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Texttop – An interactive X Linux desktop rendered in TTY and streamable over SSH

github.com

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Re: Texttop – An interactive X Linux desktop rendered in TTY and streamable over SSH

#61

Post by charlottepty »

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Re: Texttop – An interactive X Linux desktop rendered in TTY and streamable over SSH

#62

Post by Piskvorrr »

pvdebbe wrote: post #34
shakna wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sometimes I don't have very good Internet. If all I have is a 3kbps connection I don't think X would handle that very well, and you may not have an X server at the other side.

3 kbps is not enough for smooth TTY text-only ssh either...

That's where `mosh` comes in.

Re: Texttop – An interactive X Linux desktop rendered in TTY and streamable over SSH

#63

Post by Piskvorrr »

erikb wrote: post #35

Why not stream X directly over ssh?

I find X-over-ssh unusable over anything non-local, even over local wifi it stumbles: the latency is especially painful. There's Xpra, which makes this somewhat bearable even on mid-level residential connections (unimpressive speed, high latency, horrible jitter), but for single kB speed, even plain ssh is really bad (with mosh making it just bad). This would make the result not-quite-horrible.

Re: Texttop – An interactive X Linux desktop rendered in TTY and streamable over SSH

#64

Post by Piskvorrr »

Fnoord wrote: post #59
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for the alternatives you suggest, but I feel you're being overly unfair on this project. Even if it wasn't at all practical, it's still an interesting demonstration of the approach. Plus, it sounds like the author finds it useful, and I'm sure there are relevant use-cases. Maybe you could explain the "run a browser in a framebuffer" technique for those of us unfamiliar with it. Zooming (not panning) is…

I'm just expressing how I don't see it useful (I'm curious to hear use cases though). That doesn't mean I want nobody in the world to find it useful. That's up to each and every one of us. Heck, perhaps it can be improved, who knows. These projects I mentioned have already (partly) tackled the latency issues. RDP and NX suffers far less from latency issues than X11 and VNC. As for framebuffer, see [1] [2] for example…

I have a use case! I travel with my smartphone (and leave my desktop at home), but I receive links to huge files via document sharing sites (gigabytes and up - not the medium I would choose, but the choice isn't mine: the clients like those, for some strange reason). The links expire quickly, are not downloadable through console browsers (JS/images/CAPTCHAs), and I might not even have enough space and/or bandwidth to download them locally, to the smartphone. Up to now, I've had to resort to weird hacks such as "X+ssh forwarding a remote xpra session from the desktop, with a browser window in it", which sort-of-worked, but was painfully slow. This is a different approach, one that seems workable.

Zooming is necessary due to the smallish smartphone display, "latency issues tackled by RDP" is mostly wishful thinking (okay, it's gone from "unusably bad" to "just bearably bad").

Re: Texttop – An interactive X Linux desktop rendered in TTY and streamable over SSH

#65

Post by djsumdog »

dukoid wrote: post #57
tombh wrote: post #40

Author here. Surprised to see this here as I've been literally spending the last 2 weeks on a complete rewrite from scratch that actually layers REAL text over the blocks. You can get an idea of my approach with this function: https://github.com/tombh/texttop/blob/webext-rewrite/webext/... After the success of hitting the front page here last year, I really wanted to sit down and do this properly. So not only am I wo…

You might get a slightly better resolution with the approach taken here: https://github.com/stefanhaustein/TerminalImageViewer (= find best matching block graphics character for most prominent colors in a cell; there is a comparison to half blocks at the end).

That makes me think of the custom characters on the old Commodore64s that are often used for games that ran in text mode.

Re: Texttop – An interactive X Linux desktop rendered in TTY and streamable over SSH

#66

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

djsumdog wrote: post #65
dukoid wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might get a slightly better resolution with the approach taken here: https://github.com/stefanhaustein/TerminalImageViewer (= find best matching block graphics character for most prominent colors in a cell; there is a comparison to half blocks at the end).

That makes me think of the custom characters on the old Commodore64s that are often used for games that ran in text mode.

This is still a technique used by DOS game programmers today to get access to the full CGA color set with graphics. See Paku Paku for an example:

http://www.deathshadow.com/pakuPaku

Re: Texttop – An interactive X Linux desktop rendered in TTY and streamable over SSH

#68

Post by mncharity »

tombh wrote: post #49
Sean1708 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just FYI you copy-pasted your HN comment straight into your readme and it broke the link in your readme (because of the way HN formats links).

Thanks. Fixed.

Also fyi, README.md contains a link "elinks" http://www.xteddy.org/elinks/ which is currently 404. http://www.xteddy.org/ has a link "Elinks" http://www.elinks.org/ which is currently 403. Sigh. A ggled http://www.starshine.org/xteddy/thomas/elinks/ links to http://elinks.or.cz/ .

Re: Texttop – An interactive X Linux desktop rendered in TTY and streamable over SSH

#69

Post by sandinmytea »

mdaniel wrote: post #14
jaytaylor wrote: post #5

This looks amazingly cool! And I apparently starred the repo previously, but don't remember ever having seen this particular badass shit before. Am I losing it?

If your situation is anything like mine, it goes much more like: "oh, neat; I'll look at that tonight" followed by a browser bounce, or something else becoming a bigger priority, lather, rinse, repeat. There is so much great content -- both "empty calories" and otherwise -- that it is so easy to get buried under it. I came to HN to retrieve _one specific link_ and ended up with 7 new browser tabs open, counting this…

No desktop/laptop screws up a lot. No consistent access. No feeling I will not be persistently made to make mistakes re: worse than prior...
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