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

Go Terminal_ Elegant and Efficient Linux Terminal

rungoterminal.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 84 posts

Re: Go Terminal_ Elegant and Efficient Linux Terminal

#11

Post by delish »

sdegutis wrote: post #8
delish wrote: post #5

If you're like me, you'll think, "aliases!" But, the shell is a bunch of nontrivial things to learn. Tools like Go Terminal_ could make a less discontinuous learning path for shell. I recently had to teach[0] someone a bit of shell, and I kept tripping over explanations of: command -[flags] arg1 arg2 arg3 | something else Merely explaining that -xvf modified tar and how was a challenge. After I explained it, the user…

> But, the shell is a bunch of nontrivial things to learn. Yeah but if you're gonna learn this trade, you kinda gotta learn these things eventually, so why settle for a pacifier indefinitely?

I should have been more explicit. I'm wishing for a less discontinuous shell-learning-path, meaning to say that you'd stick with Go Terminal_ until you found you wanted something that zsh or tmux or whatever offered you.

Everything I've learned in programming I've learned that way: do something the repetitive way until I notice it, then research or do something better.

Re: Go Terminal_ Elegant and Efficient Linux Terminal

#13

Post by nameless912 »

There's literally nothing about this I like.

A terminal with a gradient background might look pretty for screenshots, but for long sessions it just adds to fatigue and makes text harder to read. "Saving your favorite commands" in a normal terminal involves writing an alias into your rc file, not a bunch of button clicks. Same goes for the whole "interactive flags" thing.

Whoever made this clearly hates the terminal and wanted to bring a hipstery web 2.0 approach to the terminal. My question is, WHY?

Oh, and it's PAID? Fuck that. Learn to use a proper terminal or don't bother, simple as that. That isn't me being a crotchety old timer, that's me giving you serious life advice. You will always be faster in the terminal if you learn to use it properly. a 2 hour tutorial in shell scripting and learning to use `man` is worth far more to your career than 10 bucks. Learn it the right way if you're going to bother.

Re: Go Terminal_ Elegant and Efficient Linux Terminal

#14

Post by guessmyname »

dc2 wrote: post #9

This appears superficial, and that this is paid as well with no (visible) published open source turns me off. The mistakes in the GIF communicate that this was a slapped-together product. Additionally, requiring mouse clicks for a visual replacement of the alias command with a few extra bells and whistles is not the greatest appeal to a community of developers. I hope that the fact that this was written in Go does no…

Don't be fooled by the name, this application is not written in Go, that is just a random word that they chose for the name. The application was written in HTML and bundled with a webview powered by CEF (probably Electron). Just download the application and execute `strings goterminal | grep chromium` and you will see what I am talking about; again, this has 0% Go code.

EDIT: Here is the list of 720 NPM packages used by this: http://pastebin.com/raw/VhnuuDdX

EDIT2: To rub salt into the wound, this thing is ~620MB of HTML + JS + Electron, that is more or less how an entire Ubuntu installation was six years ago, like really? An entire basic Linux installation could have been included in all this archive and these guys decided to fill it with JavaScript code. Isn't a terminal emulator supposed to be lightweight?

Re: Go Terminal_ Elegant and Efficient Linux Terminal

#15

Post by benbenolson »

nameless912 wrote: post #13

There's literally nothing about this I like. A terminal with a gradient background might look pretty for screenshots, but for long sessions it just adds to fatigue and makes text harder to read. "Saving your favorite commands" in a normal terminal involves writing an alias into your rc file, not a bunch of button clicks. Same goes for the whole "interactive flags" thing. Whoever made this clearly hates the terminal a…

I agree with each and every one of your comments; in addition, I would like to know how this project was created: what language it was made in, why the author found it necessary to create it, etc.

Re: Go Terminal_ Elegant and Efficient Linux Terminal

#16

Post by JoshTriplett »

Amusing idea, and this kind of "quick GUI-builder" mechanism reminds me of ifttt or zapier in the way it gives more scripting/glue power to people who normally have access to less of it. And this would be useful for a mobile or tablet application, where GUI shortcuts to save typing help a great deal.

But the demo video shows one major issue that breaks its primary functionality as a terminal: the font rendering has a vertical spacing problem going on, with lines 1.5x spaced, which would break many screen-oriented applications, especially those that use line-drawing characters. Notice how at 22s into the video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbDxvJn1jV0#t=22s), the inverse-colored character shortcuts at the bottom of nano's UI have space between the white boxes; the white boxes should touch, like this: https://imgur.com/q0TERnM

This is either a bug with the terminal itself, or a bug with the font used. I looked for a bug tracker to report the bug, at which point I noticed that it wasn't FOSS, and promptly lost all interest in taking the time to make such a report.

Also, while I realize that this uses a browser engine for its UI, there's something surreal about a terminal emulator bundling libffmpeg.so.

Re: Go Terminal_ Elegant and Efficient Linux Terminal

#17

Post by themartorana »

nameless912 wrote: post #13

There's literally nothing about this I like. A terminal with a gradient background might look pretty for screenshots, but for long sessions it just adds to fatigue and makes text harder to read. "Saving your favorite commands" in a normal terminal involves writing an alias into your rc file, not a bunch of button clicks. Same goes for the whole "interactive flags" thing. Whoever made this clearly hates the terminal a…

I have several devs in the office that have to use the terminal a grand total of 2 times a month, and even then I installed some shortcuts for them to make using adb easier.

Being able to build a simple interface on top of the few commands they use, so they don't have to remember flags, argument orders, etc., would be advantageous to us all (and require less support on my part).

Also, what is possibly wrong with someone trying to make some money for their work??

Re: Go Terminal_ Elegant and Efficient Linux Terminal

#18

Post by nameless912 »

saboot wrote: post #6

I might not see a developer using this, but an administrator I could. Needing to run one-off scripts and server management. However only if it would work remotely, and with host specific configuration and command options.

Not to be "that guy", but if I saw an administrator using this, I would sit them down and show them the magic of using a real shell(tm). I mean, seriously, if you're a computing professional, and you're using a shell on a daily basis, this is an embarrassingly silly crutch to use. Setting up aliases is no more difficult than using this....thing, and instantly useable over ssh or copyable to other machines. Fo' free. Just saying.

Re: Go Terminal_ Elegant and Efficient Linux Terminal

#19

Post by guessmyname »

benbenolson wrote: post #15
nameless912 wrote: post #13

There's literally nothing about this I like. A terminal with a gradient background might look pretty for screenshots, but for long sessions it just adds to fatigue and makes text harder to read. "Saving your favorite commands" in a normal terminal involves writing an alias into your rc file, not a bunch of button clicks. Same goes for the whole "interactive flags" thing. Whoever made this clearly hates the terminal a…

I agree with each and every one of your comments; in addition, I would like to know how this project was created: what language it was made in, why the author found it necessary to create it, etc.

> what language it was made in

HTML + JavaScript + Electron

Just download that archive, extract its content, and you will find the "goterminal" script that is basically an ASAR archive [1] with a copy of CEF [2] as the webview for the web application that they (for some unknown reason) decided to create.

[1] https://github.com/electron/asar

[2] https://bitbucket.org/chromiumembedded/cef

Re: Go Terminal_ Elegant and Efficient Linux Terminal

#20

Post by mrmondo »

guessmyname wrote: post #19
benbenolson wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with each and every one of your comments; in addition, I would like to know how this project was created: what language it was made in, why the author found it necessary to create it, etc.

> what language it was made in HTML + JavaScript + Electron Just download that archive, extract its content, and you will find the "goterminal" script that is basically an ASAR archive [1] with a copy of CEF [2] as the webview for the web application that they (for some unknown reason) decided to create. [1] https://github.com/electron/asar [2] https://bitbucket.org/chromiumembedded/cef

Oh god, the last software I'd want to be running a terminal in!
Post reply on HN