Comment by jcrites | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcrites | Hacker News Reader

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I've been wanting to prototype the idea of an HTML-based terminal. Basically take the graphical user interface of the web and connect it to the system administration capabilities of the Unix command line. I'd probably draw inspiration from PowerShell: have programs produce some kind of data structure as output that can be rendered into HTML and displayed using stylesheets.

It would not be a trivial amount of work to build this since, to take good advantage of the UI capabilities, you'd need an entire new CLI OS - something to replace GNU Core Utilities. I haven't been sure where to start since the choice of programming language or expression language will significantly affect the overall experience.

Add an out of band channel to ssh and your favorite ssh client/terminal emulator. Teach it that information in the out of band channel is used to render html, jupyter notebooks, or whatever. On the remote side, have your sshd set an environment variable that lets apps know the side channel is available, and then df can produce cute little pie charts or historic usage graphs. Ls can produce thumbnails if run in a directory with that kind of media and the appropriate args are used.

Honestly, it's likely that nothing special is needed on the ssh part of things as simple port forwarding and environment variables would do the trick.

you have it already: https://hyper.is/

Great so now in addition to having to support everything the terminal does (the whole pile of garbage hacks that were added since the 60s) you have this electron crap running which on its own is probably more complex than 99% of software out there. This basically took the terminal and made it a hundred times worse.

OTOH, if you do what your parent suggests and start from scratch (no terminal support) you have a platform that isn't supported by anything yet, so unless you port or reimplement everything you need you have to keep using both in parallel which sounds just cumbersome.

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