Gamestonk Terminal: UX/UI >> Features

Didier Rodrigues Lopes
4 min readJan 6, 2022

Features attract users, UX/UI conquers them ⚔️

Throughout month of December, me and 3 of the most active maintainers of Gamestonk Terminal had a meeting where we discussed shifting our focus from adding features, to improving the terminal UX/UI to make it even more attractive. The main outcomes of these meeting were:

  1. Relative and Absolute menu jumping, e.g. if i’m in crypto/ta and want to go to stocks/ta I can do:
    a. Absolute: /stocks/load tsla/ta
    b. Relative: ../../stocks/load tsla/ta

2. Scripting feature. You can now interact with the terminal through a sequence of commands, e.g.: stocks/disc/ugs -l 3/gtech/active.

3. reset command everywhere to allow for faster development as it exits from the terminal and comes to the same menu running new terminal code and its API keys.

4. Auto-completion in commands with choices.

5. When misspelling a command name, if it’s similar enough that the terminal recognises the right command, it will replace it, to speed up interaction.

6. Running a .gst job, like python terminal.py scripts/test_stocks_disc.gst which allows to run a sequence of commands of the terminal.
> In the future we can take advantage of this for integration tests.
> The user can build their own daily routines to speed up the investment process.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. This is a massive improvement over the terminal usage up until now, and that’s a LOT of code changes. Which is very much true, to be specific, this engineering effort resulted in:

370 files changed with 44,875 additions and 18,463 deletions

And you may be wondering how long did this take us to do. Nope, it wasn’t months but…

1 week. Yup, a single f*king week. You can see that it was finalised with these PRs…

Didier Rodrigues Lopes