4 ms·

I agree with each and every one of your comments; in addition, I would like to know how this project was created: what language it was made in, why the author f

I agree with each and every one of your comments; in addition, I would like to know how this project was created: what language it was made in, why the author found it necessary to create it, etc.

guessmyname 10y ago
> what language it was made in HTML + JavaScript + Electron Just download that archive, extract its content, and you will find the "goterminal" script that is basically an ASAR archive [1] with a copy of CEF [2] as the webview for the web application that they (for some unknown reason) decided to create. [1] https://github.com/electron/asar https://github.com/electron/asar [2] https://bitbucket.org/chromiumembedded/cef https://bitbucket.org/chromiumembedded/cef
- mrmondo 10y ago
  Oh god, the last software I'd want to be running a terminal in!
- placeybordeaux 10y ago
  Yikes. Thats a great way to make a terminal into a memory hog and unresponsive under load.
  - KirinDave 10y ago
    Oh? Historically most terminal implementations have been fraught with performance issues. We'd moved off xterm to aterm and then back. We'd been hesitant to adopt gnome-terminal because of the GTK+ chrome then saw its font kit actually rendered faster. What most people don't get is how absurdly well-optimized the text rendering and reflowing is for web browsers. With care, people can get modern cellphone browsers to hit 60fps animations and reflows while pushing huge volumes of text through them. Take any 3 GUI toolkits you can name and ask yourself, "Do all three of these combined have a maintenance budget that equals that of even Firefox by itself, let alone any TWO modern web browsers?" Hell, some of the most cutting edge research into interpreters and garbage collectors is coming out of Google making V8 fast. Quite frankly, I'd bet that with care and foresight this could be faster than iTerm.
    - placeybordeaux 10y ago
      Maybe I am wrong, but I have yet to see a modern browser take anywhere near as little memory of CPU as a modern terminal emulator. There is also the matter that no matter how much optimization you put into something you can't recoup the cost of the fundamental design choices you went with. Choosing something with less power can solve a lot of headaches.
      - KirinDave 10y ago
        > little memory of CPU as a modern terminal emulator. Browser instances can be quite svelte. But uh... I mean... shared lib pages tend to be actually shared pages. That's why the physical memory for multiple browser instances is a lot lower. What's more, I'd gladly pay a higher price for a richer experience. We no longer need to or should rely on ANSI interfaces. In fact, they're becoming increasingly awkward in a world that really wants endpoints to be stateless by design rather than stateful sockets. Many people have already discarded the single socket model oh SSH in favor of Mosh. Let's also ditch the console for all but the most basic of tasks. It's not 1997, the lingering stink of proprietary rich client environments is cleansed. Web browsers have annihilated that assumption and made something truly open and pretty amazing. I use a web browser as my core text editor and I miss emacs not a whit and quite honestly it feels more responsive than my emacs setup. I don't notice any tangible performance differences from Vim in a terminal. We can do better.
      - HeavyStorm 10y ago
        What machine are you running your terminals in? I have as little as 8 GB of RAM, and more CPU power than I could dream a decade ago. Don't you think that maybe you are using your past environment to judge a current experience? Visual Studio Code is based on Electron and works wonderfully. Doesn't feel bloated, it's quite fast to open and I haven't felt a slow down in any meaningful way. I'm not imposing my computer specs to anyone (and I'm using vs code in a client machine in any case), but we have generally a lot more horsepower now and the discussion of performance might mean little for a desktop app (heck, we are running javascript on the server nowadays!).
- jackmott 10y ago
  > HTML + JavaScript + Electron flips over table
  - KirinDave 10y ago
    Actually, let me unflip that table. I am desperate for someone to come along and realize that the current terminal interface is a perpetual train wreck, and that if we can break compatibility but end up with something better we should. Consider for a moment what a monumental task it is to make a simple ncurses menu and status bar in bash script. Consider for a second how trivial that could be made if each command line entry were a small flexible webview. Imagine if you typed netstat and it showed the results, but there was also a field where you could key in text narrowing queries as part of the standard presentation for all very long input. No more appealing to grep or more and losing context or blasting your scrollback buffer. Consider for a moment if we could move away from trivial line interfaces for SSH and towards a protocol that actually handles sessions and works over SSL in every conceivable network environment. Hell, most people I know have migrated to mosh and only type ssh when they're provisioning fresh cloud instances (usually to get mosh on there as fast as humanly possible). The entire idea that "text is a superior interface" is correct as an input mechanism, but not necessarily as a data presentation mechanism. HTML and some basic es2015/typescript/whatever isn't just flat out better than bash for this sort of thing, but it flows from a long history of tools like tcl/tk trying to make the shell a more efficient and effective place to visualize trivial data. I've been using terminals since 80 characters was a luxury and amber was the fancy new color, and for at least 20 of those years I've been hoping we'll see something that keeps the composability of shell scripting but introduces a non-line oriented protocol that could also offer presentation logic when appropriate. We could preserve all of that if we just pretend all existing shell commands return a (forgive the templating syntax, it'll be understandable by a wide audience) Map<Stream<Text>> where {'stdout': <stdout>} and additional data can be offered around that with trivial API additions. Please, let's not pretend we'd not benefit massively from richer tooling here.
    - 59nadir 10y ago
      > Please, let's not pretend we'd not benefit massively from richer tooling here. Absolutely nothing about this project or the way they went about building it shows any tendency towards richer tooling. A web interface also does not inherently enable richer tooling. You could implement this non-line oriented protocol entirely without 500+ MB of JS and the interpretation of that data could obviously be done without it too. Edit: While I understand your rants all over these threads (it doesn't inherently have to be inefficient and bloated), you've picked a strange submission to take these fights in. The software in question is in fact bloated, not compliant and is really only an interface to aliases. Also, I would add: The proof is in the pudding. You seem to have made this a personal crusade, so I would urge you to make a decent PoC with these ideas to show the world.
- andrepd 10y ago
  I'm cringing.
- andrepd 10y ago
  I'm cringing at that entire paragraph.
- Myrmornis 10y ago
  > that they (for some unknown reason) decided to create. That's unpleasant. This is a forum for programmers. Care to explain why you are criticizing a participant for programming?
  - erlehmann_ 10y ago
    I see at least two possible reasons to create such a terminal: One: The author might have problems with how other terminals work. The other: The author just wanted to create something, without providing a superior value proposition. If it is indeed the latter scenario, it just wastes others' time.
    - Myrmornis 10y ago
      > If it is indeed the latter scenario, it just wastes others' time. What an absurd, and disgusting, point of view. The author is free to create whatever the fuck he/she wants, for fun. It's not wasting anyone's time -- no one else is obliged to spend any time interacting with it in any way. You should really reconsider your position. One point is that, while you may have the skills and experience to only work on projects that improve the status quo, many of us do not; and even those who do, as beginners had to pass through the stage where they did not.
      - erlehmann_ 10y ago
        If a project does not improve the status quo, I think it should not be presented as something one “should have”. The time wasted is exactly the time it takes to find out that “elegant and efficient” is at best hyperbole, at worst a lie.
        Myrmornis 10y ago
        Have you ever met a novice programmer?
- aphextron 10y ago
  >HTML + JavaScript + Electron This was my creeping suspicion the moment I saw the screenshots. Utter garbage.
Myrmornis 10y ago
> why the author found it necessary to create it That's unpleasant. This is a forum for programmers. Care to explain why you are criticizing a participant for programming?

I agree with each and every one of your comments; in addition, I would like to know how this project was created: what language it was made in, why the author found it necessary to create it, etc.

guessmyname 10y ago

> what language it was made in HTML + JavaScript + Electron Just download that archive, extract its content, and you will find the "goterminal" script that is basically an ASAR archive [1] with a copy of CEF [2] as the webview for the web application that they (for some unknown reason) decided to create. [1] https://github.com/electron/asar https://github.com/electron/asar [2] https://bitbucket.org/chromiumembedded/cef https://bitbucket.org/chromiumembedded/cef

mrmondo 10y ago
Oh god, the last software I'd want to be running a terminal in!
placeybordeaux 10y ago
Yikes. Thats a great way to make a terminal into a memory hog and unresponsive under load.
- KirinDave 10y ago
  Oh? Historically most terminal implementations have been fraught with performance issues. We'd moved off xterm to aterm and then back. We'd been hesitant to adopt gnome-terminal because of the GTK+ chrome then saw its font kit actually rendered faster. What most people don't get is how absurdly well-optimized the text rendering and reflowing is for web browsers. With care, people can get modern cellphone browsers to hit 60fps animations and reflows while pushing huge volumes of text through them. Take any 3 GUI toolkits you can name and ask yourself, "Do all three of these combined have a maintenance budget that equals that of even Firefox by itself, let alone any TWO modern web browsers?" Hell, some of the most cutting edge research into interpreters and garbage collectors is coming out of Google making V8 fast. Quite frankly, I'd bet that with care and foresight this could be faster than iTerm.
  - placeybordeaux 10y ago
    Maybe I am wrong, but I have yet to see a modern browser take anywhere near as little memory of CPU as a modern terminal emulator. There is also the matter that no matter how much optimization you put into something you can't recoup the cost of the fundamental design choices you went with. Choosing something with less power can solve a lot of headaches.
    - KirinDave 10y ago
      > little memory of CPU as a modern terminal emulator. Browser instances can be quite svelte. But uh... I mean... shared lib pages tend to be actually shared pages. That's why the physical memory for multiple browser instances is a lot lower. What's more, I'd gladly pay a higher price for a richer experience. We no longer need to or should rely on ANSI interfaces. In fact, they're becoming increasingly awkward in a world that really wants endpoints to be stateless by design rather than stateful sockets. Many people have already discarded the single socket model oh SSH in favor of Mosh. Let's also ditch the console for all but the most basic of tasks. It's not 1997, the lingering stink of proprietary rich client environments is cleansed. Web browsers have annihilated that assumption and made something truly open and pretty amazing. I use a web browser as my core text editor and I miss emacs not a whit and quite honestly it feels more responsive than my emacs setup. I don't notice any tangible performance differences from Vim in a terminal. We can do better.
    - HeavyStorm 10y ago
      What machine are you running your terminals in? I have as little as 8 GB of RAM, and more CPU power than I could dream a decade ago. Don't you think that maybe you are using your past environment to judge a current experience? Visual Studio Code is based on Electron and works wonderfully. Doesn't feel bloated, it's quite fast to open and I haven't felt a slow down in any meaningful way. I'm not imposing my computer specs to anyone (and I'm using vs code in a client machine in any case), but we have generally a lot more horsepower now and the discussion of performance might mean little for a desktop app (heck, we are running javascript on the server nowadays!).
jackmott 10y ago
> HTML + JavaScript + Electron flips over table
- KirinDave 10y ago
  Actually, let me unflip that table. I am desperate for someone to come along and realize that the current terminal interface is a perpetual train wreck, and that if we can break compatibility but end up with something better we should. Consider for a moment what a monumental task it is to make a simple ncurses menu and status bar in bash script. Consider for a second how trivial that could be made if each command line entry were a small flexible webview. Imagine if you typed netstat and it showed the results, but there was also a field where you could key in text narrowing queries as part of the standard presentation for all very long input. No more appealing to grep or more and losing context or blasting your scrollback buffer. Consider for a moment if we could move away from trivial line interfaces for SSH and towards a protocol that actually handles sessions and works over SSL in every conceivable network environment. Hell, most people I know have migrated to mosh and only type ssh when they're provisioning fresh cloud instances (usually to get mosh on there as fast as humanly possible). The entire idea that "text is a superior interface" is correct as an input mechanism, but not necessarily as a data presentation mechanism. HTML and some basic es2015/typescript/whatever isn't just flat out better than bash for this sort of thing, but it flows from a long history of tools like tcl/tk trying to make the shell a more efficient and effective place to visualize trivial data. I've been using terminals since 80 characters was a luxury and amber was the fancy new color, and for at least 20 of those years I've been hoping we'll see something that keeps the composability of shell scripting but introduces a non-line oriented protocol that could also offer presentation logic when appropriate. We could preserve all of that if we just pretend all existing shell commands return a (forgive the templating syntax, it'll be understandable by a wide audience) Map<Stream<Text>> where {'stdout': <stdout>} and additional data can be offered around that with trivial API additions. Please, let's not pretend we'd not benefit massively from richer tooling here.
  - 59nadir 10y ago
    > Please, let's not pretend we'd not benefit massively from richer tooling here. Absolutely nothing about this project or the way they went about building it shows any tendency towards richer tooling. A web interface also does not inherently enable richer tooling. You could implement this non-line oriented protocol entirely without 500+ MB of JS and the interpretation of that data could obviously be done without it too. Edit: While I understand your rants all over these threads (it doesn't inherently have to be inefficient and bloated), you've picked a strange submission to take these fights in. The software in question is in fact bloated, not compliant and is really only an interface to aliases. Also, I would add: The proof is in the pudding. You seem to have made this a personal crusade, so I would urge you to make a decent PoC with these ideas to show the world.
andrepd 10y ago
I'm cringing.
andrepd 10y ago
I'm cringing at that entire paragraph.
Myrmornis 10y ago
> that they (for some unknown reason) decided to create. That's unpleasant. This is a forum for programmers. Care to explain why you are criticizing a participant for programming?
- erlehmann_ 10y ago
  I see at least two possible reasons to create such a terminal: One: The author might have problems with how other terminals work. The other: The author just wanted to create something, without providing a superior value proposition. If it is indeed the latter scenario, it just wastes others' time.
  - Myrmornis 10y ago
    > If it is indeed the latter scenario, it just wastes others' time. What an absurd, and disgusting, point of view. The author is free to create whatever the fuck he/she wants, for fun. It's not wasting anyone's time -- no one else is obliged to spend any time interacting with it in any way. You should really reconsider your position. One point is that, while you may have the skills and experience to only work on projects that improve the status quo, many of us do not; and even those who do, as beginners had to pass through the stage where they did not.
    - erlehmann_ 10y ago
      If a project does not improve the status quo, I think it should not be presented as something one “should have”. The time wasted is exactly the time it takes to find out that “elegant and efficient” is at best hyperbole, at worst a lie.
      - Myrmornis 10y ago
        Have you ever met a novice programmer?
aphextron 10y ago
>HTML + JavaScript + Electron This was my creeping suspicion the moment I saw the screenshots. Utter garbage.

Myrmornis 10y ago

> why the author found it necessary to create it That's unpleasant. This is a forum for programmers. Care to explain why you are criticizing a participant for programming?