[guessmyname]

> what language it was made in

HTML + JavaScript + Electron

Just download that archive, extract its content, and you will find the "goterminal" script that is basically an ASAR archive [1] with a copy of CEF [2] as the webview for the web application that they (for some unknown reason) decided to create.

[1] https://github.com/electron/asar

[2] https://bitbucket.org/chromiumembedded/cef

[Myrmornis]

> that they (for some unknown reason) decided to create.

That's unpleasant. This is a forum for programmers. Care to explain why you are criticizing a participant for programming?

[erlehmann_]

I see at least two possible reasons to create such a terminal: One: The author might have problems with how other terminals work. The other: The author just wanted to create something, without providing a superior value proposition. If it is indeed the latter scenario, it just wastes others' time.

[Myrmornis]

> If it is indeed the latter scenario, it just wastes others' time.

What an absurd, and disgusting, point of view. The author is free to create whatever the fuck he/she wants, for fun. It's not wasting anyone's time -- no one else is obliged to spend any time interacting with it in any way.

You should really reconsider your position. One point is that, while you may have the skills and experience to only work on projects that improve the status quo, many of us do not; and even those who do, as beginners had to pass through the stage where they did not.

[erlehmann_]

If a project does not improve the status quo, I think it should not be presented as something one “should have”.

The time wasted is exactly the time it takes to find out that “elegant and efficient” is at best hyperbole, at worst a lie.

[Myrmornis]

Have you ever met a novice programmer?

[jackmott]

> HTML + JavaScript + Electron

flips over table

[KirinDave]

Actually, let me unflip that table.

I am desperate for someone to come along and realize that the current terminal interface is a perpetual train wreck, and that if we can break compatibility but end up with something better we should.

Consider for a moment what a monumental task it is to make a simple ncurses menu and status bar in bash script. Consider for a second how trivial that could be made if each command line entry were a small flexible webview.

Imagine if you typed netstat and it showed the results, but there was also a field where you could key in text narrowing queries as part of the standard presentation for all very long input. No more appealing to grep or more and losing context or blasting your scrollback buffer.

Consider for a moment if we could move away from trivial line interfaces for SSH and towards a protocol that actually handles sessions and works over SSL in every conceivable network environment. Hell, most people I know have migrated to mosh and only type ssh when they're provisioning fresh cloud instances (usually to get mosh on there as fast as humanly possible).

The entire idea that "text is a superior interface" is correct as an input mechanism, but not necessarily as a data presentation mechanism. HTML and some basic es2015/typescript/whatever isn't just flat out better than bash for this sort of thing, but it flows from a long history of tools like tcl/tk trying to make the shell a more efficient and effective place to visualize trivial data.

I've been using terminals since 80 characters was a luxury and amber was the fancy new color, and for at least 20 of those years I've been hoping we'll see something that keeps the composability of shell scripting but introduces a non-line oriented protocol that could also offer presentation logic when appropriate.

We could preserve all of that if we just pretend all existing shell commands return a (forgive the templating syntax, it'll be understandable by a wide audience) Map<Stream<Text>> where {'stdout': <stdout>} and additional data can be offered around that with trivial API additions.

Please, let's not pretend we'd not benefit massively from richer tooling here.

[59nadir]

> Please, let's not pretend we'd not benefit massively from richer tooling here.

Absolutely nothing about this project or the way they went about building it shows any tendency towards richer tooling. A web interface also does not inherently enable richer tooling. You could implement this non-line oriented protocol entirely without 500+ MB of JS and the interpretation of that data could obviously be done without it too.

Edit:

While I understand your rants all over these threads (it doesn't inherently have to be inefficient and bloated), you've picked a strange submission to take these fights in. The software in question is in fact bloated, not compliant and is really only an interface to aliases.

Also, I would add: The proof is in the pudding. You seem to have made this a personal crusade, so I would urge you to make a decent PoC with these ideas to show the world.

[KirinDave]

> you've picked a strange submission to take these fights in.

I don't see how that's germane. I didn't object to concrete references to the software (which is not as good as other submissions). I objected to knee-jerk silverbacking.

> You seem to have made this a personal crusade,

No, but I am so tired of people on HN mimicking the style of development we put together in the 80's and 90's because... well I have my opinions about this practice, but they're uncharitable. We'll leave it at that.

There is a cult of terminals in our industry that has fundamentally missed why terminals were an effective interface and throw shade on anything that isn't a terminal, even when it's actually a refinement on the terminal concepts.

[112233]

> Consider for a moment what a monumental task it is to make a simple ncurses menu and status bar in bash script.

It really isn't, see e.g. whiptail.

And using ncurses for anything today is not a good idea. Surviving terminals are overwhelmingly ANSI, and can be supported by a single codebase that uses escape sequences directly, wihtout the horrors of ncurses.

[KirinDave]

I have seen whiptail. It's still easier to make a list of selectable options in html or markdown.

[erlehmann_]

In your vision where text is not the universal interface, how would Unix pipes work? After all, often the output of one tool is the input of another – that usually has not been written to interact with the first.

[KirinDave]

Powershell accomplishes this by making the pipes pass tagged objects around containing streams. This actually has a lot of nice properties when you go to manipulate the objects programatically.

And it's a logical extension of the UNIX stream model, where in reality you're passing around a whole heck of a lot more than text when you type 'cat | sed'. You're passing environment context, multiple streams, etc.

The idea that this is "more complex" than unix pipes is understandable, but the reality is that IPC is pretty complex and a whole lot of magic and shared expectations go into the "simplicity" that bash offers. And even then that model breaks down all the time (e.g., as Docker becomes common as a deploy target the idea that you should output error conditions to STDERR has rapidly become problematic).

[erlehmann_]

I do not understand what is the problem when using Docker. Please explain?

[KirinDave]

It's somewhat involved, but life is a lot easier if your Docker containers just log everything to stdout, when you go to ship software that uses them.

Stderr is sort of an annoying detail. Especially given how inconsistent output to it is and how it has different rules for how output flushes.

[112233]

How do you imagine scrollback/ history on such thing? Genuinely curious. Have seen a few projects attempting this, but having all of the output searchable is a very central feature of terminal, for me.

[placeybordeaux]

Yikes. Thats a great way to make a terminal into a memory hog and unresponsive under load.

[KirinDave]

Oh?

Historically most terminal implementations have been fraught with performance issues. We'd moved off xterm to aterm and then back. We'd been hesitant to adopt gnome-terminal because of the GTK+ chrome then saw its font kit actually rendered faster.

What most people don't get is how absurdly well-optimized the text rendering and reflowing is for web browsers. With care, people can get modern cellphone browsers to hit 60fps animations and reflows while pushing huge volumes of text through them.

Take any 3 GUI toolkits you can name and ask yourself, "Do all three of these combined have a maintenance budget that equals that of even Firefox by itself, let alone any TWO modern web browsers?" Hell, some of the most cutting edge research into interpreters and garbage collectors is coming out of Google making V8 fast.

Quite frankly, I'd bet that with care and foresight this could be faster than iTerm.

[placeybordeaux]

Maybe I am wrong, but I have yet to see a modern browser take anywhere near as little memory of CPU as a modern terminal emulator.

There is also the matter that no matter how much optimization you put into something you can't recoup the cost of the fundamental design choices you went with. Choosing something with less power can solve a lot of headaches.

[KirinDave]

> little memory of CPU as a modern terminal emulator.

Browser instances can be quite svelte. But uh... I mean... shared lib pages tend to be actually shared pages. That's why the physical memory for multiple browser instances is a lot lower.

What's more, I'd gladly pay a higher price for a richer experience. We no longer need to or should rely on ANSI interfaces. In fact, they're becoming increasingly awkward in a world that really wants endpoints to be stateless by design rather than stateful sockets.

Many people have already discarded the single socket model oh SSH in favor of Mosh. Let's also ditch the console for all but the most basic of tasks. It's not 1997, the lingering stink of proprietary rich client environments is cleansed. Web browsers have annihilated that assumption and made something truly open and pretty amazing.

I use a web browser as my core text editor and I miss emacs not a whit and quite honestly it feels more responsive than my emacs setup. I don't notice any tangible performance differences from Vim in a terminal.

We can do better.

[HeavyStorm]

What machine are you running your terminals in? I have as little as 8 GB of RAM, and more CPU power than I could dream a decade ago.

Don't you think that maybe you are using your past environment to judge a current experience?

Visual Studio Code is based on Electron and works wonderfully. Doesn't feel bloated, it's quite fast to open and I haven't felt a slow down in any meaningful way.

I'm not imposing my computer specs to anyone (and I'm using vs code in a client machine in any case), but we have generally a lot more horsepower now and the discussion of performance might mean little for a desktop app (heck, we are running javascript on the server nowadays!).

[odbol_]

So, everything you do on a computer is instant? Oh, it's not? Could it be because all those little inefficiencies add up to a big slow mess when all programmers operate under the assumption "oh I have 8GB RAM all to myself, no need to write efficient code!"

[mrmondo]

Oh god, the last software I'd want to be running a terminal in!

[aphextron]

>HTML + JavaScript + Electron

This was my creeping suspicion the moment I saw the screenshots. Utter garbage.

[andrepd]

I'm cringing at that entire paragraph.

[andrepd]

I'm cringing.