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by JoshTriplett 3636 days ago
Amusing idea, and this kind of "quick GUI-builder" mechanism reminds me of ifttt or zapier in the way it gives more scripting/glue power to people who normally have access to less of it. And this would be useful for a mobile or tablet application, where GUI shortcuts to save typing help a great deal.

But the demo video shows one major issue that breaks its primary functionality as a terminal: the font rendering has a vertical spacing problem going on, with lines 1.5x spaced, which would break many screen-oriented applications, especially those that use line-drawing characters. Notice how at 22s into the video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbDxvJn1jV0#t=22s), the inverse-colored character shortcuts at the bottom of nano's UI have space between the white boxes; the white boxes should touch, like this: https://imgur.com/q0TERnM

This is either a bug with the terminal itself, or a bug with the font used. I looked for a bug tracker to report the bug, at which point I noticed that it wasn't FOSS, and promptly lost all interest in taking the time to make such a report.

Also, while I realize that this uses a browser engine for its UI, there's something surreal about a terminal emulator bundling libffmpeg.so.