Terminus: a configurable terminal emulator for Windows, macOS and Linux | Hacker News Reader

Terminus: a configurable terminal emulator for Windows, macOS and Linux

github.com

38 pointsaxiomdata31660 comments

100 MB for a terminal emulator? Debian's package for xterm is 200 times smaller, but OK, let's try...

Google Analytics? Thanks, I'll pass on this one!

> 100 MB for a terminal emulator?

Silly on any Linux or on OS X. The available alternatives are too good, and not such a daft size. But it's a real contender on Windows where terminal apps are dire (if improving fast).

> Google Analytics?

There's a setting for it. On or off - user's choice.

If it's on by default, it can't reasonably be called a user's choice.

A user who can't flick a switch on a settings screen has bigger problems than google analytics.

A user has to:

(a) be aware of the existence of said switch for every app they use

(b) be aware of the ramifications of that setting/feature (something I fear even many devs don't fully grok).

(c) Most importantly, can only opt-out after the fact: Google analytics runs before you have any opportunity to access the settings panel.

On reflection I do agree on the ethics of it - if the authors have a defensible reason for using it, they should make full disclosure on first run. I've submitted a github issue to that effect.

The pragmatics are still in favour of it for me - I haven't found another Windows terminal that does everything I want as effectively. Of course I switched off the analytics (scanning settings is always the first thing I do on installing anything). I do tend to try new terminals I come across because electron does seem daft for a terminal, but for now Terminus really does a fine job.

The author has added a welcome screen that it seems (haven't tried the build myself yet) won't enable google analytics until specifically authorised by the user (https://github.com/Eugeny/terminus/issues/845#issuecomment-4...)

Putting Google Analytics into a desktop application is ridiculous and immediately disqualifies the project for me. Event it it were opt-in rather than opt-out.

a user who has to flick a thousand switch a day in multiple apps and sites to have things the way he wants probably as given up and doesn't have the things the way he wants.

You won't need any third party ones on Windows soon enough.

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal

Possibly true - I compiled it and it's a bit rough for daily use as yet. It will be a long time (if ever) before it will compare with iTerm2 or Terminator.

On windows cmder is already damn good. And ms prepares an official better terminal too.

Sure, as I say it's improving. I had a bunch of problems I never fixed with cmder. Windows Terminal has definite promise. We'll see.

If the author wanted to respect the user's choice, they would simply ask instead of using dark patterns.

Downloaded it, but tbh, can't really see where it is better than any other native terminal.

For OS X its a hefty 100 megabytes, just for a terminal app, with plugins, Google Analytics and a lot of styling.

> Google Analytics

Ah, wonderful. Google and whoever is developing the app snooping on what you do in your terminal. What could go wrong?

I wish GitHub had a warning when it detected analytics software in a repo.

Sounds like a good thing to add to Travis CI or some static analyses tool.

Very shitty of them to use the same name of a well known terminal font.

Just tried this on 2K monitor. How exactly is this "A terminal for a more modern age" when the font is not readable with size 11 (and it is easily readable in iTerm2 with the same settings) ?

What the actual @#%&.

Since when did my terminal need Google Analytics? Also buggy. Was installed for about 5 minutes before I "noped" the hell out of this one... can we all agree to not use Electron for an app unless it's a super "web-y" one like Slack or Spotify? kthx.

If anyone has an iterm2 replacement for Linux I'm all ears: * Guake-style dropdown support * Tabs (on the bottom) * Splits w/o screen for scrollback

I can't believe I have to use three separate terminal applications on Linux in 2019 for modern features...

Alacritty + Tmux (+ WM/DE keybinds) does the job for me. Good performance, cross-platform, able to edit the config file on the fly. But it doesn't have tabs. That's what I use Tmux (with plugins) for. You can make Alacritty fullscreen with a keybind. I also had to change some default configuration settings.

Terminator

Yep - already use it and love it. The problem with Terminator is opening it on same monitor that my cursor is on with a keyboard shortcut key.

Guake is (I think) the only one that gets that right without custom scripting. Been researching alternative solutions all morning and I think I'm going to have to hammer something custom out in bash with xdotool, xrandr, PID lookups, etc.

looks down the rabbit hole - hold my beer, I'm goin' in.

i would never consider using an electron-based terminal, but for casual users it looks really pretty

You would be surprised how many people do.

Ubuntu (gnome actually) has a small but very competent disk tool. Yet people recommend Etcher for writing disk images to USB because it's cute.

Etcher does have really nice UX for casual users though. It couldn't really be much easier to use.

I download and tried this a while back and it did not work with Midnight Commander over SSH.

It also failed a few other command line apps I tried.

My favorite terminal application is Zoc https://www.emtec.com/zoc/

Works on Mac and Windows.

It has handled anything I have thrown at it so far including some rather obscure stuff well.

The thing I hate is the price.

You're spot on that it handles some obscure stuff; I recently had a need for ZMODEM over telnet+SSL, and ZOC was the only modern thing I could find that did that.

I looked at its features and I'd say it's rather cheap, given what it supports.

alterNATIVE option is kitty, gpu based, non electron, tab, font ligature... (basically has everything terminus does).

Alacritty is my favourite - no ligatures or tabs but super fast and runs everywhere.

I used to use Hyper (electron), but I have Alacritty looking exactly like Hyper now. Just as pretty, much lighter and faster. Starts up in a fraction of the time. Keeps up with fast scrolling text. Cross platform too!

For every new terminal I test if they can handle tricky unicode or locking escape sequences.

I tried right now the kitty terminal available on Debian Buster, and echo -e "\033(0" still requires to reset the terminal (don't paste the above in your working session if you can't type reset without visual feedback).

P.S. still using Gnome-terminal that it doesn't handle locking escapes... ^__^;

can you explain what that does? It makes my iTerm2 screen wonderfully messy.

I think I've pulled that example from the Mosh shell, if you look at https://mosh.org/#techinfo you'll find other escape sequences that are still problematic for terminal emulators.

It's an "escape" sequence that should switch coding system, but I don't recall from where it came from, I need to check my notes.

+1 for kitty, it is fast and lightweight and provides all the features I've wanted out of my terminal

I wonder why kitty has packages for every major distribution except Ubuntu?

It does on 19.04 I just installed it this week.

What's so modern about it? Does it do anything that iTerm2 doesn't do just as well?

It requires a full web browser to run (built on electron, complete with google analytics!), so I guess including a ton of unneeded/spyware crap makes things 'modern' now.

Electron based terminal is truly an apex of insanity of our modern era.

“Doesn't choke on fast-flowing outputs”

Nice to see a terminal addressing this issue. Even worse is when the output is super long and has no newlines. That can freeze up my whole desktop at work for minutes.

Wait, is this really a thing?

Never seen it myself.

Perhaps happens when the code assumes well-behaved output that has reasonably long lines. It has to collect the lines to allow for sensible reflow behaviour when resizing the window.

Downloaded and tried it out, really nice. I think I'll use it as my default terminal to test it out some more.

Downloaded and deleted after reading it's Electron-based.

hard for me to use terminals that override shell themes with their own colors now that i both 1) do more work over ssh 2) use base16-shell

gun to my head though, i'd maybe use terminus over hyper primarily due to being able to easily open new tabs to wsl/ps/cmd pretty much out of the box

Looks like an electron app. This is not going to be so nice to battery life compared to existing options.

I find Hyper isn’t bad at all in that respect, as long as you don’t have a lot of fancy effects happening.

I use iTerm (unfortunately only available for macOS) [1]

There’s a theme that makes it look compact (nicer?) [2]

iTerm is native, supports plugins (Python scripting API), is CPU/RAM friendly, with milliseconds input (very important for touch typing), it’s open source (GPL v2) [3][4], the author is a proficient programmer which I hope to sponsor via GitHub Sponsors program soon [5] although you can already sponsor him via Patreon [6], offers smooth split panes, hotkey, buffer search, intelligent autocomplete, instant replay, an exaggerated amount of extra options available from the application settings, additional shell integrations, inline images, password manager, annotations, and the list of features continues with the beta builds.

Having spent several years using Linux (xterm [7], gnome-terminal [8], guake [9], terminator [10], among others), then moving on to macOS (Terminal.app [11] then iTerm.app), and with the recent news in the Windows world [12], I don’t see any reasons why would anyone install a terminal emulator built on top of a web browser, when there’s a good list of alternatives using native libraries and UI, with much more performance, and better features.

But as people say, to each their own.

[1] https://www.iterm2.com/features.html

[2] https://i.imgur.com/46mY0O6.png

[3] https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2

[4] https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2

[5] https://github.com/gnachman

[6] https://www.patreon.com/gnachman

[7] https://invisible-island.net/xterm/

[8] https://github.com/GNOME/gnome-terminal

[9] http://guake-project.org/

[10] https://terminator-gtk3.readthedocs.io/en/latest/gettingstar...

[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_%28macOS%29

[12] https://github.com/microsoft/terminal

> I don’t see any reasons why would anyone install a terminal emulator built on top of a web browser,

It's honestly been the least problematic option I've found on Windows. Everything else I've tried has had some issue somewhere, or some oddness with tmux. But I can't see why you'd bother with it on Linux or a OS X, both of which have great options.

> with the recent news in the Windows world

Cause for optimism, but Windows Terminal isn't really ready yet.

One month. We only need to wait one more month for the new windows terminal.

If the terminal team is anything like the vscode team, it will be a very interesting summer.

I know. I'm a diehard IntelliJ user, but I've been playing with the vscode remote development extension for wsl. Really very impressive.

This is so true!

I hate that I can't use iTerm2 on linux and I think it's quite ironic that the best terminal emulator is not made for linux and on top of that also free (instead of many other OSX apps).

Hope some day we'll get it there - maybe with the github sponsoring option he'll get enough to implement it for linux? Who knows.

Happy iTerm user as well. The only thing I don't like is the increased and visible latency compared to Terminal.app when creating new tabs or windows.

It annoys me that the README correctly indicates this is a terminal emulator, but not the title

Electron? Electron of course!

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