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Comment by paxcoder | Hacker News Reader

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)

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