Hyper – A terminal emulator based on JavaScript, HTML and CSS | Hacker News Reader

Hyper – A terminal emulator based on JavaScript, HTML and CSS

hyper.is

50 pointsanirudhmurali21 comments

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12102100 (197 days ago, 630 points, 255 comments)

I gave this a shot a few months ago. It was not bad but had many usability and stability problems like unsupported fonts, crashing and some others that I don't remember now. Terminal is the last thing I expect to crash. Did not find a compelling reason to ditch iTerm2 on Mac and Terminator on Linux.

I also gave Hyper a solid go but found the native Terminal and tmux/tmuxinator gives me all the same (worthwhile) utility without some bugs related to pane management and history preservation. With Hyper I regularly experienced history being cleared and lost even in the same pane/window, but I couldn't force replication which made it more frustrating. Also, it has some strange feature (?) that can spawn a browser window inside the terminal but I can never figure out how to escape it.

I agree that my terminal shouldn't crash. I handle so many fundamental parts of my workflow in terminal so it has to be stable and efficient.

In terms of crashes, it's amazingly stable. We do have a few bugs with some glyphs still, but please give it a try!

I have given it a solid try and I've contributed to the hyperline package. But I've had panes crash/go unresponsive kind of frequently. This isn't to say I won't use it, just that I think I still prefer Terminal. One person's opinion is all. :)

We've made a ton of progress with glyphs that were not displaying properly, and more fixes are coming!

I've really enjoyed Hyper so far. My only real gripe -- and it's kind of a big one -- is that you can't re-order tabs.

Not totally sure how thy ever fix this, since the title bar is not displayed -- meaning that dragging the tab area is thy only means thy have for letting users move the entire window.

This will be possible by holding a key down in the future. Thanks for your feedback

You will take my terminal to run it through a browser from my cold, dead hands.

I'm pretty confident that we will get to the point where the performance difference with your terminal will be undistinguishable.

Working hard on this, and at some point hopefully you can't tell that it's a browser.

I mean, that looks awesome. But there is one question: WHY? I mean what's the benefit of rewriting something in HTML/JS when we already have that natively build in every operating system?

Extensibility was a huge motivation behind it.

See my other answer here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13516047

Is anyone using this on the daily to run Sidekiq, Redis, etc? I dig this and will use it if its stable and not crashing, etc.

I run Hyper on my laptop, with iTerm on my external display.

Hyper is split vertically 33/67 and horizontally 50/50. I run normal command-line stuff in the small panes (git, curl, etc), and my node/ruby servers in the larger.

I run tmux/vim in iTerm.

Something about my tmux, or vim setup didn't play particularly well in Hyper. The end result was cusor movement in Hyper/tmux/vim was painfully slow.

But my current setup works really well for me.

Every single day.

I'm pro-hypertext, but this looks like web tech for web tech's sake. Their demo is literally an animated cursor.

See TermKit for some more tought put into a graphically-enabled terminal: https://github.com/unconed/TermKit

I've dabbled a bit with hyper and the obvious benefit is how easy it is to write extensions. I got a prototype within 30min that would display certain html or images in command output – imagine a long-running process continually updating a dashboard that could use any js graph library. Or a script that you could stick anywhere in a pipe chain that visualises whatever data you're processing.

With that in mind, it is bound to be somewhat underwhelming until some "killer plugins" appear. I've been thinking about IDE functions like "black screen" is implementing, for example: type a command and the available options and their meaning pop up.

The demo is more than an animated cursor. The demo is showing that:

- you can override any output coming from the terminal and choose not to display it (in this case the "command not found" output is overridden)

- you can lay out an arbitrary `canvas` element on top and have complete freedom to style however you want.

The idea behind Hyper is that you can do everything as plugins. Instead of creating an experimental terminal like TermKit, my decision was to ship a _useful_ terminal and let it be arbitrarily and infinitely extended.

Disclosure: author of Hyper

I'm sorry if I prematurely judged your effort, but you shouldn't expect people to read between the lines in a wall of text

TermKit's last update was late 2011 with the following line in it's readme

    Warning: Alpha version, still under development. Nothing works yet.

Maybe if it was built on powershell (or on its own underlying system) it would have more hope, but *nix is far too heavily text centric

notty seems to be trying to push that text-centricness as far as possible however

https://github.com/withoutboats/notty

https://github.com/sourcelair/xterm.js

This is the one VSCode uses. (But its just a frontend)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com