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

A native graphical shell for SSH

probablymarcus.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 239 posts

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#81

Post by al_borland »

nativeit wrote: post #31
nativeit wrote: post #20

I thought this looks interesting, but was a little confused with what appears to be MacOS-only support at https://outerloop.sh/ ? I'm running Ubuntu 24.04, I kind of assumed from context that it'd be something I could spin up in a few minutes just to give it a go?

Also worth noting, my decision to give it a go relied mostly on the fact that I couldn't quite work out what the product is. Having "Outer Shell" and "Outer Loop" described as distinct-but-connected entities is a little confusing, IMO, which do I need to install, on what, and in what order? Cool idea anyway, no shade here.

I have also been having trouble grasping the difference between Outer Loop and Outer Shell. I thought maybe one was the desktop browser app for macOS and the other was something running locally on the Pi to create the socket. However, after bouncing between the links for the two, I don't think that assumption was correct.

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#82

Post by guhcampos »

gurjeet wrote: post #75
guhcampos wrote: post #58

Author apparently has never heard about Cockpit. Everything they mention as "missing", or "novel" has been part of Cockpit for over a decade, from socket-based web server connection, backend-frontend separation for server apps and the whole idea of a server console with shell access itself. To answer them: "Isn’t it weird that this doesn’t already exist?" - No, it's not, because it has existed for ages.

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. Sincerely, HN Guidelines Police :-) https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I get it, but if the author of the article uses a biased and loaded language, I think it's fair game to do the same in the comments.

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#83

Post by gurjeet »

guhcampos wrote: post #82
gurjeet wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. Sincerely, HN Guidelines Police :-) https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I get it, but if the author of the article uses a biased and loaded language, I think it's fair game to do the same in the comments.

I don't believe in that kind of response. Anything that one can say in rage or anger can be communicated in a calm and measured response.

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#84

Post by projektfu »

supertroop wrote: post #9
hnlmorg wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. A shell is any user interface. Windows shell is explorer.exe and it used to be possible to change that via a config line in a system INI file. SSH protocol also isn’t just for CLI work. It supports file transport (eg SFTP), TCP/IP forwarding and even SOCKS HTTP proxying. You also used to be able to run GUI applications over SSH via X11.

You have a very loose definition of a shell that conflicts with about 40 years of history.

38 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_Shell

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#85

Post by mrcslws »

jng wrote: post #69
guhcampos wrote: post #58

Author apparently has never heard about Cockpit. Everything they mention as "missing", or "novel" has been part of Cockpit for over a decade, from socket-based web server connection, backend-frontend separation for server apps and the whole idea of a server console with shell access itself. To answer them: "Isn’t it weird that this doesn’t already exist?" - No, it's not, because it has existed for ages.

If I'm not mistaken cockpit is web UI and doesn't run native code, important differences.

Thanks for pointing this out. I'm not hating on Cockpit, but Outer Loop (with Outer Shell) has solved a lot more of the stack. Cockpit accepts the constraints of living in existing browsers, so it requires exposing a port to the internet or using some SSH port forwarding tool. Whereas I built a dedicated browser to push capabilities so that users can get a "Just point me to a server" flow.

This thread has been useful -- I think Cockpit will also work great in Outer Loop. And it will be easy to add it as an app in Outer Shell.

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#86

Post by guhcampos »

jng wrote: post #69
guhcampos wrote: post #58

Author apparently has never heard about Cockpit. Everything they mention as "missing", or "novel" has been part of Cockpit for over a decade, from socket-based web server connection, backend-frontend separation for server apps and the whole idea of a server console with shell access itself. To answer them: "Isn’t it weird that this doesn’t already exist?" - No, it's not, because it has existed for ages.

If I'm not mistaken cockpit is web UI and doesn't run native code, important differences.

It's a very, very thin web layer on top of native code:

https://cockpit-project.org/guide/latest/features.html

To the author's defense: Cockpit is Linux only, and they seem to intend on making this also available on Windows and Mac.

Still, I don't see the appeal they seem to do, especially since it relies so much on SSH. The biggest use case I can think for something like this in the real world is something like first-time setup or MDM, and on both situations setting up SSH to begin with has the same level of friction they're trying to remove.

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#87

Post by hedgehog »

projektfu wrote: post #80
hedgehog wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This resembles Plan9 more than UNIX. I wouldn't put UNIX up on a pedestal.

Plan9 is funny because it's what UNIX might look like if the people working on UNIX understood UNIX, i.e. everything is a file and simple primitives are composed into complex systems.

They had the benefit of hindsight and bigger hardware, but UNIX got too popular and now we're struggling to move past it. It would have been interesting to see what the fourth try would be like (though looking at Go I would probably not completely like it).

Re: A native graphical shell for SSH

#88

Post by smusamashah »

Feedback: Home pages of each of Outer Loop, Outer Frame and Outer Shell contain basic intro of each instead of a link redirecting to them. By the time I click the link and on the new Outer X I have already what Outer X I came from and what it meant.
Post reply on HN