Hi, author of Upterm here. Ask me anything.
Why did you choose to use Electron? It appears to be universal reviled by developers.
Upterm – A terminal emulator and interactive shell based on Electron
81–90 of 127 posts
Re: Upterm – A terminal emulator and interactive shell based on Electron
#82Gosh, please stop making these. I'm not even going to pretend to have anything but disdain for this project. There's a serious lack of engineering accumen among the users of Electron.
I don't know how you could expect the project's developer(s) to read your comment and gain anything positive from it. It's a thinly veiled rant / grab at votes. There are a lot of ways you could be more constructive, and you decided to not go with any of them. :)
I don't. They're 2000+ commits deep into this mess, it's not like they're going to change course now. I'm hoping to discourage everyone else from building similar projects.
Re: Upterm – A terminal emulator and interactive shell based on Electron
#83How's the performance? GNU yes can produce output at more than 10GB/s. Does it cope well with that? How about lots of output that contains lots of escape sequences?
Performance is definitely worse than in iTerm or gnome-terminal, but it's improved a lot in recent Upterm versions, and we plan to improve it further. I'd say it's good enough, but you can try yourself. Recently there was this terminal performance test https://danluu.com/term-latency/ The author says that the most important things are typing delay and how quickly you can Ctrl+C a command, not how much text it prints…
> Performance is definitely worse than in iTerm or gnome-terminal
Considering I dropped those because I consider them slow and bloated, good luck with this Electron monstrosity.
You can have my RXVT when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Re: Upterm – A terminal emulator and interactive shell based on Electron
#84Like pretty much everybody, I can't stand electron. But there's an interesting angle here, which is integrating the thing running in the terminal emulator (the shell) with the terminal itself. What I'd be most interested to see though would be a terminal pushing curses support forward, since I use a lot of curses-based applications.
Taliing about integration, I like terminals with good mouse support, where one can plumb the selected text with a click.
For some reason, there aren't so many, except - 9term from plan9, - tilix or tylix, which has customisable actions for regex patterns - URL, mostly http, in vte based terminal
I wrote a simple patch for st that process some escape sequence from the shell to have the terminal aware of its shell current working dir (ocs7). Using this simple hack, one can just cd & ls & select "foo.pdf" & right click to have it handled by one ´s plumber (open, xdg-open, plumb ...) or even right click "path/to/file:line:column" from a log to the editor.
This feature is so simple, so addictive in plan9/acme, that I don't really get why it isn't offered by most terminals.
Re: Upterm – A terminal emulator and interactive shell based on Electron
#85Hacker News macro:
Author: I wrote something for people who care more about features than performance.
People who care more about performance than features: I am personally offended that you created this.
Re: Upterm – A terminal emulator and interactive shell based on Electron
#86How's the performance? GNU yes can produce output at more than 10GB/s. Does it cope well with that? How about lots of output that contains lots of escape sequences?
Not to dismiss concerns about terminal performance, but if you need a terminal to keep up at ten gigabytes per second of data, I question your goals* . How can you seek in that much data? Will you page-up or scroll for hours to find what you need? Past 1GB in the buffer, even iTerm2s search functionality lags out painfully, but . . . so does grep, on a file that big. There are other aspects of terminal performance th…
Usually performance in GNU yes is a canary for other bad performance. Its more like saying "if you can handle yes, you can handle anything." I've legitimately crashed hyper term (another electron-base term) when dumping other large amounts of data, like in large log files.
Re: Upterm – A terminal emulator and interactive shell based on Electron
#87Gosh, please stop making these. I'm not even going to pretend to have anything but disdain for this project. There's a serious lack of engineering accumen among the users of Electron.
> There's a serious lack of engineering accumen among the users of Electron I'm not a fan of Electron, but I don't see this correlation at all.
Using the wrong tool for the job is a reflection of a engineer's skill.
Re: Upterm – A terminal emulator and interactive shell based on Electron
#88that autocompletion is great! it would be awesome if you had some way to support more commands - especially if done in a more automatized way.. parsing the manuals (?)
I do man parsing for one of my projects and it is as painful as HTML parsing. OK the syntax is less complex but you still end up with the problem that the body of text is designed for human consumption so the formatting doesn't always follow the same rules from one man page to the next (tokens aside).
This means that while it is easy enough to pull flags from the man pages, offering usage suggestions is something too tricky to handle in an automated on-demand fashion.
I did toy with the idea of starting a new project porting man pages to a new document format designed specifically for utilities parsing (eg a JSON format with standardised fields). However even that would be a massive job to maintain without the support from other developers upstream.
But I'm open to other suggestions if anyone has any?
Re: Upterm – A terminal emulator and interactive shell based on Electron
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There's a serious lack of engineering accumen among the users of Electron I'm not a fan of Electron, but I don't see this correlation at all.
Using the wrong tool for the job is a reflection of a engineer's skill.
If people can be productive and efficient with VSCode or Atom then it's not the wrong tool at all.
Re: Upterm – A terminal emulator and interactive shell based on Electron
#90Fish seems to work wonders for me. I've been using it for more than a year and it works well. I welcome new developments for sure.
Autocomplete that was a little bit laggy on zsh simple works super fast on fish. Other features are also very nice. I think people who might be interested in this, might find fish interesting.