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Waveterm

waveterm.dev

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Re: Waveterm

#71

Post by kstrauser »

sgt wrote: post #32

It's Electron/TS based. I seriously doubt I can get used to using an Electron based beast for something as critical as a terminal. This is the one power user app where speed is factually of utmost urgency, and latency is non negotiable. I also don't like it using tons of memory. While this may be possible with Electron from what I have heard, I have yet to have seen it. So generally I stay away.

I have to agree that this makes it a non-starter for me, for those reasons. If I ever, ever feel the tiniest bit of latency in a terminal, or see the slightest bit of slowness when some program dumps a bunch of text to stdout, it's failed its one job as a terminal. Nah, I don’t think this one’s for us.

Re: Waveterm

#72

Post by api »

frognumber wrote: post #47

This looks nice, but I am very, very, very wary of adopting a tool like this without understanding the business model. There are two possible ways I've seen this go: 1) Build out a userbase. Once it's sufficient, monetize by screwing the userbase over in some way. 2) Take a bunch of VC money to build something awesome and open-source. Implode when there is no business model. I'm glad this is open-source -- that's pre…

My concern with all attempts these days to reinvent the terminal is that they will phone home. This is a security and privacy nightmare considering what terminals are used to do, especially for devops working on production.

Any terminal app that has telemetry is a hard absolute no.

Re: Waveterm

#73

Post by jay-barronville »

I haven’t tried this yet (so please take my commentary with a grain of salt), but my initial thoughts are: (1) it looks interesting, (2) it looks overwhelming (there’s a lot going on in those screenshots), and (3) it’s likely slow (I might be completely wrong).

To elaborate a bit…

1. I love good design work and well-designed (UI-wise) software, and it certainly looks like the creators of Wave Terminal have made that a priority.

2. UX-wise, there’s just too much going on. As someone who lives in my terminal (with the exception of browsing the web, I do virtually everything in my terminal), it’s the single most critical piece of software on my computer and it can never get in my way. I used the same terminal for many years and only switched to kitty [0] a couple years ago after testing it for months. In all of those years, every single terminal I tested managed to get in my way. Somehow, kitty manages to be packed full of features without ever—not even once—getting in my way, being slow, or freezing up on me.

3. Generally speaking, I think building on open web standards is a great thing and a plus. Unfortunately though, even in 2023, my experience has been that it’s really hard to build performant software meant to be run on native platforms using web technologies; the few who get this right—e.g., Figma—are anomalies and they generally invest an enormous amount of time and engineering capital into squeezing out as much performance as possible. As I explained in #2, for something as critical as my terminal, not being performant is simply not an option, so as much as I love the idea of building on open web standards, it actually scares me for software like this.

That said, I’m obviously judging before trying here, so I’ll make some time to test Wave Terminal.

[0]: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty

Re: Waveterm

#74

Post by linsomniac »

junon wrote: post #17
rasse wrote: post #16

Neat, you can setup SSH connections as native terminal sessions. When you type in your server info and click connect, this happens: prompt> connecting to user@host... prompt> error connecting to remote: mshell client not found prompt> trying auto-install prompt> installing mshell v0.3.0 to user@host... Install something on a server without even asking? Also, what is "mshell client" or "mshell v0.3.0"?

Not to shill, but WezTerm can also do this and isn't built on web stacks, if anyone is looking for something similar.

The wezterm built-in mosh+tmux I use all.the.time and it works great. Working from my personal macbook I have a wezterm window running on my work Linux machine with multiple screens and windows and having first-class multiple window support in the terminal has been nice.

Re: Waveterm

#75

Post by lijok »

Is anyone actually looking to use one of these "style over substance" terminals? Sure they look pretty at first glance, but instill significantly more cognitive load on the reader to understand what information it's trying to present.

If people are really interested in using terminals like this, is there a business case to be made for incredibly visually-stylish programming languages as well?

Re: Waveterm

#76

Post by krzyk »

Reading the page and encountering "web standards" got me thinking (red flag #1), why would I care for web standards in a terminal?

Another red flag is bashing vim.

Final - looking at the code and seeing "electron".

Re: Waveterm

#77

Post by frognumber »

api wrote: post #72
frognumber wrote: post #47

This looks nice, but I am very, very, very wary of adopting a tool like this without understanding the business model. There are two possible ways I've seen this go: 1) Build out a userbase. Once it's sufficient, monetize by screwing the userbase over in some way. 2) Take a bunch of VC money to build something awesome and open-source. Implode when there is no business model. I'm glad this is open-source -- that's pre…

My concern with all attempts these days to reinvent the terminal is that they will phone home. This is a security and privacy nightmare considering what terminals are used to do, especially for devops working on production. Any terminal app that has telemetry is a hard absolute no.

I agree. Two points:

1) The telemetry here can be disabled, which is an upside, but it's default-on.

2) I'm not sure this will be an option forever. Tools like co-pilot MUST phone home, and WILL be increasingly critical to being competitive. Free market forces will likely eventually force universal telemetry (even if not phrased as such).

With ML, we're heading back to the mainframe era, where a central computer center has petaflops of computing power and terabytes of models loaded into memory. I'm not quite sure the answer there, if any.

Re: Waveterm

#78

Post by lijok »

elcomet wrote: post #30
FridgeSeal wrote: post #27

But like…why? At the risk of being “HN talks about rsync on the Dropbox thread” what’s this offering that can’t already do, for free, without a EULA, and inevitable VC-enshittification risk? > ditch vim for quick updates Bruh, have you seen the average vim user? They’re about the fastest people on a computer I’ve seen in my life. This is not exactly a convincing argument. > Render code, images, markdown, and CSV file…

> They’re about the fastest people on a computer I’ve seen in my life. I've seen plenty of people using vim that seemed fast (as in plenty of keys pressed, screens changed, etc), and thought they were fast but actually were pretty slow compared to some vs code users. I don't think the app makes a huge difference, rather the mentality to improve your workflow and be more efficient.

> I've seen plenty of people using vim that seemed fast (as in plenty of keys pressed, screens changed, etc), and thought they were fast but actually were pretty slow compared to some vs code users.

Once or twice a year I'll see a PR with ">>>>>> some-branch" in the code merged in (an unresolved merge conflict). Each and every single time, it's a vi or vim user.

Re: Waveterm

#79

Post by behnamoh »

Darmody wrote: post #61

It looks fancy but after using it for a while I can't really see what are the benefits of using it over something like tmux which is battle tested, fast, robust available everywhere, etc.

While I use tmux and don't like this new Wave app, tmux is not entirely battle-tested. For example, displaying images in terminal is a problem with tmux.

Re: Waveterm

#80

Post by behnamoh »

jay-barronville wrote: post #73

I haven’t tried this yet (so please take my commentary with a grain of salt), but my initial thoughts are: (1) it looks interesting, (2) it looks overwhelming (there’s a lot going on in those screenshots), and (3) it’s likely slow (I might be completely wrong). To elaborate a bit… 1. I love good design work and well-designed (UI-wise) software, and it certainly looks like the creators of Wave Terminal have made that…

Tried Kitty for a few months. Didn't like the developer's attitude when people raised concerns and asked for "tabs". He said "just go use tmux on top of Kitty." I use tmux sometimes, but the idea that you have to glue together several pieces of software (each of which can break at any point) just to get basic functionality (like tabs that some people want) is insane.

I stopped using Kitty and switched over to iTerm2 and have been happy ever since. Most importantly, it allows me to set a custom keyboard shortcut to summon my terminal any time on macOS.

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