8 ms·

HTML5 (plugin free) web-based terminal emulator and SSH client

155 points by zacharysjoden 15y ago

leejoramo 15y ago
Impressive demo video of GateOne: http://vimeo.com/24857127 http://vimeo.com/24857127 I could see a number of use cases for this. However, I would like to know that it has been vetted for possible security issues.
- vdm 15y ago
  Impressive indeed. Why don't github README's ever link to a demo, or the intro blog post? This is why I bookmark the HN page for a project like this.
  - riskable 15y ago
    Why didn't I add a link to the demo in the README? This has been corrected. Thanks for the tip :) -- Dan McDougall - Author of Gate One
Alexandervn 15y ago
Very cool. But I don't like all the options on the right. It could have been simpler. You have the tabs in your browser. Why add another way to make screens in a screen? Though splits could be handy..
- leejoramo 15y ago
  I think because different Tabs are sandboxed from each other. Looking at the code in GitHub, the browser is communitcating to a server based application. By doing this in one browser window, you only need on connection between the browser and the server.
  - riskable 15y ago
    This is exactly right. Having said that, I plan to add support for detaching terminals into their own tabs to Gate One in the future. There's no technical reason why it can't be done but it will require a lot of coding. There's another advantage to having all your terminals under one tab: They don't clutter up your tabs! LOL! If you've ever had a dozen or so PuTTY windows open you'll know that they can really clutter the heck out of your task manager. Having a zillion tabs open would have a similar effect. -- Dan McDougall - Author of Gate One
zokier 15y ago
* Similarly, supports server-side logging, recording, and video-like playback of user sessions. It can even log to syslog to support whatever centralized logging system you want. Sounds scary.
- riskable 15y ago
  Why does auditability scare you? Besides, it is a requirement of many laws and industry regulations. Especially the log-to-syslog capability which enables centralized logging of sessions. -- Dan McDougall - Author of Gate One
  - zokier 15y ago
    Because the point of SSH is that it's encrypted and secure, thus not eavesdroppable my any intermediaries. Edit: To put it other way, this feels like using telnet to connect to a server where you can then ssh where you were going to. And the telnet server recording all traffic that goes through it.
afiler 15y ago
I wrote my own web-based terminal emulator, but shortly thereafter found shellinabox (http://code.google.com/p/shellinabox/ http://code.google.com/p/shellinabox/) and I use that instead. It looks like GateOne might be a bit more configurable, and I don't think shellinabox does tiling or bookmarks. Can anyone else comment on other relevant differences?
- superbobry 15y ago
  - unicode characters (for instance you can't type in russian) -- try there http://demos.anyterm.org/shellinabox_nano - speed could've been better, there's a noticeable delay when running something like `mc` I haven't tried Gate One yet, but I did look very closely at your project at some point. Great work, btw :)
alexholehouse 15y ago
Very, very cool - fyi your site is giving me the ol' 403 - (http://liftoffsoftware.com/ http://liftoffsoftware.com/) (if this just because you're getting it up and running let me know and I'll delete this!)
- cobrabyte 15y ago
  At the bottom of the README, the author states that links to the website are broken because the site is not yet online.
- leejoramo 15y ago
  Strangely, the last line of the README file says "NOTE: http://liftoffsoftware.com/ http://liftoffsoftware.com/ hasn't been built yet so links pointing there will be dead for a while." I guess an "Under Construction" animated GIF would be better than a 403
larelli 15y ago
This looks like an impressive, feature-rich version of escape from the web (https://launchpad.net/eftw https://launchpad.net/eftw). Both use tornado on the backend and there seem to be some similarities in the multiplex classes. Escape from the web in turn shares code with ajaxterm. Both (gateone and eftw) render terminal output on the server side using a python terminal emulator, while shellinabox mentioned in another comment uses a Javascript terminal emulator on the client side. Edit: The docs say, the terminal class was written from scratch.
- riskable 15y ago
  Hah, nice find! You'll be interested to note that I am the author of both Escape From The Web and Gate One. Once WebSockets became generally available I decided to write a new application from scratch in order to take advantage of the technology. The primary motivator was that I wanted a web-based terminal emulator that could support multiple terminals (among other things). Also, the two work on completely different principals. EFTW uses long-held HTTP streams (which differs from Ajaxterm's long-polling method) while Gate One uses asynchronous WebSockets. WebSockets are vastly superior to the old AJAX methods in that they're much less bandwidth/CPU intensive and provide an order of magnitude less latency. -- Dan McDougall - Author of Gate One
bprater 15y ago
The author created a great looking app -- I wish he had spent five minutes during the 9 months explaining how to install it!
- rufugee 15y ago
  The docs, included in the download, contain install instructions. Pretty easy and quick to install.
- djeikyb 15y ago
  An INSTALL file would be nice, but the docs are there, if buried. For my Ubuntu 11.04 install, it was smooth sailing after I purged my stock version of Tornado and upgraded to 2.1.1. sudo apt-get purge tornado sudo pip install tornado pyopenssl kerberos sudo ./setup.py install cd /opt/gateone ./gateone.py
there 15y ago
FYI: Gate One was developed entirely by one guy in his spare time over the course of ~9 months. It turned out pretty good so he's looking to start a business out of it. anyone know how he plans to do that? license it under different terms to network hardware device vendors for integration or something?
- martey 15y ago
  The repository's LICENSE.txt states, "if the terms of the AGPLv3 license do not suit your needs, a proprietary license may be purchased from Liftoff Software," so I would assume that you are correct.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- riskable 15y ago
  Two ways: 1) Gate One is licensed under the AGPLv3 which requires that you publicly distribute the source of anything that uses Gate One. Even if it is hosted via a SaaS or ASP solution. So if you want to include Gate One into another product you'll either have to make that product open source or buy a license (which will be available when Gate One reaches 1.0). 2) Support contracts. There's no requirement that business buy a support contract just to use Gate One inside their organization (please do!). Having said that, in my experience most businesses would be happy to pay for support if the price is right. Especially if there's worries about licensing (and many organizations are terrified of the AGPLv3). -- Dan McDougall - Author of Gate One
zobzu 15y ago
I thought it was implementing SSH in JS and WebSockets aka an "HTML5 SSH client" In fact its just a front end. So yeah it's plugin free, but it's still not interesting. Means also that your password travels to the host machine then and that you get double latency. "Bleh" comes to mind :-( Please someone tell me I missed a sshprotocol.py and that the ssh.py was not full of system() calls :'(
- maratd 15y ago
  I thought it was implementing SSH in JS and WebSockets aka an "HTML5 SSH client" I don't think that's possible. You would have to implement encryption in JavaScript and that is a horror in it's own right, especially when it comes to performance. There would be other problems too. Means also that your password travels to the host machine then and that you get double latency. Yes, but if you install this on your machine or another machine on your local network, it shouldn't be too bad. "Bleh" comes to mind :-( This is actually very cool! I develop on Windows (personal preference), but my development + production is all Linux. There's also instances on Rackspace and EC2, all Linux. This allows me to connect to them through the browser, without running SecureCRT or Putty!
  - skeptical 15y ago
    We get to see all kinds of impressive stuff here at HN. I was skeptical about what this was for the reasons you pointed out. An SSH client in javascript and HTML5... "HTML5 SSH Client" is a misleading title because is not accurate. The heavy lifting resources to python and system calls.
    - riskable 15y ago
      Gate One just comes with a bundled SSH plugin that makes using it for SSH really convenient. You can actually use Gate One to run any terminal application you desire. For example, if you run "sudo ./gateone.py --command=/bin/login" Gate One will instantly become the equivalent of logging into the host's console. It can be a great (secure) back door into a server in case SSH or PAM auth ever breaks. -- Dan McDougall - Author of Gate One
skeptical 15y ago
I'm not understanding how (why?) this would be useful. Accessing a server through http and pipe everything to some other server, why would I want to do that instead of directly connect to my server? What advantage does this have over running ssh normally on my terminal, or putty? Not being sarcastic, just genuinely curious about the rational of this application.
- zokier 15y ago
  Bypassing overly tight firewalls and/or execution policies is one reason. Basically this enables you to use SSH with any machine, even if it was firewalled to allow only port 80 and/or doesn't allow executing anything other than browser.
- phzbOx 15y ago
  - Easier to run on your 'mom's computer' - Easier to get it to work on ipod/ipad without downloading the app. - May avoid the ssh-key annoying stuff on different servers. (For instance, you've got a vps somewhere.. you can just login there to access your stuff; it makes it easier to associate which ssh is which). - For device with only browsers (google laptop for instance) - To have *everything* in the browsers; emails, todolist, consoles, etc. - To make it easier to add some goodies; I.e. you've got the tab open, but you can bind some javascript stuff to ease your workflow. Way easier to write a chrome extension than modify Putty. - Run it from school or jobs that need administrative access to do trivial things. (I.e. One could use emacs from his browser if he couldn't install it on his computer). This is just some examples on the top of my head.
- hippich 15y ago
  I would say best use case - integrate it into some proprietary piece of software. IP-KVM, Cloud hosting, etc.
- kiwidrew 15y ago
  My use for software like this (I use shellinabox [1] on my server) is being able to access a secure Unix commandline from absolutely any Internet-connected machine in the world. Most recently, I was able to rebook an upcoming flight in Sabre (a travel agent's reservation terminal) from an internet kiosk in the Hong Kong subway. It ran a very weird kiosk-mode browser based at least in part on IE 6.0, but I was still able to securely [2] open a terminal session on my server. [1] http://code.google.com/p/shellinabox/ http://code.google.com/p/shellinabox/ [2] I have an SSL certificate for my shellinabox vhost, which protects both the Javascript client code and the terminal communications; while I do have to trust that the web browser is properly validating the SSL certificate, it's pretty much the most secure solution possible that doesn't involve carrying around my own hardware.
rufugee 15y ago
Wait a second...is he correct on the AGPL? We have a legacy application which runs on linux...I'd be very interested in exposing it to our internal business users through something like this, but not if I had to give the source away. However, I'm not sure how this could be the case...it technically wouldn't be part of the application...it'd only be a way of accessing it. That said, if we get value of it, I'm not opposed to paying for it either. I'm just more interested in understanding whether the AGPL really forces this.
- radarsat1 15y ago
  ianal, but i believe that using it to connect to your service would not require you to release the code of your service. You'd only be required to release the code of any modifications to the Gate One software. (that is, i personally would not interpret it as making your service a "derivative" of the terminal emulator.. Maybe a lawyer could make that case though.) either way though, nothing stops you from making him an offer, provided he has the full rights to relicense it for you.
- icebraining 15y ago
  Does the GPL require that source code of modified versions be posted to the public? The GPL does not require you to release your modified version, or any part of it. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including companies), too; an organization can make a modified version and use it internally without ever releasing it outside the organization. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html As long as all the users are internal to your organization, you don't have to provide the source to anyone.
- riskable 15y ago
  As long as the use was strictly internal to your organization the only people you'd have to give the source to would be the users. This includes 3rd party companies you might have a business relationship with (though I doubt they'd put such a pressure on you =). The bigger concern with such an integration is if it ever gets exposed to the Internet at large. Then you'll need to distribute the source or be in violation. Why risk it? Licenses will be pretty cheap for such one-off situations. Everything is negotiable regardless. -- Dan McDougall - Author of Gate One
superbobry 15y ago
Just out of curiosity, why you didn't use (or decided not to use) existing solutions for the terminal backend: * http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyte http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyte * http://github.com/samfoo/vt102 http://github.com/samfoo/vt102 * http://antony.lesuisse.org/software/ajaxterm/ http://antony.lesuisse.org/software/ajaxterm/ (to name a few)
- vdm 15y ago
  Open source projects need a RELATED_WORK.txt like the section at the end of academic papers. Each project would get a summarised one paragraph comparison.
  - superbobry 15y ago
    Actually, some of them do have it -- `xterm`, for instance has a lists of flaws in other terminals. `pyte` on the other hand only mentions similar projects.
- riskable 15y ago
  I chose to write my own terminal emulator from scratch because after trying various existing open source implementations (including the one in Ajaxterm) I decided they were too slow, buggy, or incomplete. I have old versions of Gate One that used a modified version of Ajaxterm's emulation, Termemulator, and one other that I can't remember right now. The biggest reason of all was the speed. Gate One needed to support multiple users running multiple terminals. Every terminal--when the screen is updated--needs to be converted into HTML and sent to the client. I wrote terminal.py to be as fast as possible with this purpose in mind. For reference, I hadn't heard of pyte until I saw your link just now. I'll definitely be checking it out. Having said all that, now that I've already written my own terminal emulator for Gate One, it includes some additional features that only Gate One is suited to take advantage of (special escape handlers that only terminal.py would know how to handle--for plugin authors to use). I don't think it would be practical to use something else at this point. -- Dan McDougall - Author of Gate One
  - 15y ago
yatsyk 15y ago
I've thought about similar ssh client for Kindle Keyboard 3G web browser. With 3G you are getting free over the world coverage with no issues with battery. Slow e-ink screens are not a problem for terminal. So you are able to fix problem on your server almost any place in the world.

155 points by zacharysjoden 15y ago

Impressive demo video of GateOne: http://vimeo.com/24857127 http://vimeo.com/24857127 I could see a number of use cases for this. However, I would like to know that it has been vetted for possible security issues.

vdm 15y ago
Impressive indeed. Why don't github README's ever link to a demo, or the intro blog post? This is why I bookmark the HN page for a project like this.
- riskable 15y ago
  Why didn't I add a link to the demo in the README? This has been corrected. Thanks for the tip :) -- Dan McDougall - Author of Gate One

Alexandervn 15y ago

Very cool. But I don't like all the options on the right. It could have been simpler. You have the tabs in your browser. Why add another way to make screens in a screen? Though splits could be handy..

leejoramo 15y ago
I think because different Tabs are sandboxed from each other. Looking at the code in GitHub, the browser is communitcating to a server based application. By doing this in one browser window, you only need on connection between the browser and the server.
- riskable 15y ago
  This is exactly right. Having said that, I plan to add support for detaching terminals into their own tabs to Gate One in the future. There's no technical reason why it can't be done but it will require a lot of coding. There's another advantage to having all your terminals under one tab: They don't clutter up your tabs! LOL! If you've ever had a dozen or so PuTTY windows open you'll know that they can really clutter the heck out of your task manager. Having a zillion tabs open would have a similar effect. -- Dan McDougall - Author of Gate One

zokier 15y ago

* Similarly, supports server-side logging, recording, and video-like playback of user sessions. It can even log to syslog to support whatever centralized logging system you want. Sounds scary.

riskable 15y ago
Why does auditability scare you? Besides, it is a requirement of many laws and industry regulations. Especially the log-to-syslog capability which enables centralized logging of sessions. -- Dan McDougall - Author of Gate One
- zokier 15y ago
  Because the point of SSH is that it's encrypted and secure, thus not eavesdroppable my any intermediaries. Edit: To put it other way, this feels like using telnet to connect to a server where you can then ssh where you were going to. And the telnet server recording all traffic that goes through it.

afiler 15y ago

I wrote my own web-based terminal emulator, but shortly thereafter found shellinabox (http://code.google.com/p/shellinabox/ http://code.google.com/p/shellinabox/) and I use that instead. It looks like GateOne might be a bit more configurable, and I don't think shellinabox does tiling or bookmarks. Can anyone else comment on other relevant differences?

superbobry 15y ago
- unicode characters (for instance you can't type in russian) -- try there http://demos.anyterm.org/shellinabox_nano - speed could've been better, there's a noticeable delay when running something like `mc` I haven't tried Gate One yet, but I did look very closely at your project at some point. Great work, btw :)

alexholehouse 15y ago

Very, very cool - fyi your site is giving me the ol' 403 - (http://liftoffsoftware.com/ http://liftoffsoftware.com/) (if this just because you're getting it up and running let me know and I'll delete this!)

cobrabyte 15y ago
At the bottom of the README, the author states that links to the website are broken because the site is not yet online.
leejoramo 15y ago
Strangely, the last line of the README file says "NOTE: http://liftoffsoftware.com/ http://liftoffsoftware.com/ hasn't been built yet so links pointing there will be dead for a while." I guess an "Under Construction" animated GIF would be better than a 403

larelli 15y ago

This looks like an impressive, feature-rich version of escape from the web (https://launchpad.net/eftw https://launchpad.net/eftw). Both use tornado on the backend and there seem to be some similarities in the multiplex classes. Escape from the web in turn shares code with ajaxterm. Both (gateone and eftw) render terminal output on the server side using a python terminal emulator, while shellinabox mentioned in another comment uses a Javascript terminal emulator on the client side. Edit: The docs say, the terminal class was written from scratch.

riskable 15y ago
Hah, nice find! You'll be interested to note that I am the author of both Escape From The Web and Gate One. Once WebSockets became generally available I decided to write a new application from scratch in order to take advantage of the technology. The primary motivator was that I wanted a web-based terminal emulator that could support multiple terminals (among other things). Also, the two work on completely different principals. EFTW uses long-held HTTP streams (which differs from Ajaxterm's long-polling method) while Gate One uses asynchronous WebSockets. WebSockets are vastly superior to the old AJAX methods in that they're much less bandwidth/CPU intensive and provide an order of magnitude less latency. -- Dan McDougall - Author of Gate One

bprater 15y ago

The author created a great looking app -- I wish he had spent five minutes during the 9 months explaining how to install it!

rufugee 15y ago
The docs, included in the download, contain install instructions. Pretty easy and quick to install.
djeikyb 15y ago
An INSTALL file would be nice, but the docs are there, if buried. For my Ubuntu 11.04 install, it was smooth sailing after I purged my stock version of Tornado and upgraded to 2.1.1. sudo apt-get purge tornado sudo pip install tornado pyopenssl kerberos sudo ./setup.py install cd /opt/gateone ./gateone.py

there 15y ago

FYI: Gate One was developed entirely by one guy in his spare time over the course of ~9 months. It turned out pretty good so he's looking to start a business out of it. anyone know how he plans to do that? license it under different terms to network hardware device vendors for integration or something?

martey 15y ago
The repository's LICENSE.txt states, "if the terms of the AGPLv3 license do not suit your needs, a proprietary license may be purchased from Liftoff Software," so I would assume that you are correct.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
riskable 15y ago
Two ways: 1) Gate One is licensed under the AGPLv3 which requires that you publicly distribute the source of anything that uses Gate One. Even if it is hosted via a SaaS or ASP solution. So if you want to include Gate One into another product you'll either have to make that product open source or buy a license (which will be available when Gate One reaches 1.0). 2) Support contracts. There's no requirement that business buy a support contract just to use Gate One inside their organization (please do!). Having said that, in my experience most businesses would be happy to pay for support if the price is right. Especially if there's worries about licensing (and many organizations are terrified of the AGPLv3). -- Dan McDougall - Author of Gate One

zobzu 15y ago

I thought it was implementing SSH in JS and WebSockets aka an "HTML5 SSH client" In fact its just a front end. So yeah it's plugin free, but it's still not interesting. Means also that your password travels to the host machine then and that you get double latency. "Bleh" comes to mind :-( Please someone tell me I missed a sshprotocol.py and that the ssh.py was not full of system() calls :'(

maratd 15y ago
I thought it was implementing SSH in JS and WebSockets aka an "HTML5 SSH client" I don't think that's possible. You would have to implement encryption in JavaScript and that is a horror in it's own right, especially when it comes to performance. There would be other problems too. Means also that your password travels to the host machine then and that you get double latency. Yes, but if you install this on your machine or another machine on your local network, it shouldn't be too bad. "Bleh" comes to mind :-( This is actually very cool! I develop on Windows (personal preference), but my development + production is all Linux. There's also instances on Rackspace and EC2, all Linux. This allows me to connect to them through the browser, without running SecureCRT or Putty!
- skeptical 15y ago
  We get to see all kinds of impressive stuff here at HN. I was skeptical about what this was for the reasons you pointed out. An SSH client in javascript and HTML5... "HTML5 SSH Client" is a misleading title because is not accurate. The heavy lifting resources to python and system calls.
  - riskable 15y ago
    Gate One just comes with a bundled SSH plugin that makes using it for SSH really convenient. You can actually use Gate One to run any terminal application you desire. For example, if you run "sudo ./gateone.py --command=/bin/login" Gate One will instantly become the equivalent of logging into the host's console. It can be a great (secure) back door into a server in case SSH or PAM auth ever breaks. -- Dan McDougall - Author of Gate One

skeptical 15y ago

I'm not understanding how (why?) this would be useful. Accessing a server through http and pipe everything to some other server, why would I want to do that instead of directly connect to my server? What advantage does this have over running ssh normally on my terminal, or putty? Not being sarcastic, just genuinely curious about the rational of this application.

zokier 15y ago
Bypassing overly tight firewalls and/or execution policies is one reason. Basically this enables you to use SSH with any machine, even if it was firewalled to allow only port 80 and/or doesn't allow executing anything other than browser.
phzbOx 15y ago
- Easier to run on your 'mom's computer' - Easier to get it to work on ipod/ipad without downloading the app. - May avoid the ssh-key annoying stuff on different servers. (For instance, you've got a vps somewhere.. you can just login there to access your stuff; it makes it easier to associate which ssh is which). - For device with only browsers (google laptop for instance) - To have *everything* in the browsers; emails, todolist, consoles, etc. - To make it easier to add some goodies; I.e. you've got the tab open, but you can bind some javascript stuff to ease your workflow. Way easier to write a chrome extension than modify Putty. - Run it from school or jobs that need administrative access to do trivial things. (I.e. One could use emacs from his browser if he couldn't install it on his computer). This is just some examples on the top of my head.
hippich 15y ago
I would say best use case - integrate it into some proprietary piece of software. IP-KVM, Cloud hosting, etc.
kiwidrew 15y ago
My use for software like this (I use shellinabox [1] on my server) is being able to access a secure Unix commandline from absolutely any Internet-connected machine in the world. Most recently, I was able to rebook an upcoming flight in Sabre (a travel agent's reservation terminal) from an internet kiosk in the Hong Kong subway. It ran a very weird kiosk-mode browser based at least in part on IE 6.0, but I was still able to securely [2] open a terminal session on my server. [1] http://code.google.com/p/shellinabox/ http://code.google.com/p/shellinabox/ [2] I have an SSL certificate for my shellinabox vhost, which protects both the Javascript client code and the terminal communications; while I do have to trust that the web browser is properly validating the SSL certificate, it's pretty much the most secure solution possible that doesn't involve carrying around my own hardware.

rufugee 15y ago

Wait a second...is he correct on the AGPL? We have a legacy application which runs on linux...I'd be very interested in exposing it to our internal business users through something like this, but not if I had to give the source away. However, I'm not sure how this could be the case...it technically wouldn't be part of the application...it'd only be a way of accessing it. That said, if we get value of it, I'm not opposed to paying for it either. I'm just more interested in understanding whether the AGPL really forces this.

radarsat1 15y ago
ianal, but i believe that using it to connect to your service would not require you to release the code of your service. You'd only be required to release the code of any modifications to the Gate One software. (that is, i personally would not interpret it as making your service a "derivative" of the terminal emulator.. Maybe a lawyer could make that case though.) either way though, nothing stops you from making him an offer, provided he has the full rights to relicense it for you.
icebraining 15y ago
Does the GPL require that source code of modified versions be posted to the public? The GPL does not require you to release your modified version, or any part of it. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including companies), too; an organization can make a modified version and use it internally without ever releasing it outside the organization. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html As long as all the users are internal to your organization, you don't have to provide the source to anyone.
riskable 15y ago
As long as the use was strictly internal to your organization the only people you'd have to give the source to would be the users. This includes 3rd party companies you might have a business relationship with (though I doubt they'd put such a pressure on you =). The bigger concern with such an integration is if it ever gets exposed to the Internet at large. Then you'll need to distribute the source or be in violation. Why risk it? Licenses will be pretty cheap for such one-off situations. Everything is negotiable regardless. -- Dan McDougall - Author of Gate One

superbobry 15y ago

Just out of curiosity, why you didn't use (or decided not to use) existing solutions for the terminal backend: * http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyte http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyte * http://github.com/samfoo/vt102 http://github.com/samfoo/vt102 * http://antony.lesuisse.org/software/ajaxterm/ http://antony.lesuisse.org/software/ajaxterm/ (to name a few)

vdm 15y ago
Open source projects need a RELATED_WORK.txt like the section at the end of academic papers. Each project would get a summarised one paragraph comparison.
- superbobry 15y ago
  Actually, some of them do have it -- `xterm`, for instance has a lists of flaws in other terminals. `pyte` on the other hand only mentions similar projects.
riskable 15y ago
I chose to write my own terminal emulator from scratch because after trying various existing open source implementations (including the one in Ajaxterm) I decided they were too slow, buggy, or incomplete. I have old versions of Gate One that used a modified version of Ajaxterm's emulation, Termemulator, and one other that I can't remember right now. The biggest reason of all was the speed. Gate One needed to support multiple users running multiple terminals. Every terminal--when the screen is updated--needs to be converted into HTML and sent to the client. I wrote terminal.py to be as fast as possible with this purpose in mind. For reference, I hadn't heard of pyte until I saw your link just now. I'll definitely be checking it out. Having said all that, now that I've already written my own terminal emulator for Gate One, it includes some additional features that only Gate One is suited to take advantage of (special escape handlers that only terminal.py would know how to handle--for plugin authors to use). I don't think it would be practical to use something else at this point. -- Dan McDougall - Author of Gate One
- 15y ago

yatsyk 15y ago

I've thought about similar ssh client for Kindle Keyboard 3G web browser. With 3G you are getting free over the world coverage with no issues with battery. Slow e-ink screens are not a problem for terminal. So you are able to fix problem on your server almost any place in the world.