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Comment by smlacy | Hacker News Reader

Fails my standard "Too many clicks to understand what this is" test.

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.

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This is right at the top of the GitHub page:

> 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.

Not sure if "that the uptake is going to be very, very low" is very true, since the project has over 11000 stars on Github and I've seen people in the wild using it. But I'm a web developer, so...

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.

Hmm, I've never personally heard of or used the product, but I immediately understood it was, just from the release notes. What more were you looking for to clarify what it is?

This was the version page on github.

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.

These are release notes so don't expect a project description there. And I think the gif on the homepage makes it perfectly clear (to me at least).

I wish more projects would adopt this mentality. I feel like there was a time whenever you went to a project page the first thing you would find was a description and how it was helpful, followed by screenshots and a quick start guide.

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.

It's the version release notes

It's a terminal emulator built with Electron, the same tech behind the Atom and VS Code editors.

Like xterm, iTerm, Terminator, Gnome Terminal, Konsole, etc.

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