A native graphical shell for SSH

There was also a standalone Java based SSH client that worked from browsers. (Of course now with WebSockets and modern JavaScript capabilities, no need to have the a “real” SSH client on the user’s actual system…)

Unfortunately, not sure there is enough drive for mainstream applications to be developed in for this proposed “web native” interface. Practically speaking, there would probably have to be a way to run them as native GUI apps without the browser or for a text terminal.

Unfortunately, the three environments have relatively little in common aside from the trivial parts… Operating efficiently in all quickly becomes nontrivial…

Two arguments:

- TUIs are not inherently superior to GUIs

- SSH, as a transport layer, should support not just forwarding a pty (as a TUI display layer), but a GUI display layer as well

In fact, these two arguments were already realized by UNIX 30 years ago, and we already have one solution: the X protocol and ssh -X.

Unfortunately, X did not win out. We did not get the promised future where one can ssh -X into a remote machine, run gnome-control-center, and a settings window pops up and I can configure my remote computer. (If you believe that this works, try it out yourself. It is an abysmal experience.)

However the above needs still needed to be satisfied by so much people, and apps that needed it started to be developed as web servers, stuff like jupyter notebooks. It turns out that the web’s document format coupled with a styling solution and a client-side scripting language, with all of its warts and drawbacks, became a viable solution as a display layer for interactive apps. In fact, since it started from remote documents, network transparency is built-in.

It would be dumb to not realize that the HTML/CSS/JS stack did win a dominant position for desktop apps, with all of the Electron apps, and utilize the web as a display layer for the above. I see the project in a similar vein, i.e. utilizing HTML/CSS/JS to provide a display layer for remote apps via SSH.

Also note that Electron apps has the same split with X, where the display server and the client are separated: it's called the "renderer process" and the "main process", and the two processes talk via IPC (where the display server would be the renderer process running embedded Chromium, the display client would be the Electron main process, and the stuff that the client sends to the server would be the contents of the renderer JS bundle). I think, theoretically, it would be possible to run the main process separated from the renderer process on a different machine, with an appropriate IPC transport. I think this would be not far from the above idea?

I need something like this for network management tools.