Comment by amalter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amalter | Hacker News Reader

Wow HN is especially negative today.

Count me as interested in a terminal that supports “infinite” scrollback, while keeping memory usage deterministic. Apply color styling heuristically based on content is interesting. I’m assuming this only kicks in if color is not applied inside the term? Being able to cat an xml/json/source file and get decent styling sounds quite cool. Also hard.

You might want to setup a non-github landing page. While you certainly can use github for anything (within their tos), user expectations are that open source tools are hosted there.

Spin up a quick landing site (even just use something like squarespace) and capture some animated gifs showing your distinctive features in action.

I agree that you’ll have a hard time selling this as a product - there are too many “pretty damn good” versions of terminals to get folks to pay.

Have you thought of offering an embeddable component? I can imagine a number of great uses for a lightweight, native, customizable text control with the features described. I think we’re reaching peek Electron, and fully baked native text control/editor would be a differentiator.

Perhaps offer the terminal for free and commercialize the component?

Either way, HN is a tough crowd, especially with commercial products, so don’t take it to personally.

Take the constructive part of the criticism and pursue your passion.

Thank you for every suggestion. Windterm hosted in github is just because many of it will be open source, and github is also very important for windterm. This is only the first release, many things will be done in the feature. If you want to create a great terminal to make users's life easier, you can't do things alone.

For example, text editors have created a lot of schemes for python, java, c++, even ada, shell script and etc, so they can provide autocomplete, color styling, folding, lint and so on. But what have done for the systems? Do we have an autocomplete list for Ubuntu's commands of each version? Do we have a whole scheme for every command and every option of Windows's cmd or Macos's bash? How can terminals provide features without these?

What is the soul of a terminal? The soul is only lies in the text in them. If we want to click a traceback line in a terminal and then open the error source file and jump to the error line to instead of a lot redundant operations, copy the path, open it in an editor , scroll to the error line, we must need to know what does the tranceback mean. So everything I talked, we need a lot of people's help, just like they have helped text editors in past half of century.

When all this have done, every terminal can share the schemes library to provide good features, and everyone has a lot of good tools to choose. I think it is more important than I just open the windterm's source. I call this true open source too.

It's not shameful for me to talk about money if I can make a lot of people happier when they using a more useful terminal, but I do care the terminal more than the money. Money is only a byproduct, with or without it, I am still very happy if I make my terminal dreams come to true.

Sorry, I forgot to answer your questions.

I’m assuming this only kicks in if color is not applied inside the term?

You are right, if the text has color from server, the color will be respected and will not be styled again. Or many tools like vi will show a mess.

Being able to cat an xml/json/source file and get decent styling sounds quite cool.

Think a little more boldly. If we can piped the output of cat to a real text editor and let you view and modify and save it more easier:) Just pop up its content when you cat a file.

Have you thought of offering an embeddable component?

No, never. I think a good tool must guarantee its integrity. But the idea and method can be offered to others, like google introduced MapReduce and BigTable.

Perhaps offer the terminal for free and commercialize the component?

Windterm will always free for personal usage. I am very happy if someone will like to use my terminal. For companies, if they don't sell their products for money, they can use windterm for free too.

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