Hyper 1.0.0
github.com
github.com
* The .deb package seems to install everything in /opt. This seems to be pretty common practice for electron apps and isn't a huge deal, except for the fact that a wrapper executable/link isn't installed anywhere else on the system. As a result, I had to go looking for the install directory and invoke hyper as a fully-qualified path (i.e., /opt/Hyper/hyper).
* Hyper tries to run `npm prune && npm install --production` on every startup, which (naturally) fails when the user doesn't have node (much less npm) installed globally.
* Most control modifiers don't work on Linux at all, making it impossible to work inside of programs like nano, alpine, etc.
* Throughput seems to be an issue. Running `cat /dev/zero` locked the entire application up.
These problems are understandable considering the (often unappreciated) complexity of terminals, but they're also surprising in a 1.0.0 release.
Hm, just like another commonly installed package...
$ ls /opt/google/
chrome
chrome-beta
chrome-unstable
$ ls -l /usr/bin/google-*
/usr/bin/google-chrome -> /etc/alternatives/google-chrome
/usr/bin/google-chrome-beta -> /opt/google/chrome-beta/google-chrome-beta
/usr/bin/google-chrome-stable -> /opt/google/chrome/google-chrome
/usr/bin/google-chrome-unstable -> /opt/google/chrome/google-chrome-unstable/usr/local belongs to the sysadmin (I grit my teeth at FreeBSD's interpretation of this, much though I love the OS otherwise, and prefer NetBSD's addition of a /usr/pkg hierarchy to avoid jamming packages in /usr instead, which is only a bit less aggravating).
/opt exists basically for vendors to have somewhere to put things that they know won't trample on my /usr/local hierarchy.
(I still think they should've installed something in $PATH, mind, but /opt is not at all the wrong answer to my mind.)
Me too, although in the case of terminal apps, they really haven't moved on since the 70s. How many support images? Completion popups? Browsable history? Current directory widget? Collapsible output?
Honestly if it takes some insane over-engineering to get some actual innovation in terminal apps I'm all for it! And when I say "innovation" I mean "obvious features that should have been there decades ago".
I mean, if you want images, history, tabs, to support every language under the sun, and support for most platforms, I'd say a browser is a fantastic way to get most of that "for free".
I can't really blame them (Linux, like every nix, does something unique at the tty level that breaks reasonable assumptions), and I'm sure it'll get a lot worse once they try to run their JS bindings over the pty/tty subsystem of something like Solaris.
I personally prefer that the terminal delegate just about everything besides I/O to plugins or extensions, so Hyper is probably out of the picture for me. That being said, my current terminal of choice (urxvt) doesn't do much on that front either. I hope that other terminal emulator projects pay attention to the development here and adopt the best innovations.
This little gif demonstrates what it can do now: https://github.com/sedwards2009/extraterm/raw/master/docs/ed...
Some more demos of its features are here: https://github.com/sedwards2009/extraterm/blob/master/docs/t...
It is still early days for Extraterm although I use it myself daily (mostly on Windows and Linux). It too is built on Electron. It makes it possible to try out ideas relatively quickly and grants access to a megaton of 3rd party libraries and tools.
A lot of them, actually. Sixel is a thing.
>Completion popups? Browsable history?
No terminal emulator supports that. Because that's not the emulator's responsibility. That's your shell's job. Asking for your terminal emulator to support command completion is like asking X Windows to add tab completion to Gedit.
Go grab a copy of fish if you want, though. I've heard a lot of good things about it.
>Current directory widget? Collapsible output?
Those are just hard to implement, and usually not worth the effort. The directory widget is essentially provided by your prompt in many shells anyways.
How is the shell supposed to make a popup when it can only output text? It can't make popup windows.
> Those are just hard to implement
Presumably easier if you're using Electron though!
Not entirely sure, but probably in the same way like other TUI applications, e.g. vim, emacs...
Thus over-engineering has been with us all along, much of it legacy cruft.
It might be worth considering abandoning traditional terminal emulation entirely in favor of something else if more features are desired.
Personally I think remote and virtualized devices (think qxl/spice, remote audio, etc), could use some love. We have the bandwidth to improve on these technologies today.
Ranger.py runs very smooth and vim is fine. I am kind of shocked that there was no delay and I am on a 8 year old dell.
Wait, what, really? Wouldn't that leave you without dependencies if you don't have internet connection at the time?
Seems a very dangerous thing to do for many, many reasons.
FWIW `npm prune` only removes modules from node_modules that aren't specified in package.json. It won't actually remove and declared dependencies.
(I literally have not tried a single other thing. I made a typo on the very first command I wanted to try. I tried ctrl+c to start over, and it did not recognize it.)
EDIT
I gave it another chance. If I start a bash shell, it recognizes ctrl+c, but it does not recognize the up arrow key. Not impressed. Don't get the hype. Sorry.
EDIT2
Is this being brigaded? It's the first result on HN without clear reason, and I'm being downvoted immediately for posting this feedback. What's going on?
https://github.com/zeit/hyper/issues/1127
https://github.com/zeit/hyper/issues/1126
https://github.com/zeit/hyper/issues/1121
https://github.com/zeit/hyper/issues/1129
EDIT3
OK, seriously, what's with the downvote brigade? I'm at -3 now.
EDIT: I wrongly stated that the issue was closed. Please see further downthread. I apologize.
My experience with the Zeit team is that they're very responsive and interactive via GitHub - I'd be surprised if the issue isn't fixed soon
And without clicking through to all four links, there's no indication that they were from you trying things.
Anyway, I put my money where my mouth is and I reported each issue that I encountered with hyper on Github (the links are above) before giving up on it (for now). I'm not a bandwagon hater nor a bandwagon fan, at the moment, hyper is not ready for use or worth the hype. In a month, it may be. I'll revisit it periodically in order to re-evaluate my findings in the interest of using the best tool for the job. All these years later, putty remains the most compatible, but I can't figure out how to use it locally on Ubuntu/bash for Windows (if I can get an ssh server working, I could just start a loopback session and use that). For now, I'm using cmd.exe and conemu.
I've been looking for improved terminal clients for years. To that end, I have a simple benchmark that I run:
find /
Hyper on linux under X actually stops rendering the output very quickly, but all subsequent input is ignored. The tmux case was the same. In addition, CPU usage spiked to 2 procs each @ 100%. Interrupting the shell was not possible with Ctrl+C or other means, though I was able to `SIGKILL` it.
This particular test is my personal benchmark of whether I can use a terminal - because nothing is more frustrating than having to kill an entire session because of a typo or bad command that generates a lot of output. Too, clients that struggle with this also have a tendency to slowly render changing curses layouts on large terminals - such as when resizing tmux panes, or rendering large amounts of scrolling content in a sub-region of the terminal.
This is a simple case, and many native clients struggle with it as well. So far, although it's not my most-favorite to use, `konsole` is the only one that handles this well.
find /
All of about 5 seconds.
Optional typing is the sweet spot.
```
const whatIsFoo = match (foo) {
case : nil : "nothing, really"
case : string : "it's a string"
case : number | boolean : "it's bool or number"
case [ head, ...tail ] : string[] : `it's array of strings with head ${head} and tail ${tail.join(', ')}`
case { value } : { type: 'NodeFoo' } : `it's Node Foo with value ${value}`
default: "well, something else."
```
Optional, structural algebraic type system with runtime support (mainly for `match ...` constructs) is IMHO the sweet spot.
It really makes a difference to have it. The analogy on top of my head is this: it's like a difference, when working on text processing code, to have regexp or do things by hand. Similar to regexps, above type system support, can cut necessary code by orders of magnitude and make it much more readable/reason about.
Quit looking for pots of gold and start panning for nuggets.
emphasis mine.
I have to say I'm pretty tired of this attitude that the whole world should use the anglo-centric defaults (but in case you won't we add support for you later).
Regrettably most of us developers (even those of us who live in non-english speaking counties and don't speak english natively) seem to just "settle" for the english keyboard layouts when we are developing. We tell our self that the english layout is "superior for programming". Perhaps we are correct (I doubt we are), but that is irrelevant. When we think like that we are causing accessibility problems to a huge portion of the users of our products.
What bothers me most, as an Icelandic developer who prefers my native keyboard layout, is how we shun ISO third level shifts[1]. For example, when I type TILDE (U+007E; ~), I press and hold the third level shift (remapped to <Caps Lock>; traditionally <Alt Gr>), press and release <?>, and release the third level shift. Most English speaking developers use the ANSI keyboard layout[2], which historically doesn't have a notion of third level shift. Mac OS X is a terrible perpetrator by mapping the third level shift to the <⌥ option> key, which also serves as a modifier. I never know when I type COMMERCIAL AT (U+0040; @) (<Third Level Shift> + Q) whether I will input the character or quit the program.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_9995#Levels_.28.E2.80....
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout#/media/File:AN...
---
Edit: Formatting
I've clicked through several pages and still don't know, aside from the fact that apparently it extends the command line in some way.
But I might just be missing something.
A shell is the program that handles the words you type into your terminal emulator.
This is definitely not obvious from the release notes.
It would be nice of the title of the HN post said this (Hyper 1.0 Released, A Terminal Emulator built using Web Technologies), but it's easy to figure out once you go to the home or github page.
I fault the OP for the poor title, not the project.
BTW, it might just be the fact I have scripts blocked, but it doesn't appear to say that on the homepage at hyper.is - just the Github page.
I'm really sooo tired of projects being introduced through Github pages which have all kinds of non-descript change-lists and commit SHAs on them but lack even the most fundamental kind of information, like what the heck does it do, especially when there's about 100 other pieces of software out there with the same name.
In this case the project does actually have a proper website (which btw. is nowhere mentioned on the Github page). Why not just link to the website instead? Is that somehow not cool enough any more?
I can't sympathize at all with your sense of exasperation. I know you feel like you are arguing for a cause, but you're also being condescending.
The purpose of this post isn't to introduce a project, but to announce a significant milestone version release. With that in mind, it makes a lot more sense to link to the announcement post on github. It includes plain language descriptions of the changes, download links, plenty of screenshots, and hardly any SHAs. The website is mentioned at the very top of the main github page, as well as in several other places.
Yea, but it's mentioned nowhere on the page that was linked.
Just kind of pointed it to that bash for easy switch and didn't really see a reason to try and find anything else.
// the shell to run when spawning a new session (i.e. /usr/local/bin/fish)
// if left empty, your system's login shell will be used by default
shell: 'C:/Program Files/Git/bin/bash.exe',
https://gist.github.com/Klathmon/355386261e4477d9b6ee237019c...
I run full-screen cygwin X11 so I can use fvwm2 as a manager for multiple xterms, and still find it vastly superior to any alternative for me, but I'm pretty sure I'm an outlier in that regard.
But, everybody has their own list of must-haves and deal-breakers. I'm sure hyper 1.0.0 does enough for a significant number of people out there. Congrats to the team.
1. It's actually not that zippy. Do a "find /" and watch it lock up.
2. Rendering is very glitchy. Resizing the window seems to cause all hell to break loose for me and I have to restart to get things working again.
3. There are hot key problems. Sometimes hot keys (i.e. COMMAND-1 open tab 1, COMMAND-2 open tab 2) don't work, sometimes they do. Clicking in the window makes them work (temporarily) but doing some other stuff can break that again.
4. Sometimes it seems like I'm focused ON that tab, not IN the tab and I have to use my mouse fix that. That's a problem for something that's supposed to be keyboard driven.
Edit:
5. I tried to exit the application and now I'm stuck in an infinite modal dialog "uncaught exception" loop.
It looks like a very promising application, but a replacement for iTerm 2 it is not. This feels like this should be a 0.10 release and not a 1.0 release to me. This app is not robust enough to justify 1.0. :(
It seems reasonably stable and fast, I suspect because it leverages the hterm terminal emulator that's built into ChromeOS. May not work on Windows or OSX though.
It also doesn't seem to recognize my alt+h (j/k/l) shortcuts to switch tmux panes, just prints odd characters in the terminal.
150MB+ when installed, Few hundred MB Ram when running.
And just like Web Browsers, lot of little lock up and Jank.
Seriously I dont mind Apps with Web Technologies, but these problems needs to be taken into account for improvement. Opera, before switching to Chrome / Blink, were an Full Browser, with Email, RSS Reader, all packed under 11MB.
Dependability has to come before the bells and whistles and this appears to be a long ways out just skimming through the amount of bugs that are caught in this comments section.
I'd probably use it on Windows though.
Congrats to the team and all the contributors.
- easier to customize (at least for me)
- runs super smooth (not that iTerm was slow or anything)
- I'd have to confirm, but a lot syntax highlighting and things that I just want to "work" out of the box seemed more applicable to Hyper than iTerm
- extensions (not sure if iTerms extension community could rival npm)
2. How much disk space savings? 20MB? Please.
3. Wow, much features, such productivity.
Not to mention that both xdg-open and open can both do that on GNU/Linux and OS X, respectively.
I'm a simple man and like pretty, shiny things, like occasionally activating power mode, or playing the John Cena theme when you open a new tab. Stupid shit like this keeps my morale up.
Maybe they improved performance with this version, I will see.
[0]: https://magit.vc/
What I like about iTerm are the many small options that allow me to tweak it a bit here and there.
This is how I feel about Sublime Text vs Atom. Every time I try to switch to Atom, I run into this problem. The slight sluggishness gets increasingly annoying the more time I spend using it.
Once I went back to vim, though, I was impressed again by its performance.
It's a pity that electron still has some trouble with performance. Slack, for example, does not make me happy. Visual Studio Code, on the other hand, is fast and is written using the same platform so there must be a way to do it right.
However, the ability for quick, easy, and familiar customization and automation for web developers is hard to deny either.
I have a program at work that does something like
Do you want to remove x from y? [y/n]
Do you want to remove z from y? [y/n]
Do you want to remove a from y? [y/n]
etc. etc, 100s of times. yes is a lifesaver.
I also like how it's used as an experiment for basic optimization: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/4wde08/optimising_yes...
4.5 GB/s of 'y'. Hilarious.
Every time there is a thread about VSCode or Atom, you always get people asking why does VS Code run so well while Atom is sluggish.
URxvt, XTerm, etc. do this very well, and they're also quite fast. Why would I switch to an implementation that is demonstrably worse at everything I care about, and better at things that don't matter? Do I just really hate my DRAM, and want to see it under constant max use?
I still do toy with Hyper from time to time. A feature I do like is the hotkey-enabled pane-splitting. CMD+D to open a vertical pane. CMD+SHIFT+D to open a horizontal pane. CMD+W closes them — though I wish this option would prompt as I’ve accidentally closed panes a number of times by a poorly-timed keystroke. For somebody who doesn’t use swap files with VIM, this can be a killer.
I am very much looking forward to installing this on my Windows machine tonight, however. ConEmu is a beast, but sometimes I just want quick, simple access to a text editor or a few commands in a familiar environment.
Some days jumping into ConEmu feels like an alien world (especially when it comes to setup/options), and Powershell just so different from what I work in most of the time.
The bit of crossover, even if there are a few sacrifices, is appreciated as an option here.
PSA: In iTerm you can hit CMD+Z within a few seconds to unclose a tab or window.
I wonder if it will end the same way. Will Javascript eventually go on to die where all languages go to die -- as as enterprise backend language?
I ended up switching back to iTerm2 because encountering minor bugs was a frequent enough occurrence and iTerm2 works perfectly well for me.
I'm now curious what people who have been using Hyper consistently think about its usability and whether it's worth it to switch over? For me, worth it means at least matching iTerm2 in basic functionality and utility, having no noticeable performance issues, and not being a high battery drain. Thoughts?
Is possible to have a fast html rendered just for the UI and use native code for the rest?
A good example for a performant Electron/Node application is Microsoft VSCode
I like how html/css work for build the UI, but wish not to use node at all. Also, exist a engine more light and fast than webkit?
It doesn't have tab reordering, nor "close other tabs"/"close tabs on the right", but I'm sure there are plugins for that.
I thought this was about Hyper, the Rust crate for HTTP functions.[1] That's at 0.9.14 and has major outstanding bug reports. If that had reached 1.0.0, that would be significant.
Is that a problem exclusive to the Windows version? Is there any setting I should tweak?
On the other hand: My favorite iOS SSH/Mosh client seems to be built on top of this and it's awesome.
Language fads are very tiring.
Runs everywhere (client and server), is the language picked up by beginners, and is abused to fit every square peg into a round hole.
I've asked several of these people to explain the attraction (one of whom had a fascination with the even-worse CoffeeScript) and thus far I have not really come across a satisfactory explanation. To me, JavaScript is still the language you only use when you have to because it's the only runtime the browser vendors will embed.
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/02/10/where-money-is/
Javascript is a "workable" or "decent" language, and it happens to run where the users are. This is also a large part of why C++ was a success and C before it.
JavaScript is not good. We should be working to get it out of the way, not converting everything in our environments to run on it.
Whether or not that makes it a solid, durable terminal program is another question, though.
If your goal is to provide a consistent look and user experience across platforms and be easily extendable, what do you choose? Feel free to name one.
You asked for one, here's five:
* GTK+
* wxWidgets
* Swing
* SWT
* Tcl/Tk
You then mentioned "easily extendable". I'm not sure if you'll agree Swing/SWT are easily extendable (I'd argue they can be), but wxWidgets and GTK+ have bindings available in many common scripting languages (heck, even PHP!) which are just as easy to extend as JavaScript is.
Again, I'm not arguing any of these are better suited, just responding to your point that there was no alternative.
Of the 5 alternates you provided, can you name me an app that runs on major platforms that people describe as a good user experience? Not just that they work, but that they serve as good example of how to design a user experience. The only one that I can think of that I use on an everyday basis is the JetBrains apps which are built in java, although what UI implementation they're using I'm unsure. Beyond that, all the good cross platform apps that I can think that aren't using something webkit based (slack/atom/discord/etc) use native OS GUI implementations. I'm sure there are others, but it's hard to completely discredit the browser-as-an-app approach.
From what I gathered from the project, it's aim is to go beyond being just another terminal emulator and provide a certain amount of bells and whistles through its interface. Turns out interface bells and whistles is something that HTML+CSS+Javascript has nailed pretty well while remaining cross platform compatible.
However, the major cross-platform toolkits of wxWidgets, Qt, and GTK+ have run long projects to allow for native interface components on the platforms they support. This is usually something that can be configured at compile time.
VLC is wxWidgets and it offers a consistent user experience across platforms. Chromium is GTK+ and it does so as well. I'm not sure what's trendy in the UX snob circles these days so I don't know if they qualify as "amazing UX" or not, but they're two widely-used, major projects that incorporate standard cross-platform desktop toolkits.
Personally, I've always been partial to Qt, though I can't think of something off the top of my head that uses Qt and has widespread usage across platforms (Qt of course powers the entire KDE suite, but that usually doesn't cross over to Mac or Windows users, and Amarok's glory days are long gone). I guess Clementine uses Qt, and it may be widely used. I used it on both Win and Linux and the UX is identical.
Another very common Qt based app is Skype.
Dav Glass did some awesome hack day projects in the early days of Node.js demonstrating how this could work for Yahoo mail. Hit your inbox for the first time in a browser session and it'll send back a full HTML page rather than a bunch of JS files and expect the client to render before anything appears. With this you could have less than one second full render times for a complex single page app. Imagine if Gmail did something like this, you wouldn't need to leave a tab open to avoid the 5-10sec it takes from login till inbox shows. Furthermore, you could build this out further where if the "compose page" JavaScript hadn't loaded yet, you could then roundtrip to the server and get the markup rather than waiting on it to parse and execute on a slower machine.
Not saying everyone should do this obviously, but it is a valid use case for JavaScript on the server if done right IMHO.
Maybe instead of building square wheels they should work on improving some of the existing round wheels.
Where would we be if Einstein had spent all his time trying to improve Newton's gravity rather than reinventing it?
Where would we be if Einstein had spent all his time
trying to improve Newton's gravity rather than
reinventing it?
General Relativity is the implication of Special Relativity being true, generalized for all observers.
Einstein's approach was very much step 1, just repeated 2-3 times.
Special Relativity didn't necessarily destroy Newton's gravity. To be generalized in GR gravity had to stop being force. It was just a natural implication of a prior step.
The idea you can chase a total alien solution nobody supports and pull complete magic out of thin air is rarely true. Normally it is just a myth created by people who don't actually understand the solution or process that attained it.
"As an older frield I must advise you against [generalizing relativity to incorporate gravity] for in the first place you will not succeed, and even if you succeed, no one will believe you." - Max Planck to Einstein, 2 years before Einstein succeeded. It was a big deal to even attempt to do this, and people tried to talk Einstein out of it.
And why did Planck say no one would believe Einstein? Because Einstein was trying to do something fundamentally different; he was trying to create a new kind of wheel.
"Newton, forgive me." - Albert Einstein -- why ask for forgiveness?
Einstein's role was something quite different from the role that most physicists play. Most physicists add small refinements to existing theories. Einstein upended quite a lot of existing physics and replaced it with something new. Newton saw gravity as action at a distance. Einstein showed that it was something quite different.
I'll repeat this quote
The idea you can chase a total alien solution nobody supports and pull complete magic out of thin air is rarely true. Normally it is just a myth created by people who don't actually understand the solution or process that attained it.
Einstein didn't start out in left field, he didn't set out to invent a new wheel. He just saw some problems in the old one, and suggested an updated wheel that would resolve them. That's the difference. One is being contrarian or experimenting on their own, which is not necessarily wrong and can certainly be useful experience to draw on, but it's just not likely to yield large advancements on its own.
Large advancements occur when someone is current with the cutting edge, accepting of the established truths, and still striving to solve the larger puzzle (which may involve rotating the puzzle pieces that make up parts of the "established truths" -- but you can't get there if you don't have the pieces at your disposal).
Do you suggest that these people set out to make a great terminal emulator, and were eventually driven into the arms of JavaScript as the one true answer to the fundamental problem?
I think it's more likely that they said "Let's try to do this thing that's been done hundreds of times ... IN JAVASCRIPT!!!" And again, there's not anything wrong with that per se. It just doesn't make a good value proposition when you're trying to convince users to use your product.
Best long winded alias for the field of programming to date!
That's simply how the programming "field" works. Also in the category of "how it works": People grousing about it. (Seriously, that is the way it works, and do we dare suppose there is a better way?)
To be sure, JavaScript can sometimes be fairly terrible as the scope of projects grow. The advantage here is how easily rich (or even absurd) UI elements can be implemented across all platforms by using web technologies. It also makes it comparatively easy to create a platform that is highly customizable and pluggable.
I really don't understand why their first line isn't: "Hyper is a ..."
One of those situations where submissions being a single URL isn't quite ideal.
EDIT:
Also who came up with using the hotkeys (Alt + Ctrl + tab) & (Alt + Ctrl + Shift + tab), How are you even supposed to use those O.o
This Terminal Emulator: brew cask install hyper
Docker Hosting: brew install hyper
I've switched back to iterm2 due to these two issues which can easily be fixed by the maintainer(s)
Posted link has virtually no description of what the project is.
Going to the root of the github repo has release notes and with the most detailed description as "HTML/CSS/JS Terminal" but burned into a PNG file.
Best description of the product is on "hyper.is" in an animated GIF form.
People working on project like this need to understand that without a reasonable textual description of their product, outlining basic features and benefits over other existing systems, that the uptake is going to be very, very low.
Also, I found it easy to figure out what it was. Github description has " A terminal built on web technologies", website says "JS/HTML/CSS Terminal" and the readme mentions "HTML/JS/CSS Terminal" again. Sure, would be nice of a description of what the basic features and such there is, but probably not needed for their target developers, web developers who want to be able to modify their terminal.
Btw, I don't use Hyper myself, just felt that parent comment was a bit off.
Nowadays they all just tell you what was in the latest release, or give some instructions on how to install it without telling me why I should even bother take time out of my day to install it.
Like xterm, iTerm, Terminator, Gnome Terminal, Konsole, etc.
If you go to the root github readme "A terminal built on web technologies https://hyper.is"
> People working on project like this need to understand that without a reasonable textual description of their product, outlining basic features and benefits over other existing systems, that the uptake is going to be very, very low.
For people using terminals I would HOPE people would know what "HTML/CSS/JS used to make a terminal means. What audience is this going to reach? Most will find this to be a unholy heresy and we will stick with our urtv terminals.
> A terminal built on web technologies https://hyper.is
On the home page, the very first thing it says is:
>Hyper™ JS/HTML/CSS Terminal
Then I scroll down and everything else I see pretty much confirms this. It's a terminal which uses HTML and JavaScript to make things look pretty (which is what I would have inferred from both of those descriptions).
I've seen some terrible pages, but I think you're being a bit harsh on this one.