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

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

#91

Post by Piskvorrr »

Fnoord wrote: post #83
Piskvorrr wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right so, if the previous options of running UI apps remotely don't work, you'd need a web browser with JPEG, PNG, JS and Linux framebuffer support. Dillo and Lynx are quick. Dillo last release was 2 years ago. Lynx is in active development. They don't have JS support though. Links has support for JPEG/PNG and Linux framebuffer but somewhere in '00s they removed JS support (it was an unmaintained port of spidermonkey…

"Console browsers won't work at those particular sites, because the sites are dependent on JS and image CAPTCHAs". - "I question wanting JS 24/7 locally [because you can just not use JS and you'll be fine]". What part of "if I do not have JS, it just won't work at all" did I fail to explain? Did you even mean to reply to this comment, and not some completely different one? (Rest assured that I use NoScript for my usual browsing needs, most sites cope with no-JS gracefully, and this use-case is not a typical browsing set-up, or anything that would be useful for general browsing.)

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

#92

Post by Fnoord »

tombh wrote: post #89
Fnoord wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tom, my bad. It seems there is a bug in Docker for Mac which causes high CPU usage [1]. Def made the overheating worse. I'll give it a whirl on a different environment instead. EDIT: Just tried it on Windows. Is there a terminal you can recommend working on Windows? I tried CMD.exe, Powershell, Bash (WSL / Ubuntu) and Cmder. None worked well. [1] https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/1759

Oh, interesting, I never tried it on Windows. What doesn't work? Everything!? Can you make an Github Issue for it?

I was using RDP. Had different issues with each terminal but am going to try local, and I'll report the issue(s) on GitHub.

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

#93

Post by tombh »

Fnoord wrote: post #92
tombh wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, interesting, I never tried it on Windows. What doesn't work? Everything!? Can you make an Github Issue for it?

I was using RDP. Had different issues with each terminal but am going to try local, and I'll report the issue(s) on GitHub.

Thank you :)

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

#94

Post by jancsika »

tombh wrote: post #87
jancsika wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you thought about adding sound? Either something like Opus, or... You could do a decomposition of the audio signal and send a small array of {frequency, amplitude} pairs for each frame, then ramp to each new pair as they arrive. If you do this fast enough then you get just enough of the timbre of the original to make a listener think they are hearing the "right" thing for a video they already know. Even with a s…

I've thought about it a little, it seems really hard. But that's a really interesting idea you have there. Are there any docs or blog posts or something you can point me to?

I think the server part would be pretty straightforward. For example, using Jack you could port the system outs (or Firefox outs) into something like Pure Data and do the decomposition there into the frequency/amp pairs. From there you could either send to an ssh tunnel or feed into whatever process is running on the server that sends messages to the client.

On the client side, I'm not so sure. Keeping with Pure Data, you could instantiate in the background and have it listen on a localhost port, then forward the pairs and resynthesize them.

If you want I can make a demo patch to show you what this sounds like.

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

#95

Post by hultner »

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).

I had some problems with this software, lot's of segfaults. Some images works one time but segfaults on the second view while others renders half or nothing at all before I reach a segfault.

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

#96

Post by tombh »

jancsika wrote: post #94
tombh wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thought about it a little, it seems really hard. But that's a really interesting idea you have there. Are there any docs or blog posts or something you can point me to?

I think the server part would be pretty straightforward. For example, using Jack you could port the system outs (or Firefox outs) into something like Pure Data and do the decomposition there into the frequency/amp pairs. From there you could either send to an ssh tunnel or feed into whatever process is running on the server that sends messages to the client. On the client side, I'm not so sure. Keeping with Pure Data…

Interesting. I've actually completely rewritten the app (see the webext-rewrite branch), so now the main code lives in a webextension (ie inside a tab). Researching, I can't unfortunately see any way to get the audio for a tab :( So we'd have to use your approach of connecting to the outside of Firefox somehow.

So then the other thing is how to make it as convenient as possible to open up the audio connection. It's gonna have to be something like `ssh texttop -p1234` for the imagery and `texttop_audio_client.sh -p1235` for the audio? There's no way to combine them I don't think?

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

#97

Post by dukoid »

hultner wrote: post #95
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).

I had some problems with this software, lot's of segfaults. Some images works one time but segfaults on the second view while others renders half or nothing at all before I reach a segfault.

Please file an issue at the github project, ideally with an image that always crashes.

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

#98

Post by jancsika »

tombh wrote: post #96
jancsika wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the server part would be pretty straightforward. For example, using Jack you could port the system outs (or Firefox outs) into something like Pure Data and do the decomposition there into the frequency/amp pairs. From there you could either send to an ssh tunnel or feed into whatever process is running on the server that sends messages to the client. On the client side, I'm not so sure. Keeping with Pure Data…

Interesting. I've actually completely rewritten the app (see the webext-rewrite branch), so now the main code lives in a webextension (ie inside a tab). Researching, I can't unfortunately see any way to get the audio for a tab :( So we'd have to use your approach of connecting to the outside of Firefox somehow. So then the other thing is how to make it as convenient as possible to open up the audio connection. It's g…

So when you do `ssh texttop -p1234` how do the mouse movements and clicks get sent from the client to the server?

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

#99

Post by tombh »

jancsika wrote: post #98
tombh wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I've actually completely rewritten the app (see the webext-rewrite branch), so now the main code lives in a webextension (ie inside a tab). Researching, I can't unfortunately see any way to get the audio for a tab :( So we'd have to use your approach of connecting to the outside of Firefox somehow. So then the other thing is how to make it as convenient as possible to open up the audio connection. It's g…

So when you do `ssh texttop -p1234` how do the mouse movements and clicks get sent from the client to the server?

Just through SSH, they're essentially identical to keyboard input, just wrapped in different ANSI escape codes.
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