5 ms·

Finalterm - modern terminal done right

62 points by pjvds 13y ago

Domenic_S 13y ago
This is exactly how a product page should look. - "Get it now" link - Demonstrates why you want it above the fold - Three major features right up front - More detail below, if you care to read that far I don't know if the project is any good, but hot damn I love that page.
- Numberwang 13y ago
  I don't know. For me it didn't really live up to the high standards of what is submitted to HN. Way too much information, and no where to sign up. No one will be interested in this.
  - mbillie1 13y ago
    It's a FOSS terminal emulator, what is there to sign up for? And there's an obvious and prominent link to the Github repo. For the record, I think it's highly interesting.
    - icebraining 13y ago
      I think it was a sarcastic post :)
casca 13y ago
Been watching Finalterm for a few months - it looks interesting but it's still too unstable to use for production. The risk of it doing the wrong thing when running on a production host is just not worth the potential efficiency gains.
- scbrg 13y ago
  Not that I know anything about the software in question but... don't run it on a production host. Or when you're connected to a production host. 99% of your work should be spent on non production hosts. Fire up your old XTerm or whatever when you need to manage a production machine. I don't really see the problem.
electic 13y ago
Too bad it's not for mac.
- wandermatt 13y ago
  Keep an eye on this pull request: https://github.com/p-e-w/finalterm/pull/130 https://github.com/p-e-w/finalterm/pull/130
- ConAntonakos 13y ago
  Yeah, I was looking forward to using this on the Mac.
robinhoode 13y ago
I remember seeing this here: http://n0where.net/final-term/ http://n0where.net/final-term/ While the idea looks great, it seemed slow to react to my key presses. Maybe they can fix that in the near future. Otherwise I'm probably sticking to xterm.
uolot 13y ago
Last time I checked it, it was very buggy and unstable, but current version look much much better. Unfortunately it's totally unusable for Vim users...
- pestaa 13y ago
  > Unfortunately it's totally unusable for Vim users... How so?
  - uolot 13y ago
    It gets totally messed up - I can attach a screenshot if you wish. Maybe it's fault of my vim's config.
possibilistic 13y ago
This is really cool. I haven't evaluated it personally, but I don't think it's up my alley (I use a tiled WM); Vala and GTK make it seem like it's for the Gnome stack, and it also has mouse interactivity. Finalterm might be neat for an Ubuntu box, though. Are there any comparable terminal emulators that support completion, 24-bit color, are hardware-accelerated, etc? I'd definitely like to replace mine if so.
jlgreco 13y ago
I'll say what I said the last time Finalterm was discussed here (and what I often say when 'improved' terminal emulators are thrown around): Much of what is being provided here could and should be implemented in the shell, not in the terminal emulator. Implemented in the shell, you could get many if not all of these features in any modern terminal emulator. If the terminal emulator genuinely does not provide the facilities that a shell needs to do something, then we can discuss extending the terminal emulator to provide generic facilities that the shell would then use. The dropdowns in particular could and should be implemented in the shell. Look at what Vim does with its completion right now[0]; it doesn't need specialized terminal emulator support for that. Throwing in mouse support for those dropdowns would be nice, and could be done with existing terminal emulators. Also, the last time this was discussed people raised concerns that additional parsing of terminal output presented an increased surface area for attack. xterm 'title' support has caused a vulnerability in the past, we should be careful to not repeat that. [0] http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ci2yBnqzJgM/TD1PfKTlwnI/AAAAAAAAADs/nOGWTRLuae8/s1600/vim_complete.png http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ci2yBnqzJgM/TD1PfKTlwnI/AAAAAAAAAD...
- javajosh 13y ago
  Nice. I mean, is there anything more satisfying than comparing someone's concrete implementation with our perfect ideal of what they should have written? Ah, the software in our imagination is so wonderful! It is elegant! Bug-free! Conceptually unified! All of the abstractions match up nicely from hardware to application! Compared to our imagination, real software is a horrible, steaming, pile of shit. And yet. I can't run your ideas on my computer, but I can run Finalterm. So Philipp Emanuel Weidmann wins the argument, by default. Sorry.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    If HN isn't the place to have an honest discussion about the merits of a project's architecture, then I don't know where is. The author of this has some very good ideas and I don't doubt that they are technically proficient. Nevertheless, I believe they have executed their idea the wrong way. This may seem like a complaint that the end user doesn't have any reason to care about, but I disagree. Downthread[0] there is somebody lamenting tab being used to activate the completion. I don't know what shell they use, but if they use zsh they already have a myriad of completion options available to them. Taking advantage of the features provided in this terminal emulator and zsh simultaneously would undoubtedly be problematic (actually, last I heard they seem to have somehow broken 'vi support', so whether or not arbitrary zsh configurations will even work on it is questionable). If we want Finalterminal to support the extensive range of completion that zsh already does, we are going to have a lot of duplicated effort. Completion features should therefore be implemented at the same level that they have always existed at, the shell and/or application (think vim) layer. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6574405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6574405
mgraczyk 13y ago
It really kills me to see an otherwise promising terminal with no screen splitting capability, and I did not see splitting mentioned anywhere on their product page. Fortunately it appears to be a feature under active development, and they address splitting on their blog: http://blog.finalterm.org/2013/10/multiple-terminals-final-term-style.html http://blog.finalterm.org/2013/10/multiple-terminals-final-t... The landing page looks great, but I think mentioning screen splitting would be wise.
- yeukhon 13y ago
  I wonder if it's hard to implement spliiting. I also wonder why gnome shell never implemented one. I just don't understand why linux shell don't come with this by default. Think Ubuntu's terminal.
- nilved 13y ago
  Why not use screen or tmux? I don't think that should be handled by the terminal emulator. Then again, neither should a lot of these features.
  - mgraczyk 13y ago
    While trying to think of a reply to this comment I realized that I have no answer, and I should probably just use screen or tmux. Thanks for that.
chrismonsanto 13y ago
If you like the completion dropdown, and use Emacs, you may like term-mode extended with my readline-complete.el [0] and auto-complete-mode. Screenshots on the page. As an aside, you would not believe how difficult it is to read completion data from readline. There is virtually no useful documentation on this matter; many readline settings make the task impossible; the --More-- menu requires your scraper to be interactive... you'd think there would be an escape to return the necessary data in a computer readable format, but you'd be wrong. On top of that, some programs use mechanisms similar to but incompatible with readline, see Haskell's GHCi and haskeline. [0]: https://github.com/monsanto/readline-complete.el https://github.com/monsanto/readline-complete.el
- hablahaha 13y ago
  For a few seconds there I thought the Monsanto had a Github account. I was kind of excited to see what OSS they had.
  - chrismonsanto 13y ago
    My great great great (however many greats) aunt was the namesake for the company. I don't necessarily approve of their practices, and unfortunately I don't get any money out of the deal :(
kcbanner 13y ago
I'm not sure why people find the need to create these things when they already exist in shells such as zsh.
yeukhon 13y ago
suggestion by tabbing in shell is annoying to me. Some commands have popular prefix. It would be better if suggestion is made like the one you did in finalterm (and list most frequent one at the top).
davidjhamp 13y ago
This looks like a cool project but lately I've been really enjoying a Guake terminal(http://guake.org http://guake.org) + fish shell(http://fishshell.com http://fishshell.com) combo.

62 points by pjvds 13y ago

This is exactly how a product page should look. - "Get it now" link - Demonstrates why you want it above the fold - Three major features right up front - More detail below, if you care to read that far I don't know if the project is any good, but hot damn I love that page.

Numberwang 13y ago
I don't know. For me it didn't really live up to the high standards of what is submitted to HN. Way too much information, and no where to sign up. No one will be interested in this.
- mbillie1 13y ago
  It's a FOSS terminal emulator, what is there to sign up for? And there's an obvious and prominent link to the Github repo. For the record, I think it's highly interesting.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    I think it was a sarcastic post :)

casca 13y ago

Been watching Finalterm for a few months - it looks interesting but it's still too unstable to use for production. The risk of it doing the wrong thing when running on a production host is just not worth the potential efficiency gains.

scbrg 13y ago
Not that I know anything about the software in question but... don't run it on a production host. Or when you're connected to a production host. 99% of your work should be spent on non production hosts. Fire up your old XTerm or whatever when you need to manage a production machine. I don't really see the problem.

electic 13y ago

Too bad it's not for mac.

wandermatt 13y ago
Keep an eye on this pull request: https://github.com/p-e-w/finalterm/pull/130 https://github.com/p-e-w/finalterm/pull/130
ConAntonakos 13y ago
Yeah, I was looking forward to using this on the Mac.

robinhoode 13y ago

I remember seeing this here: http://n0where.net/final-term/ http://n0where.net/final-term/ While the idea looks great, it seemed slow to react to my key presses. Maybe they can fix that in the near future. Otherwise I'm probably sticking to xterm.

uolot 13y ago

Last time I checked it, it was very buggy and unstable, but current version look much much better. Unfortunately it's totally unusable for Vim users...

pestaa 13y ago
> Unfortunately it's totally unusable for Vim users... How so?
- uolot 13y ago
  It gets totally messed up - I can attach a screenshot if you wish. Maybe it's fault of my vim's config.

possibilistic 13y ago

This is really cool. I haven't evaluated it personally, but I don't think it's up my alley (I use a tiled WM); Vala and GTK make it seem like it's for the Gnome stack, and it also has mouse interactivity. Finalterm might be neat for an Ubuntu box, though. Are there any comparable terminal emulators that support completion, 24-bit color, are hardware-accelerated, etc? I'd definitely like to replace mine if so.

jlgreco 13y ago

I'll say what I said the last time Finalterm was discussed here (and what I often say when 'improved' terminal emulators are thrown around): Much of what is being provided here could and should be implemented in the shell, not in the terminal emulator. Implemented in the shell, you could get many if not all of these features in any modern terminal emulator. If the terminal emulator genuinely does not provide the facilities that a shell needs to do something, then we can discuss extending the terminal emulator to provide generic facilities that the shell would then use. The dropdowns in particular could and should be implemented in the shell. Look at what Vim does with its completion right now[0]; it doesn't need specialized terminal emulator support for that. Throwing in mouse support for those dropdowns would be nice, and could be done with existing terminal emulators. Also, the last time this was discussed people raised concerns that additional parsing of terminal output presented an increased surface area for attack. xterm 'title' support has caused a vulnerability in the past, we should be careful to not repeat that. [0] http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ci2yBnqzJgM/TD1PfKTlwnI/AAAAAAAAADs/nOGWTRLuae8/s1600/vim_complete.png http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ci2yBnqzJgM/TD1PfKTlwnI/AAAAAAAAAD...

javajosh 13y ago
Nice. I mean, is there anything more satisfying than comparing someone's concrete implementation with our perfect ideal of what they should have written? Ah, the software in our imagination is so wonderful! It is elegant! Bug-free! Conceptually unified! All of the abstractions match up nicely from hardware to application! Compared to our imagination, real software is a horrible, steaming, pile of shit. And yet. I can't run your ideas on my computer, but I can run Finalterm. So Philipp Emanuel Weidmann wins the argument, by default. Sorry.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  If HN isn't the place to have an honest discussion about the merits of a project's architecture, then I don't know where is. The author of this has some very good ideas and I don't doubt that they are technically proficient. Nevertheless, I believe they have executed their idea the wrong way. This may seem like a complaint that the end user doesn't have any reason to care about, but I disagree. Downthread[0] there is somebody lamenting tab being used to activate the completion. I don't know what shell they use, but if they use zsh they already have a myriad of completion options available to them. Taking advantage of the features provided in this terminal emulator and zsh simultaneously would undoubtedly be problematic (actually, last I heard they seem to have somehow broken 'vi support', so whether or not arbitrary zsh configurations will even work on it is questionable). If we want Finalterminal to support the extensive range of completion that zsh already does, we are going to have a lot of duplicated effort. Completion features should therefore be implemented at the same level that they have always existed at, the shell and/or application (think vim) layer. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6574405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6574405

mgraczyk 13y ago

It really kills me to see an otherwise promising terminal with no screen splitting capability, and I did not see splitting mentioned anywhere on their product page. Fortunately it appears to be a feature under active development, and they address splitting on their blog: http://blog.finalterm.org/2013/10/multiple-terminals-final-term-style.html http://blog.finalterm.org/2013/10/multiple-terminals-final-t... The landing page looks great, but I think mentioning screen splitting would be wise.

yeukhon 13y ago
I wonder if it's hard to implement spliiting. I also wonder why gnome shell never implemented one. I just don't understand why linux shell don't come with this by default. Think Ubuntu's terminal.
nilved 13y ago
Why not use screen or tmux? I don't think that should be handled by the terminal emulator. Then again, neither should a lot of these features.
- mgraczyk 13y ago
  While trying to think of a reply to this comment I realized that I have no answer, and I should probably just use screen or tmux. Thanks for that.

chrismonsanto 13y ago

If you like the completion dropdown, and use Emacs, you may like term-mode extended with my readline-complete.el [0] and auto-complete-mode. Screenshots on the page. As an aside, you would not believe how difficult it is to read completion data from readline. There is virtually no useful documentation on this matter; many readline settings make the task impossible; the --More-- menu requires your scraper to be interactive... you'd think there would be an escape to return the necessary data in a computer readable format, but you'd be wrong. On top of that, some programs use mechanisms similar to but incompatible with readline, see Haskell's GHCi and haskeline. [0]: https://github.com/monsanto/readline-complete.el https://github.com/monsanto/readline-complete.el

hablahaha 13y ago
For a few seconds there I thought the Monsanto had a Github account. I was kind of excited to see what OSS they had.
- chrismonsanto 13y ago
  My great great great (however many greats) aunt was the namesake for the company. I don't necessarily approve of their practices, and unfortunately I don't get any money out of the deal :(

kcbanner 13y ago

I'm not sure why people find the need to create these things when they already exist in shells such as zsh.

yeukhon 13y ago

suggestion by tabbing in shell is annoying to me. Some commands have popular prefix. It would be better if suggestion is made like the one you did in finalterm (and list most frequent one at the top).

davidjhamp 13y ago

This looks like a cool project but lately I've been really enjoying a Guake terminal(http://guake.org http://guake.org) + fish shell(http://fishshell.com http://fishshell.com) combo.