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by pdenya 4664 days ago
This is not a standard terminal replacement, it's a Chrome extension providing quicker access to koding.com's vm service. Vague headline, cool product but not relevant to me right now.
2 comments

I thin the read Terminal for Chrome is this

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhec...

hello, koding dev there. "koding.com's vm service" provides a standard real terminal. what are your expectations? asking to make it better.
I think he meant (and I initially assumed from the headline) effectively bash in the browser, running locally.
you're right, but local bash in the browser is technically not possible for now. (if you don't hack or bridge the chrome). It can be an emulator or a connector like the secure-shell app by Google in Chrome store. Terminal app provides a free and full terminal with Koding VM.
ChromeOS has something, but I have a feeling that's the browser acting as a window manager and running the terminal from its underlying Linux OS. I do wonder what might be achievable with PNaCl...

Not saying what you've done ain't cool! Just wasn't quite what I expected from the headline :)

ChromeOS is able to show terminal in the browser because the feature is built into the browser. i.e terminal extension (crosh extension) on ChromeOS has special privileges to access the underlying system.

if you want to dig deeper (grep for terminal_private_api here):

http://git.chromium.org/gitweb/?p=git/chromium.git;a=commitd...

For whatever it is worth, I found ChromeOS's to be trash. I used it for a weekend on my Pixel and found it very unpleasant to use. If your environment isn't restricted such that a terminal in browser is really your only option, I don't know why you would do it that way. I don't see the use.
The one that's normally available (crosh) is pretty awful, yes. The dev-mode shell available by typing "shell" in crosh is more normal. All I really want it for is ssh anyway. If anything more hardcore is needed it gets rebooted into Ubuntu mode.

Haven't actually laid eyes on the pixel yet, I have a Samung ARM chromebook and I love it. Is the pixel worth the cash? And have you loaded an alternate OS yet?

> local bash in the browser is technically not possible for now.

Yes it is, and I've seen it. It was posted to HN a while (like about a year or two) ago, and could run emacs etc. It was done by emulating x86 in Javascript and then running Linux on the emulator.

You are probably referring to the work of Fabrice Bellard?

http://bellard.org/jslinux/

This is an emulator. Not a real one. This 'looks like a terminal'
Yes I am, thank you for the link!
local bash in the browser technically is possible without any hacks. You need to write an NPAPI browser plugin to do forkpty() and the browser-javascript can access the pseudo terminal through the NPAPI plugin.
It's certainly possible to run a GNU userland on top of NaCl, though it would be highly nontrivial.
i already told that it's possible but "connecting to local terminal from chrome" is not that possible. maybe you can do it over local SSH connection.
Well, if you're using Chrome on Linux you can just run Gate One (https://github.com/liftoff/GateOne) on your desktop and connect to https://localhost/. That'll let you access SSH or whatever terminal program you like. I use it every day!

(full disclosure: I wrote Gate One =D )