processor is cut off. That's not that big of a deal, but clearly the text is not being handled properly. We have the core usage for 1 to 8 and then 9 to 16. We have our system temp, the speed, not the clock, the speed. Very different thing. The max speed, the number tasks running, our memory usage, swap which is at zero, and then we have a very, very basic process monitor. And as mentioned before, we do have a GUI file manager down here. This bar along the bottom, even though it is styled basically identically to the scroll bar here, is not actually a scroll bar. That is storage usage. I know the line isn't there, but I feel like there's you're running an Electron app, right? You're not limited to what a terminal can show. I feel like there's got to be a better way to style this that doesn't make it look like the scroll bar. Normally, I would be critical of something built with Electron, but again, this terminal is a meme. This is not something you'd actually run on a daily basis. It's it's a joke and no one's going to build something like this in a C or C++. Maybe someone would. It could happen, but I just Electron is the place for this. Web tech is the place for this. By default, when you open up the application, you're going to be in your home directory in .config/edex-ui. This is where all the configs are stored, and because it's an Electron app, also a bunch of random other web nonsense as well, like cookies and logs and GPU cache and various other nonsense. There are four things in here you probably want to care about. Those being the keyboards, the themes, the settings.json, and the shortcuts.json. There is this preferences here. Clicking it does nothing. So, that can't be opened in the app. However, keyboards, if we go into that folder, we can now select a different keyboard. Right now, obviously, I'm on en.us, but if we go to Dvorak, and this is the interesting thing, it doesn't actually change the keyboard mapping. It changes the mapping on the virtual keyboard, but if I do something like, "Hi, my name is Brody Robertson." Spelled correctly. You probably noticed that I typed that totally fine. I'm not a Dvorak user. I have a QWERTY keyboard here. What it is doing is mapping those QWERTY keys over to Dvorak. So, if you want to pretend like you're using Dvorak, you can do that. Or something like Colemak, if you prefer that one, or various other ones here. Do note that if you try to use Workman, it seg faults. Honestly, I could not tell you why it seg faults with that keyboard. Maybe it doesn't on your system. If it doesn't, hey, go and pretend to use Workman, but I have just not been able to get that to work. If you're wondering how we get back to another directory, we can click the go up. It's electron, and then it goes back up here. Over in the themes folder, we have a number of themes to choose from. Obviously, you have your normal kind of themes like Nord, but of course, you've got to have those hacky kind of themes as well. Here we have the Matrix theme. Should be obvious where the name came from. Here we have the Tron theme. This is simply known as red. And obviously, incredibly important if you're breaking through the firewall. You're cracking the firewall. The firewall is at 33%. This here is the Cyborg theme, and you'll notice with this one and some of the others, there are variations of that theme as well. We also have Cyborg-Focus. This one drastically changes the UI, and we don't have the virtual keyboard any longer. This is just trying to be still kind of a meme, but a more useful terminal. Remember, this is an electron app, so you have access to CSS, and anything you want to do with CSS styling can be done here as well. For example, there is this theme. This is known as Horizon. This one is not actually shipped with the application, but drastically changes the layout. For now, I'll be going with the Tron theme. Now, in the settings, we have a number of things we can change. As I mentioned before, we have the shell, and if you want to pass in any shell arguments, that can be done as well. If you want to change the default directory to load in, say for example, you want to load into your home directory by default instead of the config directory, that can absolutely be done. Also, we can change the keyboard and the theme from this interface. And the rest of the settings we have here, I think they're all pretty self-explanatory. Do you want it to be in 12-hour or 24-hour time, or if you're in the US, military time. The monitor you want to spawn on. Do you want to have the intro play? Do you want to see the cursor, various other things like that. Do you want it to make sure it retains the aspect ratio in windowed mode? Overall, nothing too crazy here. Most of the complicated configuration, that's going to be done through theming. As for the shortcuts, this is mainly just a list of the available shortcuts. It does seem like you're supposed to be able to edit these. That doesn't appear to be possible. I think this is one of those things which was partially implemented and then nothing was fully completed here. Unless I'm Unless I'm missing something, there doesn't appear to be any way to actually go and change it here. However, we can go and click open the shortcuts file and that should do something. Theoretically, it did. I just did not see the window. It's over here. So, here we have a JSON file. We can go and modify all of the things in here. Pretty straightforward. Theoretically, I've not tested this. We're going to find out right now. If I quit the file, Okay, now the application goes back to working. So, it will temporarily freeze the interface whilst that file is open. Now, am I going to use this terminal frequently? No, absolutely not. I'm probably going to uninstall it as soon as I finish this video because it's an AppImage, that's just deleting the file and then deleting the configs. However, if you're looking for a way to mess with non-techy people, maybe don't use it at an airport. That's my recommendation, but if you want to mess with people in other situations, this might be the application to do it. When the project was archived, this post was made. It has been 3 years since eDEX's initial 1.0 release. Since then, 60 updates have been released with the help of 46 contributors and they've been downloaded about 400,000 times. Last year I opened an issue to gather support both moral and financial to fund maintenance as I was a student with little resources for project of this size. Thanks to sponsorship and other generous donations of some of you, I've been able to keep the project on life support. This summer I dropped out to become a full-time software engineer and I feel it is time to reassess the situation. NX will now be archived as I'll move on to other projects. The code base has been in dire need of a fresh refactoring for some time now and considering limited usefulness of the software, I like to think that as a functional art project, I think this is the best decision going forward. I want to thank every person who has ever contributed to, starred, liked, tried out, crashed, and bug squashed NXUI. We had a really good run and lots of fun. Honestly, this is a really cool project. It is not the first of its kind, it certainly won't be the last, but people were talking about it. So, I am here to talk about it. Anyway, give it a shot, see if you like it. You probably won't because electron, but again, mess with your friends with it, have some fun, and um yeah. So, if you like the video, go and like the video. If you really like the video and you want to become one of these amazing people over here, go subscribe as well and check out the Patreon subscribe to Daily Bleep Bleep link in the description down below. That's going to be it for me and I am Hacker Man.