[robmccoll]

Just what I've always wanted from a terminal - things I can only do with a GUI and mouse. /sarcasm

This product seems to fundamentally misunderstand people that use terminals. Perhaps it would do better to instead become more of a thing that puts quick GUI wrappers around terminal commands and tries to parse the output and present it in a pretty GUI way for people who'd prefer not to get their hands dirty? Otherwise, this seems like what aliases and functions in my bashrc are for.

Either way, why is there a group of people that seems to think we desperately need to take applications that we are already running natively, wrap them in HTML/CSS/JS, throw them inside of a webview, embed that webview into a separate Chromium instance, and string it all together using a tool and execution environment designed to take a client-side single threaded web scripting language and use it for making servers? (Mugatu: I feel like I'm taking crazy pills - does nobody see this?!?)

[guessmyname]

> why is there a group of people that [want to wrap everything] in HTML/CSS/JS

I believe you already know the answer to your own question, because to be honest I think the answer is pretty obvious; but in case you are actually curious about the answer here is what I think (mostly sarcasm, don't expect much):

The majority of people making these applications are web developers who are frustrated by the difficulty of learning one or more of the popular GUI libraries available in the market (Cocoa, QT, GTK, etc), they found Node-Webkit and then Electron and realized that they could target desktop users using the same stack they have been using so far (HTML + CSS + JavaScript). Since they are web developers and many of them were originally designers, it is makes sense to think that they can make shiny websites to attract people into trying their projects.

I think most of these programmers just want to show up, try this new Electron thing, and get acknowledged by other people. I don't think they believe their applications are actually good because it is obvious that they are not (as in this case). As much as I hate this trend of web applications disguising themselves as (native) desktop application I have to agree that Electron have allowed some people to... Hmmm, you know what? I don't think Electron has allowed anyone (with the exception of GitHub) to accomplish anything, fuck that trend.

[eberkund]

Well there's Slack and VS Code just off the top of my head

[guessmyname]

Slack started as a website, then created the desktop and mobile clients, so if I stick to my statement "accomplish anything" I would still keep Slack out of the list because the "desktop" client does not provides anything special over the original web interface. About Visual Studio Code, I don't know what have Microsoft accomplished with that project yet, but I will give you a point for that just because.

[KirinDave]

> Just what I've always wanted from a terminal - things I can only do with a GUI and mouse. /sarcasm

Just what this conversation needs - someone who fundamentally doesn't get that web browsers and their derivatives have more affordances for accessibility than a native terminal interface ever did.

> This product seems to fundamentally misunderstand people that use terminals.

> Either way, why is there a group of people that seems to think we desperately need to take applications that we are already running natively, wrap them in HTML/CSS/JS, throw them inside of a webview, embed that webview into a separate Chromium instance, and string it all together using a tool and execution environment designed to take a client-side single threaded web scripting language and use it for making servers? (Mugatu: I feel like I'm taking crazy pills - does nobody see this?!?)

In part because this could offer secondary visualizations for data that is better without breaking anything at all, if people would stop making elaborate nose-pinching brow arching gestures every time the idea of a web browser came up.

Oh, and it'd be the basis for a more robust and usable SSH option. SSH is a horrible protocol and Mosh works in very few network environments. An HTTP/2 connection and decoupling of input from user response (without appealing to line mode) would be demonstrably better.

[alsetmusic]

> Just what this conversation needs - someone who fundamentally doesn't get that web browsers and their derivatives have more affordances for accessibility than a native terminal interface ever did.

I do not have sight impairment, but I'm quite certain that I could navigate a fixed number of keystrokes more reliably than I could operate a mouse. If I were listening to synthesized speech dictating on-screen output, I know that the option that makes the most sense is four taps back and one up. Finding that with a mouse would be unnecessarily complex by comparison.

[KirinDave]

I don't understand why you're perfectly happy to consider assistive technology for your terminal but completely unwilling to consider assistive technology for the browser.

The Web is an order of magnitude more tooled for usability than nearly any application you use on a day to day basis. Requiring pointer actions has nothing to do with that.