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Comment by benbenolson | Hacker News Reader

There was another project that's extremely similar to this posted a week or so ago, and it got a lot of flak for existing; I don't think very many commenters agreed with its existence (except, perhaps, as an educational exercise for the programmer).

That project was posted here: http://rungoterminal.com/

This, however, is executed and presented much better than that other project, and catered towards the correct crowd (web developers using Mac OS X). Although I would never use either, I think that it just goes to show that presentation is extremely important: these two terminal emulators could very well be the exact same implementation (or at least very similar), and far less people would use it because they've chosen the wrong demographic.

Also because of the clean presentation, it creates a perception that HyperTerm is executed more cleanly than Rungo Terminal, even if there are no facts to back that belief.

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> "it got a lot of flak for existing"

Oh wow, you weren't kidding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12046778

These comments really make me ashamed of the HN community.

Anything related to javascript or web technologies brings out that kind of response in some way, but sometimes the HN crowd takes it overboard.

I appreciate that the HN community doesn't feel the need to sugar coat something that is obviously bullshit. If you don't want people to critique your work, don't post it on discussion forums.

Yet there is such a thing as a middle ground in criticism. I'm glad HN is not product hunt (a mix of "hey check my alternative product" and "hey that's amazing, best product ever, wow"), but the comments on that thread were harsh cheap shots taken at the author. Only a single commenter was able to provide constructive feedback, which is a shame.

Just because you specifically are okay with receiving harsh criticism doesn't mean that everyone is, or should be.

Yep, the videos are hugely important. The first half of Go Terminal's is just creating aliases (which is easier to do without the fancy UI), and that's where I got bored and closed the page. This project actually showed some interesting things.

I didn't see the previous Go Terminal post but after trying it now, my immediate reaction is that HyperTerm is much more usable. For some reason, Go Terminal ignored some of my zsh configuration. It also took longer to start and seemed more sluggish overall.

Still seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of what a terminal is for. I SSH into any number of boxes every day, be it on my RaspberryPi, client machines in AWS, crappy hosting providers, etc. The standard bash terminal is there on all of them, which can not be said of any project like this.

Your comment is a fundamental misunderstanding of what a terminal is for. Bash is not a terminal, it is a shell.

You interact with the shell through the terminal.

Old-school terminals were physical devices that had their own keyboard and CRT display, and were connected to the computer via a serial port. Modern "terminals" are actually terminal emulators (software that emulates the older hardware) that display the emulated terminal display on your screen. That might be your kernel's /dev/tty1 which displays the text by directly writing to the graphics card. Or, it might be a user-space application that displays it as a window in a graphics system; such as PuTTY[1], Terminal.app, iTerm, XTerm, gnome-terminal, or one of these projects.

[1] PuTTY is not just a terminal emulator, it is also an SSH client, among other things.

This is a 'terminal emulator' (client). So what you ssh into is irrelevant and Bash etc. are also irrelevant. This is a client you could ssh from (and use whatever shell you like, locally and remotely).

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