ht: Headless Terminal

#1

Post by tosh » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 7:53 AM UTC

ht: Headless Terminal
github.com

Re: ht: Headless Terminal

#2

Post by m1keil » Tue, Jun 04, 2024, 1:30 PM UTC

That's pretty interesting. What would be an example use case of this?

Re: ht: Headless Terminal

#3

Post by pzmarzly » Tue, Jun 04, 2024, 1:37 PM UTC

I think it is a really good idea to separate vt100 emulation "backend" from the UI. Then all terminal emulators could use a common implementation and just focus on displaying the text, instead of emulating quirks of 50-year old devices.

Using JSON as RPC also seems like a good idea, especially when SSH-ing in, as the language server protocol has shown.

That being said, I don't see this project doing anything (yet?) about escape sequences (for colors, clickable links, mouse and clipboard integrations, setting title and cwd, etc) and handling shortcuts (e.g. translating ctrl-c to sigint). There are very few terminal emulators that get all of that right (I think Kitty, iTerm, WezTerm), so it would be great if this project could lead towards more of them being written.

Re: ht: Headless Terminal

#4

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jun 04, 2024, 1:39 PM UTC

m1keil wrote: post #2

That's pretty interesting. What would be an example use case of this?

[deleted]

Re: ht: Headless Terminal

#5

Post by npace12 » Tue, Jun 04, 2024, 1:39 PM UTC

m1keil wrote: post #2

That's pretty interesting. What would be an example use case of this?

could be useful for llm tools using the command line

Re: ht: Headless Terminal

#6

Post by telotortium » Tue, Jun 04, 2024, 1:39 PM UTC

m1keil wrote: post #2

That's pretty interesting. What would be an example use case of this?

I’m guessing it’s mostly useful for writing a terminal emulator in the browser. In theory I think all input and output on the terminal is done via text, which may contain control codes, so you’d still have to write code to render the text, support mouse input and selection, etc.

Re: ht: Headless Terminal

#7

Post by guyman50 » Tue, Jun 04, 2024, 1:40 PM UTC

m1keil wrote: post #2

That's pretty interesting. What would be an example use case of this?

It looks like the use case is if you want to script the usage of a tui program. In most cases it would be best to script the operation yourself with sed rather than ht/nano. I could see this being useful for scripting internal tui tools without access to the source code.