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

State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions

jeffquast.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 283 posts

Re: State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions

#61

Post by IshKebab »

9dev wrote: post #37
IshKebab wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is though - the ssh authentication and connection is already handled, and I'm already in a terminal. When I quit the app or session I'm back in the terminal. If it worked it would greatly reduce the hassle. Think about all the TUI apps that exist. They're useful because they're convenient when working in a terminal, not because they look like shit.

What you are looking for is forwarding an X session via SSH, and that has been supported since the dawn of time.

> Probably too many GUI naysayers and "What's wrong with remote X?" for this to ever happen though.

Re: State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions

#62

Post by IshKebab »

trenchpilgrim wrote: post #47
9dev wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are looking for is forwarding an X session via SSH, and that has been supported since the dawn of time.

Is there a wayland equivalent?

Closest is wprs

https://github.com/wayland-transpositor/wprs

I have yet to use it though because Wayland still doesn't work properly for me (it doesn't restore the desktop properly after sleep) so I'm still on X11... without compositing... because KWin's compositor causes random freezes.

Yeay, Linux on the Desktop.

Re: State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions

#63

Post by anthk »

IshKebab wrote: post #27
skerit wrote: post #7

I see Ghostty does not support (and does not plan on adding support for) Sixels, instead preferring the Kitty image protocol. Now if the Kitty image protocol is so great and the Sixel stuff is so bad, ~~why is it only used in Kitty and Ghostty?~~ *Edit: it's also supported in Konsole, WezTerm, ... but still I'm interested in why we have 2 competing protocols right now.

IMO none of them are particularly useful. Sixels is hilariously inefficient. Kitty is slightly better because you can send data as PNG, but ... you have to send image data as PNG! I wish there was a high performance way of remoting graphics over SSH. How cool would it be if you could SSH to a remote machine and it just showed you the remote desktop in the terminal itself? No messing around with port forwarding, weird…

drawterm under Unix clients and 9front cpu connections; but that's Unix Philosphy 2.0.

Re: State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions

#64

Post by anthk »

sph wrote: post #14
Asooka wrote: post #13

I wonder how long until terminals support half of the XWindows protocol (as some weird combination of Markdown, HTML and escape codes, most probably). This is not a diss, I would actually be pretty happy with a pared-down GUI protocol in the terminal with extensive Unicode support.

2052: the whole of computing is VT100-compatible Javascript CLI applications running on a Javascript port of the Linux kernel, within a tab of Chromium. This is the actual end game of the worse is better philosophy.

It's 9front actually. VT100 it's killed except for legacy plaforms, it's seen like CP/M and Altair emulators where looked upon 1995-2000.

9front's libc with a minimal desktop based on a tweaked rio(1) and a taskbar plus a really simple file manager won. People god fed up of FX' and bells and whistles everywhere. A minimal RTF editor with simple options plus a simple spreadsheet with rc/awk support does things much faster. Oh, and, of course, you can damn bind/import devices (video cards, network cards, whole networks) from anywhere to anywhere with IPV6 and quantum networks.

Old GNU/Linuxen, OpenBSD et all are just virtualized at crazy speeds under photonic CPU's.

There's no SSH, just rcpu and quantum-secured factotum(1). Photonic GPU's and neural network devices just boot 9front themselves too, with zero delay. Forget VPN's, too. These are obsolete too.

Re: State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions

#66

Post by anthk »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #60
IshKebab wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is though - the ssh authentication and connection is already handled, and I'm already in a terminal. When I quit the app or session I'm back in the terminal. If it worked it would greatly reduce the hassle. Think about all the TUI apps that exist. They're useful because they're convenient when working in a terminal, not because they look like shit.

If I want to view an image file on a remote machine, and all I have is ssh... I just connect to that machine with filezilla and click on whatever files I want. I can even open files that aren't PNG! Even files that aren't even images at all. Mindblowing. A terminal with in-band graphics primitives is called an RDP client. We've had graphics terminals since RIP BBS's and even before that. If they were actually useful…

With sshfs and 'rclone mount' you forget the shell and everything it's a filesystem.
Post reply on HN