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Hey, I have a few issues with your attitude. Firstly, if there is one piece of software that I want to be fast, lightweight, and most importantly secure, it's

by wrl 10y ago

Hey, I have a few issues with your attitude. Firstly, if there is one piece of software that I want to be fast, lightweight, and most importantly secure, it's my terminal emulator. The hard part isn't drawing characters to the screen (which is what HTML and CSS would help with), it's the VT100 parsing and logic, which can be written in...well, anything, really. I would first like to point out that the HyperTerm OSX zip is 43mb, and the unzipped HyperTerm.app is 123mb. Supporting exactly one OS: again, the OS specific bits aren't the hard part. Blitting characters to the screen is easy, and platform independence certainly isn't worth 123mb of overhead. 250k+ Node modules: The number of packages in a package repository is a poor metric for determining anything except the number of packages in the package repository. npm has tons of redundant or ill-maintained packages, and that's even before we discuss whether having a bunch of available packages makes a terminal better at all. In my opinion, it doesn't, and this circles back around to the fact that a terminal needs to be secure. I sure as hell don't want random unaudited code running in the same application that I use to administer systems. Standardised plugins: what standardised plugins? npm modules? Not sure what you mean here. Can't open web pages locally: Why should a terminal do that? As a party trick? I don't want to stand in the way of improvement, here, but I also have no problem opening a separate web browser to browse the web. Javascript hate: It's not hate when people bring up salient points. Just because the web platform is open and everybody is using it right now doesn't mean that it's perfect or above criticism.

zingermc 10y ago
I tend to agree with all of your points. How do you feel about the 'eshell' mode in emacs? I think it's neat because it's basically a normal shell plus an elisp REPL. I imagine a terminal emulator with access to a large library of functions (such as a trusted subset of npm modules) could be useful.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
>Firstly, if there is one piece of software that I want to be fast, lightweight, and most importantly secure, it's my terminal emulator. So you prefer one written in ... C? Because C is secure by design? <rim shot> Coding a terminal in Rust or even Go would be awesome, I admit... >Standardised plugins: what standardised plugins? npm modules? Not sure what you mean here. See the demo animation for a (silly yet awesome) example. >250k+ Node modules Point is to use them to do other cool things client-side. It's a Really Big Toolbox. The CSS/HTML part can potentially provide interesting options as well. >It's not hate when people bring up salient points. >>>without having to write any JavaScript, which is its own achievement. The latter quote is from the comment I was replying to. It is not a "salient point," but simple JavaScript hate. His other points were that, in the past, he had written a JavaScript terminal as a school project that he ended up hating, it took him thousands of lines of code, and he'd done it before Node existed to provide the batteries. What salient points do you actually refer to? I'm not really disagreeing with you about the terminal: Honestly I will keep my lighter terminal with tabs and good UI for most real uses. But I love to see people innovating; providing extendable architecture is the way we get great new features. Maybe there's no killer feature in this one to justify the extra weight, but neither do I see the need to pile hate on it because JavaScript; even less because they had a bad experience in school writing a JavaScript project that was similar.
- parent5446 10y ago
  > So you prefer one written in ... C? Because C is secure by design? <rim shot> You missed the point. A program that is 2,500,000 lines of code of interpreted JavaScript, and was written by some guy in a few weeks who pulled in hundreds of unaudited third party libraries, is definitely less secure than a 100,500 line C application that has been slowly developed, improved, and audited for some 25 years or more. >See the demo animation for a (silly yet awesome) example. A plugin is inherently not "standard" if it does not work on terminals other than the one it's designed for. Zsh has many plugins, albeit not "standard", and almost definitely fulfills all of the functionality you could want out of this project. >Point is to use them to do other cool things client-side. It's a Really Big Toolbox. The CSS/HTML part can potentially provide interesting options as well. As said before, I don't want to do really cool things with CSS and HTML _in my terminal_. That's what I use a proper browser, IDE, or other functional-specific application for. And even if I did want a program that did absolutely everything, I'd rather use Emacs than some random NodeJS terminal emulator somebody wrote. > The latter quote is from the comment I was replying to. It is not a "salient point," but simple JavaScript hate. JavaScript is objectively a bad language, and to simply say "JavaScript hate is so 2010" is a cheap redirect of actual criticisms of the language. (And no, I don't think ES6 makes it that much better, although at the very least it becomes bearable that way.)
  - SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
    >JavaScript is objectively a bad language JavaScript is not objectively bad. I have 30 years experience programming in probably 15 languages and both formal and informal education in language theory to back that assertion up. It's objectively not perfect, but then most languages have problems. There are a few regretful mistakes in the design, but they can be worked around by using programming style decisions enforced by a linter. JavaScript has some of the most advanced features of languages available today, including lambdas, closures, and asynchronous coding patterns that make it faster at dealing with IO than naive C implementations. Most of what sucks about using JavaScript is dealing with the DOM and browser differences in DOM implementations, but that's not JavaScript, that's just dealing with multiple browser platforms. Which you don't have to do in Node or Electron. >"JavaScript hate is so 2010" is a cheap redirect of actual criticisms No, it was a cheap comeback at substance-free hate directed at the language. If you want to argue details, read JavaScript, The Good Parts (or watch the YouTube video of the same name), and get back to me with what parts of JavaScript are actually, objectively bad. And in order to meet the "objectively" threshold, be sure to cite studies, because otherwise it's just your opinion.

by wrl 10y ago

zingermc 10y ago

I tend to agree with all of your points. How do you feel about the 'eshell' mode in emacs? I think it's neat because it's basically a normal shell plus an elisp REPL. I imagine a terminal emulator with access to a large library of functions (such as a trusted subset of npm modules) could be useful.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

SomeCallMeTim 10y ago

>Firstly, if there is one piece of software that I want to be fast, lightweight, and most importantly secure, it's my terminal emulator. So you prefer one written in ... C? Because C is secure by design? <rim shot> Coding a terminal in Rust or even Go would be awesome, I admit... >Standardised plugins: what standardised plugins? npm modules? Not sure what you mean here. See the demo animation for a (silly yet awesome) example. >250k+ Node modules Point is to use them to do other cool things client-side. It's a Really Big Toolbox. The CSS/HTML part can potentially provide interesting options as well. >It's not hate when people bring up salient points. >>>without having to write any JavaScript, which is its own achievement. The latter quote is from the comment I was replying to. It is not a "salient point," but simple JavaScript hate. His other points were that, in the past, he had written a JavaScript terminal as a school project that he ended up hating, it took him thousands of lines of code, and he'd done it before Node existed to provide the batteries. What salient points do you actually refer to? I'm not really disagreeing with you about the terminal: Honestly I will keep my lighter terminal with tabs and good UI for most real uses. But I love to see people innovating; providing extendable architecture is the way we get great new features. Maybe there's no killer feature in this one to justify the extra weight, but neither do I see the need to pile hate on it because JavaScript; even less because they had a bad experience in school writing a JavaScript project that was similar.

parent5446 10y ago
> So you prefer one written in ... C? Because C is secure by design? <rim shot> You missed the point. A program that is 2,500,000 lines of code of interpreted JavaScript, and was written by some guy in a few weeks who pulled in hundreds of unaudited third party libraries, is definitely less secure than a 100,500 line C application that has been slowly developed, improved, and audited for some 25 years or more. >See the demo animation for a (silly yet awesome) example. A plugin is inherently not "standard" if it does not work on terminals other than the one it's designed for. Zsh has many plugins, albeit not "standard", and almost definitely fulfills all of the functionality you could want out of this project. >Point is to use them to do other cool things client-side. It's a Really Big Toolbox. The CSS/HTML part can potentially provide interesting options as well. As said before, I don't want to do really cool things with CSS and HTML _in my terminal_. That's what I use a proper browser, IDE, or other functional-specific application for. And even if I did want a program that did absolutely everything, I'd rather use Emacs than some random NodeJS terminal emulator somebody wrote. > The latter quote is from the comment I was replying to. It is not a "salient point," but simple JavaScript hate. JavaScript is objectively a bad language, and to simply say "JavaScript hate is so 2010" is a cheap redirect of actual criticisms of the language. (And no, I don't think ES6 makes it that much better, although at the very least it becomes bearable that way.)
- SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
  >JavaScript is objectively a bad language JavaScript is not objectively bad. I have 30 years experience programming in probably 15 languages and both formal and informal education in language theory to back that assertion up. It's objectively not perfect, but then most languages have problems. There are a few regretful mistakes in the design, but they can be worked around by using programming style decisions enforced by a linter. JavaScript has some of the most advanced features of languages available today, including lambdas, closures, and asynchronous coding patterns that make it faster at dealing with IO than naive C implementations. Most of what sucks about using JavaScript is dealing with the DOM and browser differences in DOM implementations, but that's not JavaScript, that's just dealing with multiple browser platforms. Which you don't have to do in Node or Electron. >"JavaScript hate is so 2010" is a cheap redirect of actual criticisms No, it was a cheap comeback at substance-free hate directed at the language. If you want to argue details, read JavaScript, The Good Parts (or watch the YouTube video of the same name), and get back to me with what parts of JavaScript are actually, objectively bad. And in order to meet the "objectively" threshold, be sure to cite studies, because otherwise it's just your opinion.