Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Upterm – A terminal emulator and interactive shell based on Electron

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 127 posts

Re: Upterm – A terminal emulator and interactive shell based on Electron

#111

Post by AndrewCHM »

CptBland wrote: post #109
jd3 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

typing latency (evident in all electron programs) is a deal breaker tbh - this becomes especially true for something like a term emulator

I don't notice any typing latency on Slack and I'm usually pretty sensitive to it. That said, Atom with a bunch of plugins can chug a little.

I don't notice any notable latency in discord, vscode, etc

But I do notice latency in hyper.js, and it just makes it feel very "dull", and that's what I think a lot of people know of electron terminals

plus the competition from native apps is a bit absurd in terms of performance, with most of the serious ones either rendering asap or on the next frame (when vsync'd)

Re: Upterm – A terminal emulator and interactive shell based on Electron

#113

Post by sime2009 »

hnlmorg wrote: post #64
shockone wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great piece of feedback, thank you so much! We do utilize a login shell for executing commands, but we only support Bash and ZSH. So, it's a real Bash. However, there are some complications with environment interpolation and built-in commands; it's a known bug and we're working on it. Unfortunately, I don't see how to allow using custom shells while providing a better command entering experience (i.e. zle o…

Maybe you could support a user-defined auto-completion config like Bash et al do for theirs and IDEs would for custom languages too. With regards to the shell input: I don't know how you are currently detecting the $SHELL prompt (and thus when you can do your auto-completion) but maybe you could allow users to specify hooks for what to watch for to determine the different between the $SHELL and other tools, based on…

Can your project be found anywhere? (github??)

Re: Upterm – A terminal emulator and interactive shell based on Electron

#114

Post by sime2009 »

AndrewCHM wrote: post #111
CptBland wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't notice any typing latency on Slack and I'm usually pretty sensitive to it. That said, Atom with a bunch of plugins can chug a little.

I don't notice any notable latency in discord, vscode, etc But I do notice latency in hyper.js, and it just makes it feel very "dull", and that's what I think a lot of people know of electron terminals plus the competition from native apps is a bit absurd in terms of performance, with most of the serious ones either rendering asap or on the next frame (when vsync'd)

and why would your experience of one terminal app based on Electron apply to all other terminal apps based on Electron? You even say that you don't notice latency in VSCode. A text editor and a terminal have similar problems to solve.

Re: Upterm – A terminal emulator and interactive shell based on Electron

#115

Post by tbrock »

I don’t get the hate for things built on electron. The technology is awesome.

Have some patience. It will eventually improve to the point where it is very low overhead and provides much richer experiences than we have in the terminal today.

Nobody is forcing you to use it today. Just be supportive because we want it’s future.

Re: Upterm – A terminal emulator and interactive shell based on Electron

#116

Post by soulbadguy »

tbrock wrote: post #115

I don’t get the hate for things built on electron. The technology is awesome. Have some patience. It will eventually improve to the point where it is very low overhead and provides much richer experiences than we have in the terminal today. Nobody is forcing you to use it today. Just be supportive because we want it’s future.

> Have some patience. It will eventually improve to the point where it is very low overhead and provides much richer experiences than we have in the terminal today.

This is a very optimistic of framework/technology performance.

> Nobody is forcing you to use it today. Just be supportive because we want it’s future.

Using web stack for desktop application wasn't a technological choice. It's a much more a reflection of the inability of our industry to cohesively innovate

Re: Upterm – A terminal emulator and interactive shell based on Electron

#118

Post by WorldMaker »

sime2009 wrote: post #93
hexrcs wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit off-topic but I wonder if it is possible that Electron team distribute something like the VS C++ Runtimes on Windows? And release patches for different versions/updates? Haven't used a Windows machine for a while but I remember there were bunches of different VS Runtime version installed on my PC before. Some app installers came with a runtime installer, but if the required runtime version was installed it woul…

There has been discussion of this idea. https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/673

You can approximate this somewhat today by distributing only an .asar or .zip archive of an application package and encouraging:

    npm install -g electron
    electron ./myapp
Or as npx gets more widely deployed:

    npx electron ./myapp
That's not a particularly "robust" way to install applications and you can't use native libraries outside of the base Electron distribution, and you'd mostly only be useful to devs with NodeJS already installed, but it's an option of a sort.

(It still won't share as much runtime memory as you might want, but it would reduce install footprints at least.)

Re: Upterm – A terminal emulator and interactive shell based on Electron

#119

Post by WorldMaker »

WorldMaker wrote: post #118
sime2009 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has been discussion of this idea. https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/673

You can approximate this somewhat today by distributing only an .asar or .zip archive of an application package and encouraging: npm install -g electron electron ./myapp Or as npx gets more widely deployed: npx electron ./myapp That's not a particularly "robust" way to install applications and you can't use native libraries outside of the base Electron distribution, and you'd mostly only be useful to devs with NodeJS…

There's also experiments like electrino [1] to force more use of platform webviews since all of our platforms have a webview built in anyway, trading some additional testing for bundling Chromium everywhere.

I'm surprised that I haven't yet seen a fork of electron-windows-store [2] that makes use of the UWP webview, as that seems an obvious enhancement to me. The Electron remoting between webviews and Electron code is already setup well enough you should be able to run the Node app as a UWP background app and use UWP remoting.

[1] https://github.com/pojala/electrino [2] https://www.npmjs.com/package/electron-windows-store

Re: Upterm – A terminal emulator and interactive shell based on Electron

#120

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

naiyt wrote: post #89
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can be productive driving nails with the handle of a screwdriver, too!
Post reply on HN