4 ms·

Show HN: DomTerm – a web-based rich terminal emulator and console

78 points by Per_Bothner 8y ago

Per_Bothner 8y ago
The article at https://opensource.com/article/18/1/introduction-domterm-terminal-emulator https://opensource.com/article/18/1/introduction-domterm-ter... is a good overview of what DomTerm is about. I've long been interested in how we can improve terminals/REPLs/consoles - I wrote the Emacs term mode in attempt to integrate shell mode with a real terminal emulator (though the attempt to replace shell mode did not "take"). (I reposted at the encouragement of moderator Daniel - thanks!) Some of the things I've been working on since the opensource.com article include: - better input editing: most of the functionality of readline with mouse/selection/clipboard integration. Main thing to be worked on is command (tab-) completion. I'm mulling the best way to do that. - more generally, I want the functionality of UpTerm/FinalTerm. But writing out own shell is a mistake (well, I'm thinking about that, too ...). Better to use an existing shell - possibly fish as it has builtin auto-completion. - Menus (menubar and popup) for "generic" (non-Electron non-Qt) front-ends: http://per.bothner.com/blog/2018/jsMenus/ http://per.bothner.com/blog/2018/jsMenus/ - better display of complex nested data, integrating show/hide buttons with pretty-printing, wih dynamic re-flpw on window re-size
- watersb 8y ago
  Thanks for DomTerm! I am pleased with the current ascendancy of Jupyter notebooks, interactive sessions of data manipulation. When I first encountered Mathematica notebooks in early 1990s, I thought that this would be the way forward. A few years later, XMLTerm with Mozilla.. and it doesn't find an audience. I was thinking of an uncanny valley between CLI and GUI, but I am writing this in a web browser on an iPad, which is better than any interaction paradigm we might have held in 1990. We need more work on DOMTerm, notebook-style interaction design. I'm a bit surprised that Windows PowerShell does not play in this space.
  - Per_Bothner 8y ago
    A main goal of DomTerm is to support "rich" REPL environments, similar to Jupyter.
- still_grokking 8y ago
  > But writing out own shell is a mistake (well, I'm thinking about that, too ...). Better to use an existing shell - possibly fish as it has builtin auto-completion. Maybe consider xonsh shell [1]. » Xonsh is a Python-powered, cross-platform, Unix-gazing shell language and command prompt. The language is a superset of Python 3.4+ with additional shell primitives that you are used to from Bash and IPython. It works on all major systems including Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows. Xonsh is meant for the daily use of experts and novices alike. « [1] http://xon.sh/ http://xon.sh/
  - Per_Bothner 8y ago
    See https://kashell.org https://kashell.org for where my ideas are going (with a very incomplete prototype).
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jonny_eh 8y ago
How does this compare to Hyper? https://hyper.is/ https://hyper.is/
- rkeene2 8y ago
  Or good old XMLTerm http://www.xml.com/pub/2000/06/07/xmlterm/ http://www.xml.com/pub/2000/06/07/xmlterm/
  - Per_Bothner 8y ago
    XMLTerm was an inspiration to me, and you can think of DomTerm as my attempt to combine the ideas of XMLTerm (graphics, logical structure of output, smart interaction) with a solid xterm-compatible terminal emulator. The most important difference is that XMLTerm is long dead! (However, XMLTerm's author more recently wrote GraphTerm as a more modern take on XMLTerm - however, that too is unmaintained.)
- Per_Bothner 8y ago
  Based on trying Hyper out (a version from April), and the web-site, I can list these differeences. (I could be wrong about them, and I'm sure Hyper has other nifty features, perhaps as an extension.) Applications under DomTerm can "print" general html including images and rich text. Hyper does worse on xterm/vtNNN compatibility, as indicated by running the vttest program. Hyper does not re-flow long lines on window resize. Hyper does not remember if TAB was used in output. (I.e. cat Makefile, then copy-and-paste contains spaces, not a tab.) Both support splitting the window into panes, but hyper doesn't seem to support re-arranging using drag-n-drop. DomTerm can run in a browser (as an alternative to Electron), and has buitlin session support (a la tmux/screen). DomTerm has a builtin input editor (similar to GNU readline, but with mouse/selection/clipboard integration). By default (in "auto" mode) this is selected by on the pty canon/raw state. DomTerm keeps track of "logical" structure of the output, aided by special PROMPT escape. DomTerm lets you right-click on an FILENAME:LINE:COLUMN in an error message, and can open your preferred editor. Hyper has an extension mechanism, which DomTerm does not (yet) have.
- smartmic 8y ago
gcoda 8y ago
It is either my isp, or this site got some malicious js that reidirects me to wierd places from my android device
- Per_Bothner 8y ago
  No reports of anything like that before. DomTerm.org is hosted under my DreamHost account, which also hosts my personal stuff, including bothner.com.
  - Per_Bothner 8y ago
    There was a bad (malicious) .htaccess file. I've removed it, but there remains the question of how it got there. Added: The domterm.org directory in my home directory on DreamHost (from which domterm.org is hosted) was group and world-writable. Don't know how that happened (probably my carelessness), but I fixed it.
    - buzzier 8y ago
      https://discussion.dreamhost.com/t/malicious-htaccess-reappearing/56998 https://discussion.dreamhost.com/t/malicious-htaccess-reappe...
wolframhempel 8y ago
Always great to see my layoutmanager (https://golden-layout.com/ https://golden-layout.com/) in the wild. Thanks so much for using it!
- ravitation 8y ago
  This is so beautiful, definitely discovery of the day (at least) for me. Thanks for making it!
- Per_Bothner 8y ago
  Thank you - GoldenLayout is a great package.
dfee 8y ago
First, very cool. Second, now that we've got the terminal in a browser, we've got a linux subsytem for WebAssembly (https://github.com/cervus-v/cervus https://github.com/cervus-v/cervus), and we've got QT for WebAssembly, we seem to be ~2 years out from someone pushing a real "web os" – as in an adult could probably boot to WebKit and perhaps not know that they're in a WebBrowser. Sure that's an opportunity for Google and Facebook to finally "compete" against the incumbent OS market. The snake will inevitably eat itself again in some 30 year supercycle. This is along the lines of the "birth and death of javascript" slides. But as it really is happening, are we really gaining anything? Anything at all? And again, not to take away from DomTerm which seems really cool.

78 points by Per_Bothner 8y ago

The article at https://opensource.com/article/18/1/introduction-domterm-terminal-emulator https://opensource.com/article/18/1/introduction-domterm-ter... is a good overview of what DomTerm is about. I've long been interested in how we can improve terminals/REPLs/consoles - I wrote the Emacs term mode in attempt to integrate shell mode with a real terminal emulator (though the attempt to replace shell mode did not "take"). (I reposted at the encouragement of moderator Daniel - thanks!) Some of the things I've been working on since the opensource.com article include: - better input editing: most of the functionality of readline with mouse/selection/clipboard integration. Main thing to be worked on is command (tab-) completion. I'm mulling the best way to do that. - more generally, I want the functionality of UpTerm/FinalTerm. But writing out own shell is a mistake (well, I'm thinking about that, too ...). Better to use an existing shell - possibly fish as it has builtin auto-completion. - Menus (menubar and popup) for "generic" (non-Electron non-Qt) front-ends: http://per.bothner.com/blog/2018/jsMenus/ http://per.bothner.com/blog/2018/jsMenus/ - better display of complex nested data, integrating show/hide buttons with pretty-printing, wih dynamic re-flpw on window re-size

watersb 8y ago
Thanks for DomTerm! I am pleased with the current ascendancy of Jupyter notebooks, interactive sessions of data manipulation. When I first encountered Mathematica notebooks in early 1990s, I thought that this would be the way forward. A few years later, XMLTerm with Mozilla.. and it doesn't find an audience. I was thinking of an uncanny valley between CLI and GUI, but I am writing this in a web browser on an iPad, which is better than any interaction paradigm we might have held in 1990. We need more work on DOMTerm, notebook-style interaction design. I'm a bit surprised that Windows PowerShell does not play in this space.
- Per_Bothner 8y ago
  A main goal of DomTerm is to support "rich" REPL environments, similar to Jupyter.
still_grokking 8y ago
> But writing out own shell is a mistake (well, I'm thinking about that, too ...). Better to use an existing shell - possibly fish as it has builtin auto-completion. Maybe consider xonsh shell [1]. » Xonsh is a Python-powered, cross-platform, Unix-gazing shell language and command prompt. The language is a superset of Python 3.4+ with additional shell primitives that you are used to from Bash and IPython. It works on all major systems including Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows. Xonsh is meant for the daily use of experts and novices alike. « [1] http://xon.sh/ http://xon.sh/
- Per_Bothner 8y ago
  See https://kashell.org https://kashell.org for where my ideas are going (with a very incomplete prototype).

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jonny_eh 8y ago

How does this compare to Hyper? https://hyper.is/ https://hyper.is/

rkeene2 8y ago
Or good old XMLTerm http://www.xml.com/pub/2000/06/07/xmlterm/ http://www.xml.com/pub/2000/06/07/xmlterm/
- Per_Bothner 8y ago
  XMLTerm was an inspiration to me, and you can think of DomTerm as my attempt to combine the ideas of XMLTerm (graphics, logical structure of output, smart interaction) with a solid xterm-compatible terminal emulator. The most important difference is that XMLTerm is long dead! (However, XMLTerm's author more recently wrote GraphTerm as a more modern take on XMLTerm - however, that too is unmaintained.)
Per_Bothner 8y ago
Based on trying Hyper out (a version from April), and the web-site, I can list these differeences. (I could be wrong about them, and I'm sure Hyper has other nifty features, perhaps as an extension.) Applications under DomTerm can "print" general html including images and rich text. Hyper does worse on xterm/vtNNN compatibility, as indicated by running the vttest program. Hyper does not re-flow long lines on window resize. Hyper does not remember if TAB was used in output. (I.e. cat Makefile, then copy-and-paste contains spaces, not a tab.) Both support splitting the window into panes, but hyper doesn't seem to support re-arranging using drag-n-drop. DomTerm can run in a browser (as an alternative to Electron), and has buitlin session support (a la tmux/screen). DomTerm has a builtin input editor (similar to GNU readline, but with mouse/selection/clipboard integration). By default (in "auto" mode) this is selected by on the pty canon/raw state. DomTerm keeps track of "logical" structure of the output, aided by special PROMPT escape. DomTerm lets you right-click on an FILENAME:LINE:COLUMN in an error message, and can open your preferred editor. Hyper has an extension mechanism, which DomTerm does not (yet) have.
smartmic 8y ago

gcoda 8y ago

It is either my isp, or this site got some malicious js that reidirects me to wierd places from my android device

Per_Bothner 8y ago
No reports of anything like that before. DomTerm.org is hosted under my DreamHost account, which also hosts my personal stuff, including bothner.com.
- Per_Bothner 8y ago
  There was a bad (malicious) .htaccess file. I've removed it, but there remains the question of how it got there. Added: The domterm.org directory in my home directory on DreamHost (from which domterm.org is hosted) was group and world-writable. Don't know how that happened (probably my carelessness), but I fixed it.
  - buzzier 8y ago
    https://discussion.dreamhost.com/t/malicious-htaccess-reappearing/56998 https://discussion.dreamhost.com/t/malicious-htaccess-reappe...

wolframhempel 8y ago

Always great to see my layoutmanager (https://golden-layout.com/ https://golden-layout.com/) in the wild. Thanks so much for using it!

ravitation 8y ago
This is so beautiful, definitely discovery of the day (at least) for me. Thanks for making it!
Per_Bothner 8y ago
Thank you - GoldenLayout is a great package.

dfee 8y ago

First, very cool. Second, now that we've got the terminal in a browser, we've got a linux subsytem for WebAssembly (https://github.com/cervus-v/cervus https://github.com/cervus-v/cervus), and we've got QT for WebAssembly, we seem to be ~2 years out from someone pushing a real "web os" – as in an adult could probably boot to WebKit and perhaps not know that they're in a WebBrowser. Sure that's an opportunity for Google and Facebook to finally "compete" against the incumbent OS market. The snake will inevitably eat itself again in some 30 year supercycle. This is along the lines of the "birth and death of javascript" slides. But as it really is happening, are we really gaining anything? Anything at all? And again, not to take away from DomTerm which seems really cool.