22 ms·

Hyper 3.0.0

beardicus 7y ago
In before the JavaScript gripes begin. How about we skip the Electron whinging this time? I haven't switched to Hyper because I have found it a bit pokey and that doesn't work for me, but I'll still give this one a try. I'm curious to hear about any interesting reasons other people _have_ chosen Hyper, or particularly cool things it enables by being built on web technologies. Anybody?
- beardicus 7y ago
  Update: Hyper 3 feels super-fast. Startup and new tabs are somewhat sluggish still but actual rendering responsiveness seems real nice.
  - HereBeBeasties 7y ago
    Sad commentary on the state of the world when you feel the need to comment on the speed with which a computer can pain text to the screen. If you read their changelog you'll see that Hyper 3.0 uses WebGL to achieve this. OpenGL. To draw text at a reasonable speed. It's not individually an insane thing to do within the context of Electron, etc. but take five steps back and talk about using a sledgehammer to crack a nut...
    - ynniv 7y ago
      Actually that's a very reasonable thing to do. macOS has been using hardware accelerated graphics since 10.0, and leveraging this is better than fighting it. Also see https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty
      - lprd 7y ago
        +1 for Alacritty. I've been using it as my daily driver (switched from iTerm2) for a few months now and I couldn't be happier.
        kbd 7y ago
        How do people use Alacritty as a daily driver when it can't open more than one window?
        intertextuality 7y ago
        Tmux. Alacritty lacks basic things like splits or tabs so tmux or screen are recommended.
        kbd 7y ago
        I know that's the answer for running multiple sessions at once, but even if you're a tmux expert I don't see how people live with only one window. I constantly have multiple iterm windows open and frequently open new windows for one-off things.
        Fnoord 7y ago
        If you're a tmux expert, it'd work something like this: 1) You don't have the default config/bindings. 2) You use some plugins. 3) You use multiple _panes. 4) You use multiple _windows_ (Do not confuse these 2). 5) You save sessions which persist between tmux sessions/reboots. 6) You run your terminal full screen or at least maximized. Example: I make a pane with ctrl+a (I don't use ctrl+b as tmux hotkey) plus - or plus |. I make a window with ctrl+a + c. I can switch between panes with ctrl+a + hjkl (or pointer). I can switch between windows with ctrl+a + 1234567890 (or pointer). So what matters is that running multiple terminal windows side by side is akin to using Tmux panes, and using multiple terminal tabs is akin to using Tmux windows. It requires some practice to get used to it because basically Tmux becomes more and more your window manager... (You can even run Firefox in a terminal btw, with Browsh.)
    - iaml 7y ago
      It's not insane. FYI the fastest terminal (alacritty) achieves its performance by rendering via gpu, and it's written in rust. iTerm recently started doing it too.
      - nickjj 7y ago
        But if you look at input latency benchmarks (there was one posted not too long ago on HN, maybe a month or 6 weeks ago) alacritty isn't close to the fastest terminal for pressing a key and being able to see the key on the screen. IMO pressing a key and seeing it is the primary focus of a terminal.
        Fnoord 7y ago
        Here is an output latency benchmark [1] [1] https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/issues/673#issuecomment-459342135 https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/issues/673#issuecomment-4...
    - Tyriar 7y ago
      I wrote the WebGL renderer after explorations in rendering the text using a 2D canvas which simply didn't live up to my expectations. It wasn't so much about drawing text at a "reasonable" speed, that was very easy to accomplish using the DOM, it was about excelling and trying to reach native-level performance from within a web context. You can argue about the downsides of Electron all you want, but in xterm.js (the component that does the terminal parsing/rendering that Hyper consumes) we have a portable terminal frontend that can run on anything that has a webview and is getting really fast. It's also used in _a lot_ of software[0]. I wouldn't call that particularly sad. https://github.com/xtermjs/xterm.js#real-world-uses https://github.com/xtermjs/xterm.js#real-world-uses
- Joe8Bit 7y ago
  Same, I try it every few months to see if its tmux support has improved. So far no luck! I actually really like the way it's configure/managed, the whole `hyper install foo` is pretty nice.
- egeozcan 7y ago
  > In before the JavaScript gripes begin. How about we skip the Electron whinging this time? I have a feeling that it's used to farm hate (as karma or "acceptance"). In a less accusatory way, let me say, I think that people really like to see that other people share their hate. This is just my gut feeling though, as I don't share their passionate hate,even though I don't "love" electron.
- nfRfqX5n 7y ago
  been using it for over a year on my windows machine, never really had any issues. probably gonna try out the new microsoft terminal soon tho
thosakwe 7y ago
Honestly speaking, I started using Hyper again this week after 3.0.0 came out, and I like it a lot. I'm not really sure if there's any actual benefit to using it as opposed to the regular Mac terminal, but the colors are bit easier on my eyes at night. The only thing I'm missing is the ability to move tabs around.
- 1f97 7y ago
  why not use iTerm if on OS X?
  - Supermighty 7y ago
    I use iTerm. There are alternatives that are faster, like Alacritty, but iTerm has a ton of features. It's hard to beat.
    - 1f97 7y ago
      out of curiosity, could you give an example of where Alacritty would be faster than iTerm in a day-to-day environment?
      - Supermighty 7y ago
        Alacritty uses the gpu for acceleration, where iTerm uses it only sometimes. That might have changed in a recent release, but originally iTerm was limited in when it used the gpu. I notices it a little bit when moving around quickly in NeoVim.
      - konart 7y ago
        The only usecase that comes to my mind is text rendering when you want to navigate through some large log file, maybe even this some kind of syntax highlight. Otherwise I'm quite curious too to why you may need a GPU rendering or something like this...
        Supermighty 7y ago
eberkund 7y ago
Command prompt on Windows is pretty fast but Git Bash is still unusably slow. I guess I'll try again next major release.
neilsimp1 7y ago
I have been using Cmder on Windows for a while, but Hyper has also looked really good. With the announcement of the new Windows Terminal, I wonder if these projects will become irrelevant. The only reason I use Cmder is for tabs, and once I have Windows Terminal with that feature, I doubt I would ever use Cmder or Hyper.
- egeozcan 7y ago
  IMHO windows needs a beginner friendly & built-in tiling window manager. Then nobody would care about the lack of tabs in cmd or explorer.
  - nickjj 7y ago
    Yeah. I wish someone would build a native port of i3wm. There's an autohotkey project that tries to be a tiling window manager but it's quite buggy and feels very forced. Cool project tho.
- nickjj 7y ago
  If you adapt using tmux then you are free to pick whatever terminal you want because tabs / split panes are done very well in tmux. For example I tried nearly every terminal on Windows and ultimately use wsltty because tmux offers nearly instant tabs and split panes, buffer searching and everything else you could want in a terminal. Here's a whole write up on the comparisons: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/conemu-vs-hyper-vs-terminus-vs-mobaxterm-terminator-vs-ubuntu-wsl https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/conemu-vs-hyper-vs-terminus-v...
  - neilsimp1 7y ago
    Perhaps. I love tmux for multiple terminals in one SSH connection, but I'm a big fan of tabbed browsing, tabbed file explorers, etc., so having tabs in my terminal just makes sense. I could probably get used to tmux handling tabs and split panes all the time.
    - nickjj 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
nickjj 7y ago
I gave up on Hyper about 8 months ago after only using it for a few weeks. 2.1 was close to unusable on Windows. Major prompt / cursor bugs (it would disappear all the time), ~200ms input latency (but a terminal's only job is to make typing feel awesome) and it took 5 seconds+ to open on an SSD. I reported a number of those issues but the maintainers didn't even respond even though people were commenting that it was a problem for them too. Since then I've moved to wsltty for WSL and it's great when combined with tmux. Lightning fast with all of the terminal features you could ever want thanks to tmux (separate windows (ie. tabs), split panes, buffer searching and session saving / restoring). Close to zero input latency too as of wsltty 3.0.0.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- yboris 7y ago
  Hyper is all I use on Mac OS but on Windows I had some trouble with it so I started using Terminus - https://github.com/Eugeny/terminus https://github.com/Eugeny/terminus Looking forward to trying out Hyper 3 on Windows when I get home :)
  - nickjj 7y ago
    I tried Terminus too. I compared a whole bunch of terminals a while back at: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/conemu-vs-hyper-vs-terminus-vs-mobaxterm-terminator-vs-ubuntu-wsl https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/conemu-vs-hyper-vs-terminus-v... I have no intention of ever using Hyper again but I did attempt to install 3.0.0 to see if anything improved just from a pure curiosity standpoint. After running the setup program, it opens a green rectangle that animates. I can only assume that's the installer, except it doesn't let you customize where it gets installed to or anything like that. After 5 full minutes of animating without ever providing a UI hint that it's doing something (on an SSD), I killed the task. I guess I'll never know!
    - rahilwazir 7y ago
      Lol
konart 7y ago
>Disable VSCode type checking okay?
egwynn 7y ago
Hyper certainly looks cool, but “looks cool” doesn’t cut it when it comes to winning me over for what might be the #1 most important tool I use on a daily basis. Is there a page telling me why I should use this over my current terminal (iTerm2, FWIW)?
- jacobwg 7y ago
  This is my personal experience, but for me, considering that the terminal is so frequently used, the small improvements add up over time. I found the font rendering more pleasant on the eyes. I'm not entirely sure why this is, and I'd be interested to see what options could be tweaked in iTerm2 to make it visually similar, but Hyper just "feels" nicer to look at for me. Second, I've found it useful to be able to customize my terminal with web technologies. Previously I used a custom prompt with lots of different bits of context (git status, node environment, python environment, Kubernetes context, etc). With Hyper it's been fairly easy for me to create a local plugin that renders a statusbar with those bits of context. It's built with React, CSS, etc, so personally the ability to easily adjust and create is super nice. Two things I miss from iTerm2 are infinite scrollback and the ability to search output with Command-F. I would assume there's a plugin out there to handle searching, I just haven't looked that far into it yet. Performance of Hyper 2 was adequate enough for me to switch. I'm interested to see how Hyper 3 compares. I'm also interested in iTerm2 3.3, which overhauls the iTerm2 UI. tl;dr - small customizations add up. It's basically the same migration as when I moved from Sublime Text to Atom (though I use VS Code now)
  - intertextuality 7y ago
    You say the small things. You mean like, how quickly the terminal opens and how quickly text gets painted on the screen? iTerm2 blows hyper out of the water in those regards, and it actually does add up. Styling otherwise really isn't that difficult, but it begs the question of why do you need so much information? Are you actually developing or just spending time tinkering on your terminal to have bells and whistles that you don't actually even look at? Surely a simple colorscheme + font that aliases correctly should be enough to "feel nice" to look at? The only thing keeping me from the better performance of alacritty is iterm2's infinite scrollback and some other miscellaneous features that alacritty will probably never get.
justanegg 7y ago
electro...i'm out
mwexler 7y ago
For those wondering, HTML/JS/CSS terminal. https://hyper.is/ https://hyper.is/ gives more useful introduction.
echelon 7y ago
I thought this was the Rust HTTP client/server [1]. I've never heard of this. When two notable projects share the same name, it's confusing. One of these projects should consider rebranding. [1] https://hyper.rs https://hyper.rs
- nat 7y ago
  I don't think there's all that much overlap between people who use Rust and people who think a terminal written in javascript is a good idea.
  - kvark 7y ago
    unless... it's in WASM!
  - moosingin3space 7y ago
    Contrary to popular HN memes, most Rust developers aren't zealots.
StevePerkins 7y ago
I just don't understand the use case here. It's an Electron-based terminal... that has a thousand pretty themes, but lacks basic functionality like being able to expand your scroll buffer. It's just not usable as a daily driver. I'm not trying to hate on Electron (VS Code is my main editor now, and I enjoy it). But I just don't see the point here other than, "Look what they wrote with Electron!". Is it the "social" aspect of posting color themes and seeing how many downloads you get, and I'm just old?
- malux85 7y ago
  No youre not old, just wise. Terminals are actually pretty complex beasts and performance matters above all, closely followed by compatibility. I feel the same way as you. Or maybe we're both just old. Lets chase the kids off our lawn, get some dr pepper and fire up the alphaservers?
- mikl 7y ago
  Ditto here. Given how performance- and security intensive a terminal emulator is (who wants to add JavaScript injection to their list of server security worries?), writing one in Electron seems a bit nuts to me.
  - malux85 7y ago
    well as long as it's not EVAL'ing the .... wait they wouldn't ... OH NO
- STRiDEX 7y ago
  its one of the few options you can use on both windows and osx with the same themes and plugins etc. However, i agree, it wasn't able to get me to stop using item2
- petetttt 7y ago
  We all enjoy customising our setup? A web dev friendly developer experience and a javascript plugin ecosystem opens that up to a new audience. It's a pretty big audience. I guess the hope is that raises the bar for what users expect from a terminal and it's plugins, while providing performance that is adequate enough for it's target audience.
lprd 7y ago
Aside from the plethora of themes and other visual niceties, can anyone explain to be the appeal of Hyper when less expensive, more performant alternatives exist? A terminal written in Electron seems just silly to me...
- qpiox 7y ago
  Well, LaTeX is also Turing complete, so I wonder why has no-one tried programming a terminal in it. It would be fun to install 1GB of TeX packages to be able to open a terminal.
qpiox 7y ago
What's the point of using hypertext-(web)-standard-oriented multimedia-capable framework to create an application that just shows plain text (ok, plain text + 16 colors + bold). Why would one package a 50MB terminal, packing stuff that will never be needed in a terminal. It would make sense if they were to spend all that effort to create a terminal-based web browser.
thatguyagain 7y ago
If you are a developer and using hyper, what language do you work with the most?
- nailer 7y ago
  JS/TS. Occasionally Python or C#.
- carmate383 7y ago
  Whatever the language of the week is obviously.
mrskitch 7y ago
I'm a daily user of Hyper. There has been some gripes of pretty basic things like scrolling and resizing. These aren't showstoppers for me, however I only do pretty basic operations in a terminal (some server maintenance, git commands, and basic file operations). The big downside I see to using the GPU for this is that it is such a hit to battery life. I was an avid iTerm user, but noticed that when I had it running I only get ~2 hours of usable battery time, even when it was just backgrounded. I hope that Hyper doesn't have this same issue -- will keep a close eye on it.
FennNaten 7y ago
I tried hyper v2 recently, took some time to fiddle with plugins and config everything to my liking. It was usable, though missing the ability to launch different shells in different tabs (I'm a windows user, so being able to have a git bash tab, a cmd tab, a powershell tab, a wsl tab, etc. is kind of a must). This morning I was prompted to upgrade to hyper v3, I clicked yes, it refreshed. All my plugins and configs were gone. No prior warnings, no suggested upgrade path, just full wipeout. I uninstalled hyper and went back to cmder.
nailer 7y ago
I've been using Hyper 3 Canary for a while, if you're on Windows it's a MASSIVE difference from previous versions - all the normal stuff you expect to work (select to copy, right click paste, rendering, readline shortcuts etc) works (with a little tweaking, see below). It's definitely usable as a daily driver. I've been using Windows Terminal in the last 24 hours and it still has some major bugs. While I'd say Fluent Terminal is the best in terms of being lightweight and feature filled, and Alacritty for raw power if you have big shell workloads, Hyper 3 is pretty damn good and worth a try. Sane defaults: Use pwsh (not cmd, that's the Windows equivalent of launching 70's Bourne shell on a *nix box): shell: "C:\\Program Files\\PowerShell\\6\\pwsh.exe", shellArgs: [], Normal new tab, close window keys, make readline keys work: keymaps: { "tab:new": "ctrl+t", // Also known as 'close tab' "pane:close": "ctrl+w", // Bug workaround for https://github.com/zeit/hyper/issues/2873 "editor:movePreviousWord": "", "editor:moveNextWord": "" },
carmate383 7y ago
"New Blazing Fast WebGL Engine". Wow really? Major changes - "Emoji support". For fucks sake, seriously? Am I the only one that doesn't want anything of the following _bull shit_? * A terminal emulator that is dependent on an entire web browser (not to mention the layers upon layers of bullshit abstractions all to run something from the 70s). * Support for "emojis" (I mean, come on. It's a _damn terminal_). * To execute code that can hijack control of my shell from any of the 956 dependencies[1] this _heap of shit_ relies on. [1] $ git clone https://github.com/zeit/hyper.git https://github.com/zeit/hyper.git $ cd hyper $ npm install $ ls -lt | wc -l 956
- nfoz 7y ago
  Like it or not: in the era of Unicode, emoji's are plaintext.
  - carmate383 7y ago
    I can live with that. But I can't live with a web browser terminal emulator that markets this as a spectacular feature. I mean, c'mon really? Where is the level where JavaScript masturbation needs to stop?
msavelyev 7y ago
Here is my comparison of terminal typing latencies on mac. https://imgur.com/yFDuVpR https://imgur.com/yFDuVpR Terminal.app is still going to by my go-to terminal
sirtoffski 7y ago
My choices are as follows. * Linux: # Tilix - probably the best option in terms of performance, customization, looks and features. https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/ https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/ # Extraterm - in my experience the best electron-based terminal emulator in terms of performance. It has some neat features too. I catch myself using it more often than Tilix. https://github.com/sedwards2009/extraterm https://github.com/sedwards2009/extraterm * Windows: # CMDer - pretty much the only option. Has everything one needs, even built in bash on Windows. Useful on Windows 7 PCs at work that don't have WSL or admin rights to install more stuff. https://github.com/cmderdev/cmder https://github.com/cmderdev/cmder * MacOS # Plain old built in terminal is actually nice ;) # Extraterm is alright too, but it's electron based and the old mac-mini does not really like it. # iTerm 2 - never got around to fully configuring it, but everyone swears by it. https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2 https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2
- y4mi 7y ago
  cmdr/conemu's copy paste is broken on my work pc. i tried all available copy-paste options (i think there were 4?). none worked. also, the screen keeps flickering with cmdr. probably a byproduct from the cheap hardware or virus scanner... so hyper won by default. i'm looking forward to the new windows terminal though. it'll hopefully get rid of that atrocity.
  - sirtoffski 7y ago
    I usually use ctrl+c/ctrl+v for single line copy paste. For multi-line the only thing I found to work was right click :) it then properly formats multi-line paste.
    - y4mi 7y ago
      Even a single word copy paste is missing at least a few characters in the middle
nkkollaw 7y ago
I've been waiting for Hyper to get reordable tabs (which to me is kind of a basic feature). I wonder if this version will finally introduce this functionality.
- Per_Bothner 7y ago
  May I suggest DomTerm (https://domterm.org https://domterm.org)? It has builtin tabs and tiling, which can dragged and reordered with the mouse. It works very nicely (using the GoldenLayout package).
  - nkkollaw 7y ago
    You may, thank you. I'm not really looking for a terminal built on web tech specifically, I use it for work and I care about reliability more than anything else. I'll take a look and see if I can install it on Linux, though. Thanks!

In before the JavaScript gripes begin. How about we skip the Electron whinging this time? I haven't switched to Hyper because I have found it a bit pokey and that doesn't work for me, but I'll still give this one a try. I'm curious to hear about any interesting reasons other people _have_ chosen Hyper, or particularly cool things it enables by being built on web technologies. Anybody?

beardicus 7y ago
Update: Hyper 3 feels super-fast. Startup and new tabs are somewhat sluggish still but actual rendering responsiveness seems real nice.
- HereBeBeasties 7y ago
  Sad commentary on the state of the world when you feel the need to comment on the speed with which a computer can pain text to the screen. If you read their changelog you'll see that Hyper 3.0 uses WebGL to achieve this. OpenGL. To draw text at a reasonable speed. It's not individually an insane thing to do within the context of Electron, etc. but take five steps back and talk about using a sledgehammer to crack a nut...
  - ynniv 7y ago
    Actually that's a very reasonable thing to do. macOS has been using hardware accelerated graphics since 10.0, and leveraging this is better than fighting it. Also see https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty
    - lprd 7y ago
      +1 for Alacritty. I've been using it as my daily driver (switched from iTerm2) for a few months now and I couldn't be happier.
      - kbd 7y ago
        How do people use Alacritty as a daily driver when it can't open more than one window?
        intertextuality 7y ago
        Tmux. Alacritty lacks basic things like splits or tabs so tmux or screen are recommended.
        kbd 7y ago
        I know that's the answer for running multiple sessions at once, but even if you're a tmux expert I don't see how people live with only one window. I constantly have multiple iterm windows open and frequently open new windows for one-off things.
        Fnoord 7y ago
        If you're a tmux expert, it'd work something like this: 1) You don't have the default config/bindings. 2) You use some plugins. 3) You use multiple _panes. 4) You use multiple _windows_ (Do not confuse these 2). 5) You save sessions which persist between tmux sessions/reboots. 6) You run your terminal full screen or at least maximized. Example: I make a pane with ctrl+a (I don't use ctrl+b as tmux hotkey) plus - or plus |. I make a window with ctrl+a + c. I can switch between panes with ctrl+a + hjkl (or pointer). I can switch between windows with ctrl+a + 1234567890 (or pointer). So what matters is that running multiple terminal windows side by side is akin to using Tmux panes, and using multiple terminal tabs is akin to using Tmux windows. It requires some practice to get used to it because basically Tmux becomes more and more your window manager... (You can even run Firefox in a terminal btw, with Browsh.)
  - iaml 7y ago
    It's not insane. FYI the fastest terminal (alacritty) achieves its performance by rendering via gpu, and it's written in rust. iTerm recently started doing it too.
    - nickjj 7y ago
      But if you look at input latency benchmarks (there was one posted not too long ago on HN, maybe a month or 6 weeks ago) alacritty isn't close to the fastest terminal for pressing a key and being able to see the key on the screen. IMO pressing a key and seeing it is the primary focus of a terminal.
      - Fnoord 7y ago
        Here is an output latency benchmark [1] [1] https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/issues/673#issuecomment-459342135 https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/issues/673#issuecomment-4...
  - Tyriar 7y ago
    I wrote the WebGL renderer after explorations in rendering the text using a 2D canvas which simply didn't live up to my expectations. It wasn't so much about drawing text at a "reasonable" speed, that was very easy to accomplish using the DOM, it was about excelling and trying to reach native-level performance from within a web context. You can argue about the downsides of Electron all you want, but in xterm.js (the component that does the terminal parsing/rendering that Hyper consumes) we have a portable terminal frontend that can run on anything that has a webview and is getting really fast. It's also used in _a lot_ of software[0]. I wouldn't call that particularly sad. https://github.com/xtermjs/xterm.js#real-world-uses https://github.com/xtermjs/xterm.js#real-world-uses
Joe8Bit 7y ago
Same, I try it every few months to see if its tmux support has improved. So far no luck! I actually really like the way it's configure/managed, the whole `hyper install foo` is pretty nice.
egeozcan 7y ago
> In before the JavaScript gripes begin. How about we skip the Electron whinging this time? I have a feeling that it's used to farm hate (as karma or "acceptance"). In a less accusatory way, let me say, I think that people really like to see that other people share their hate. This is just my gut feeling though, as I don't share their passionate hate,even though I don't "love" electron.
nfRfqX5n 7y ago
been using it for over a year on my windows machine, never really had any issues. probably gonna try out the new microsoft terminal soon tho

thosakwe 7y ago

Honestly speaking, I started using Hyper again this week after 3.0.0 came out, and I like it a lot. I'm not really sure if there's any actual benefit to using it as opposed to the regular Mac terminal, but the colors are bit easier on my eyes at night. The only thing I'm missing is the ability to move tabs around.

1f97 7y ago
why not use iTerm if on OS X?
- Supermighty 7y ago
  I use iTerm. There are alternatives that are faster, like Alacritty, but iTerm has a ton of features. It's hard to beat.
  - 1f97 7y ago
    out of curiosity, could you give an example of where Alacritty would be faster than iTerm in a day-to-day environment?
    - Supermighty 7y ago
      Alacritty uses the gpu for acceleration, where iTerm uses it only sometimes. That might have changed in a recent release, but originally iTerm was limited in when it used the gpu. I notices it a little bit when moving around quickly in NeoVim.
    - konart 7y ago
      The only usecase that comes to my mind is text rendering when you want to navigate through some large log file, maybe even this some kind of syntax highlight. Otherwise I'm quite curious too to why you may need a GPU rendering or something like this...
      - Supermighty 7y ago

eberkund 7y ago

Command prompt on Windows is pretty fast but Git Bash is still unusably slow. I guess I'll try again next major release.

neilsimp1 7y ago

I have been using Cmder on Windows for a while, but Hyper has also looked really good. With the announcement of the new Windows Terminal, I wonder if these projects will become irrelevant. The only reason I use Cmder is for tabs, and once I have Windows Terminal with that feature, I doubt I would ever use Cmder or Hyper.

egeozcan 7y ago
IMHO windows needs a beginner friendly & built-in tiling window manager. Then nobody would care about the lack of tabs in cmd or explorer.
- nickjj 7y ago
  Yeah. I wish someone would build a native port of i3wm. There's an autohotkey project that tries to be a tiling window manager but it's quite buggy and feels very forced. Cool project tho.
nickjj 7y ago
If you adapt using tmux then you are free to pick whatever terminal you want because tabs / split panes are done very well in tmux. For example I tried nearly every terminal on Windows and ultimately use wsltty because tmux offers nearly instant tabs and split panes, buffer searching and everything else you could want in a terminal. Here's a whole write up on the comparisons: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/conemu-vs-hyper-vs-terminus-vs-mobaxterm-terminator-vs-ubuntu-wsl https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/conemu-vs-hyper-vs-terminus-v...
- neilsimp1 7y ago
  Perhaps. I love tmux for multiple terminals in one SSH connection, but I'm a big fan of tabbed browsing, tabbed file explorers, etc., so having tabs in my terminal just makes sense. I could probably get used to tmux handling tabs and split panes all the time.
  - nickjj 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

nickjj 7y ago

I gave up on Hyper about 8 months ago after only using it for a few weeks. 2.1 was close to unusable on Windows. Major prompt / cursor bugs (it would disappear all the time), ~200ms input latency (but a terminal's only job is to make typing feel awesome) and it took 5 seconds+ to open on an SSD. I reported a number of those issues but the maintainers didn't even respond even though people were commenting that it was a problem for them too. Since then I've moved to wsltty for WSL and it's great when combined with tmux. Lightning fast with all of the terminal features you could ever want thanks to tmux (separate windows (ie. tabs), split panes, buffer searching and session saving / restoring). Close to zero input latency too as of wsltty 3.0.0.

deleted 7y ago
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yboris 7y ago
Hyper is all I use on Mac OS but on Windows I had some trouble with it so I started using Terminus - https://github.com/Eugeny/terminus https://github.com/Eugeny/terminus Looking forward to trying out Hyper 3 on Windows when I get home :)
- nickjj 7y ago
  I tried Terminus too. I compared a whole bunch of terminals a while back at: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/conemu-vs-hyper-vs-terminus-vs-mobaxterm-terminator-vs-ubuntu-wsl https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/conemu-vs-hyper-vs-terminus-v... I have no intention of ever using Hyper again but I did attempt to install 3.0.0 to see if anything improved just from a pure curiosity standpoint. After running the setup program, it opens a green rectangle that animates. I can only assume that's the installer, except it doesn't let you customize where it gets installed to or anything like that. After 5 full minutes of animating without ever providing a UI hint that it's doing something (on an SSD), I killed the task. I guess I'll never know!
  - rahilwazir 7y ago
    Lol

konart 7y ago

>Disable VSCode type checking okay?

egwynn 7y ago

Hyper certainly looks cool, but “looks cool” doesn’t cut it when it comes to winning me over for what might be the #1 most important tool I use on a daily basis. Is there a page telling me why I should use this over my current terminal (iTerm2, FWIW)?

jacobwg 7y ago
This is my personal experience, but for me, considering that the terminal is so frequently used, the small improvements add up over time. I found the font rendering more pleasant on the eyes. I'm not entirely sure why this is, and I'd be interested to see what options could be tweaked in iTerm2 to make it visually similar, but Hyper just "feels" nicer to look at for me. Second, I've found it useful to be able to customize my terminal with web technologies. Previously I used a custom prompt with lots of different bits of context (git status, node environment, python environment, Kubernetes context, etc). With Hyper it's been fairly easy for me to create a local plugin that renders a statusbar with those bits of context. It's built with React, CSS, etc, so personally the ability to easily adjust and create is super nice. Two things I miss from iTerm2 are infinite scrollback and the ability to search output with Command-F. I would assume there's a plugin out there to handle searching, I just haven't looked that far into it yet. Performance of Hyper 2 was adequate enough for me to switch. I'm interested to see how Hyper 3 compares. I'm also interested in iTerm2 3.3, which overhauls the iTerm2 UI. tl;dr - small customizations add up. It's basically the same migration as when I moved from Sublime Text to Atom (though I use VS Code now)
- intertextuality 7y ago
  You say the small things. You mean like, how quickly the terminal opens and how quickly text gets painted on the screen? iTerm2 blows hyper out of the water in those regards, and it actually does add up. Styling otherwise really isn't that difficult, but it begs the question of why do you need so much information? Are you actually developing or just spending time tinkering on your terminal to have bells and whistles that you don't actually even look at? Surely a simple colorscheme + font that aliases correctly should be enough to "feel nice" to look at? The only thing keeping me from the better performance of alacritty is iterm2's infinite scrollback and some other miscellaneous features that alacritty will probably never get.

justanegg 7y ago

electro...i'm out

mwexler 7y ago

For those wondering, HTML/JS/CSS terminal. https://hyper.is/ https://hyper.is/ gives more useful introduction.

echelon 7y ago

I thought this was the Rust HTTP client/server [1]. I've never heard of this. When two notable projects share the same name, it's confusing. One of these projects should consider rebranding. [1] https://hyper.rs https://hyper.rs

nat 7y ago
I don't think there's all that much overlap between people who use Rust and people who think a terminal written in javascript is a good idea.
- kvark 7y ago
  unless... it's in WASM!
- moosingin3space 7y ago
  Contrary to popular HN memes, most Rust developers aren't zealots.

StevePerkins 7y ago

I just don't understand the use case here. It's an Electron-based terminal... that has a thousand pretty themes, but lacks basic functionality like being able to expand your scroll buffer. It's just not usable as a daily driver. I'm not trying to hate on Electron (VS Code is my main editor now, and I enjoy it). But I just don't see the point here other than, "Look what they wrote with Electron!". Is it the "social" aspect of posting color themes and seeing how many downloads you get, and I'm just old?

malux85 7y ago
No youre not old, just wise. Terminals are actually pretty complex beasts and performance matters above all, closely followed by compatibility. I feel the same way as you. Or maybe we're both just old. Lets chase the kids off our lawn, get some dr pepper and fire up the alphaservers?
mikl 7y ago
Ditto here. Given how performance- and security intensive a terminal emulator is (who wants to add JavaScript injection to their list of server security worries?), writing one in Electron seems a bit nuts to me.
- malux85 7y ago
  well as long as it's not EVAL'ing the .... wait they wouldn't ... OH NO
STRiDEX 7y ago
its one of the few options you can use on both windows and osx with the same themes and plugins etc. However, i agree, it wasn't able to get me to stop using item2
petetttt 7y ago
We all enjoy customising our setup? A web dev friendly developer experience and a javascript plugin ecosystem opens that up to a new audience. It's a pretty big audience. I guess the hope is that raises the bar for what users expect from a terminal and it's plugins, while providing performance that is adequate enough for it's target audience.

lprd 7y ago

Aside from the plethora of themes and other visual niceties, can anyone explain to be the appeal of Hyper when less expensive, more performant alternatives exist? A terminal written in Electron seems just silly to me...

qpiox 7y ago
Well, LaTeX is also Turing complete, so I wonder why has no-one tried programming a terminal in it. It would be fun to install 1GB of TeX packages to be able to open a terminal.

qpiox 7y ago

What's the point of using hypertext-(web)-standard-oriented multimedia-capable framework to create an application that just shows plain text (ok, plain text + 16 colors + bold). Why would one package a 50MB terminal, packing stuff that will never be needed in a terminal. It would make sense if they were to spend all that effort to create a terminal-based web browser.

thatguyagain 7y ago

If you are a developer and using hyper, what language do you work with the most?

nailer 7y ago
JS/TS. Occasionally Python or C#.
carmate383 7y ago
Whatever the language of the week is obviously.

mrskitch 7y ago

I'm a daily user of Hyper. There has been some gripes of pretty basic things like scrolling and resizing. These aren't showstoppers for me, however I only do pretty basic operations in a terminal (some server maintenance, git commands, and basic file operations). The big downside I see to using the GPU for this is that it is such a hit to battery life. I was an avid iTerm user, but noticed that when I had it running I only get ~2 hours of usable battery time, even when it was just backgrounded. I hope that Hyper doesn't have this same issue -- will keep a close eye on it.

FennNaten 7y ago

I tried hyper v2 recently, took some time to fiddle with plugins and config everything to my liking. It was usable, though missing the ability to launch different shells in different tabs (I'm a windows user, so being able to have a git bash tab, a cmd tab, a powershell tab, a wsl tab, etc. is kind of a must). This morning I was prompted to upgrade to hyper v3, I clicked yes, it refreshed. All my plugins and configs were gone. No prior warnings, no suggested upgrade path, just full wipeout. I uninstalled hyper and went back to cmder.

nailer 7y ago

I've been using Hyper 3 Canary for a while, if you're on Windows it's a MASSIVE difference from previous versions - all the normal stuff you expect to work (select to copy, right click paste, rendering, readline shortcuts etc) works (with a little tweaking, see below). It's definitely usable as a daily driver. I've been using Windows Terminal in the last 24 hours and it still has some major bugs. While I'd say Fluent Terminal is the best in terms of being lightweight and feature filled, and Alacritty for raw power if you have big shell workloads, Hyper 3 is pretty damn good and worth a try. Sane defaults: Use pwsh (not cmd, that's the Windows equivalent of launching 70's Bourne shell on a *nix box): shell: "C:\\Program Files\\PowerShell\\6\\pwsh.exe", shellArgs: [], Normal new tab, close window keys, make readline keys work: keymaps: { "tab:new": "ctrl+t", // Also known as 'close tab' "pane:close": "ctrl+w", // Bug workaround for https://github.com/zeit/hyper/issues/2873 "editor:movePreviousWord": "", "editor:moveNextWord": "" },

carmate383 7y ago

"New Blazing Fast WebGL Engine". Wow really? Major changes - "Emoji support". For fucks sake, seriously? Am I the only one that doesn't want anything of the following _bull shit_? * A terminal emulator that is dependent on an entire web browser (not to mention the layers upon layers of bullshit abstractions all to run something from the 70s). * Support for "emojis" (I mean, come on. It's a _damn terminal_). * To execute code that can hijack control of my shell from any of the 956 dependencies[1] this _heap of shit_ relies on. [1] $ git clone https://github.com/zeit/hyper.git https://github.com/zeit/hyper.git $ cd hyper $ npm install $ ls -lt | wc -l 956

nfoz 7y ago
Like it or not: in the era of Unicode, emoji's are plaintext.
- carmate383 7y ago
  I can live with that. But I can't live with a web browser terminal emulator that markets this as a spectacular feature. I mean, c'mon really? Where is the level where JavaScript masturbation needs to stop?

msavelyev 7y ago

Here is my comparison of terminal typing latencies on mac. https://imgur.com/yFDuVpR https://imgur.com/yFDuVpR Terminal.app is still going to by my go-to terminal

sirtoffski 7y ago

My choices are as follows. * Linux: # Tilix - probably the best option in terms of performance, customization, looks and features. https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/ https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/ # Extraterm - in my experience the best electron-based terminal emulator in terms of performance. It has some neat features too. I catch myself using it more often than Tilix. https://github.com/sedwards2009/extraterm https://github.com/sedwards2009/extraterm * Windows: # CMDer - pretty much the only option. Has everything one needs, even built in bash on Windows. Useful on Windows 7 PCs at work that don't have WSL or admin rights to install more stuff. https://github.com/cmderdev/cmder https://github.com/cmderdev/cmder * MacOS # Plain old built in terminal is actually nice ;) # Extraterm is alright too, but it's electron based and the old mac-mini does not really like it. # iTerm 2 - never got around to fully configuring it, but everyone swears by it. https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2 https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2

y4mi 7y ago
cmdr/conemu's copy paste is broken on my work pc. i tried all available copy-paste options (i think there were 4?). none worked. also, the screen keeps flickering with cmdr. probably a byproduct from the cheap hardware or virus scanner... so hyper won by default. i'm looking forward to the new windows terminal though. it'll hopefully get rid of that atrocity.
- sirtoffski 7y ago
  I usually use ctrl+c/ctrl+v for single line copy paste. For multi-line the only thing I found to work was right click :) it then properly formats multi-line paste.
  - y4mi 7y ago
    Even a single word copy paste is missing at least a few characters in the middle

nkkollaw 7y ago

I've been waiting for Hyper to get reordable tabs (which to me is kind of a basic feature). I wonder if this version will finally introduce this functionality.

Per_Bothner 7y ago
May I suggest DomTerm (https://domterm.org https://domterm.org)? It has builtin tabs and tiling, which can dragged and reordered with the mouse. It works very nicely (using the GoldenLayout package).
- nkkollaw 7y ago
  You may, thank you. I'm not really looking for a terminal built on web tech specifically, I use it for work and I care about reliability more than anything else. I'll take a look and see if I can install it on Linux, though. Thanks!