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Comment by eridius | Hacker News Reader

Can someone please explain to me why I would possibly want to run a terminal emulator inside of my web browser, instead of just using the terminal emulator app that my system ships with?

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the complete list of software i use day-to-day consists of a web browser and a terminal emulator. if i switched over to this, that list goes down to just a browser.

maybe some people don't care, but i think it's pretty cool.

If the complete list of software you use is a web browser and a terminal emulator, what do you do in the terminal emulator? Run a text-based web browser and/or other terminal emulators?

sorry, i mean software installed on my computers. i use many different software packages installed on remote servers, but i don't need or want any of that stuff running on my computers.

I don't like the idea of using a single app for everything. I have tons and tons of (personal) reasons, but the most obvious and un-solvable reason is: I can switch between terminal emulator and web browser with Command+Tab. If they were both the same thing, I couldn't do it and I would be very disturbed and confused. The same reason I don't use GMail web app and use Mail.app instead, or Reeder.app or iCal.app or iTunes.app.

You know you can Ctrl+Tab between tabs in most web browsers, right?

Of course. But I usually have a few open browser windows (each containing 5-10 related tabs). If Gmail was also a window, I would have to press Cmd-` (Mac's shortcut for switching between different windows of a single app) multiple times.

But to be honest that's not how I actually do my stuff. I use QuickSilver[1] and when I want to go to Mail.app, I just press Cmd-Space, then 'M' or 'Ma' (because Mail.app begins with M) and press return. It takes less than 0.4 seconds (QS is wicked fast) and is much more convenient than a tab in my browser. Not to mention that a native app is usually way faster and more responsive (I have a ridiculously slow internet connection).

[1]: http://qsapp.com

On Windows and *nix--well Ubuntu at least--you can drag a browser tab into a new window and then Alt-Tab between them. Is there no equivalent on a Mac?

Yes. It's Cmd-` (~ without holding down shift. and it works in all apps, not just browsers). But there are more benefits to a native app than a browser tab (for me at least): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3912689

"un-solvable reason is"

This is actually completely solvable, if it was something lots of people wanted to do it could be trivially built into any browser.

It could be built into FF globally with an extremely simple plugin.

Well if the world turns out to become as Google fantasizes and all applications will be ran in browsers, you can switch between apps with ctrl+tab.

It's the difference between Ctrl-Tab and Cmd-Tab, no?

THANK YOU. I seriously do not get this app. Yes, they may have done a great job, but i don't get why i would want to use it. I can't use it on someone else's desktop because i'd have to install crap in their Chrome. I wouldn't use it on my desktop because I've already got a good terminal app that I've tweaked to be just the way I like it.

Nevermind "killer" app... why is there ANY need for this?

I feel like I'm missing something very obvious.

Chrome OS? Your Android phone? Windows?

I can't work on a Windows machine without installing SecureCRT or Putty. One less thing to install and tweak.

That's funny, I can't work on a Windows machine at all :)

I don't think it will run on Chrome OS.

Nope, it runs fine on my Cr-48. In fact, as of Chrome OS 20, the native xterm seems to have been replaced with the version from this extension, running in its own tab.

Yup, if you read some of the dev notes, it was specifically designed for Chrome OS.

As a followup, my terminal windows are rarely the same size as my browser windows. I don't like resizing my browser windows in general because the browser will remember the new size, even though it was meant as a once-off window. So having a browser-sized terminal doesn't seem like a very good experience.

Additionally, it doesn't even work right. In a screen-controlling app like vim it seems fine, but in the normal shell, once I enter enough text to use more than a screen, the bottom-most line is actually off the window (even if I scroll down).

You can file bugs on the chromiom-os project.

http://code.google.com/p/chromium-os/issues/list?can=2&q...

The missing lines at the bottom is a bug that got fixed just after this release. The next Secure Shell release won't have the issue.

And your browser size issue goes away if you open the terminal in its own window. Chrome even has an "Open as Window" option (right click on the Secure Shell icon) to open in a window with no browser UI.

So I used to think the same thing, and then I saw something funny: it was a spinning 3D cube with a scrolling document on all 6 faces. It was made with pdf.js and WebGL.

Now this isn't the same because it's NaCl and therefore not pure-web, but a pure-web terminal emulator would be awesome! It would mean you could embed it within normal web content and mash it up with other stuff. Want to edit your dropbox contents/Gmail in Vim? Maybe pipe the contents of a file into a text box? Maybe just live refresh the output of your web site when you save?

Actually, I'm running out of cool things you could do. Nobody needs a spinning 3D cube with a PDF on it, but the fact that you CAN do it means that people will invent something useful for it, and I have no doubt they would invent something awesome with an in-browser terminal emulator.

Unfortunately, this being NaCl, it may not be it. Shame.

I can understand that having an open-source library that provides the ability to embed a terminal emulator might be useful somewhere, to someone. But as a full-screen plugin for Chrome?

The only part about this written in NaCl is the "ssh" command. The terminal emulator portion of it is entirely JS.

The only reason it isn't currently cross-browser is because I don't have enough time in the day to make it work everywhere. I tried not to make it too Webkit specific though. If some brave JS hacker/Firefox user wants to make this cross browser, I'd be happy to help.

Ah, pretty awesome then. (I can't change my previous reply though, due to time limits)

Do Chromebooks ship with a terminal application? If not, that would be a good use case.

Chromebooks have a limited term app that allows you to ssh, top, ping, and one or two other commands.

Windows doesn't have good terminal emulator. This extension is almost like having gnome-terminal on Windows. SSH into a remote machine and you have the usual keyboard navigation that the Windows "terminal" doesn't offer.

Sure, but I can download and run PuTTY directly from its download page faster than I can log in to my Google account on any machine where the credentials aren't already saved.

The Chrome extension could be nice for preconfigured "many-to-many" single-sign on from/to a number of hosts with a (hopefully encrypted) RSA key, however.

I'm guessing if you have a chrome book it would be a nice solution.

Chromebooks already have SSH installed natively.

And they support keys -- Although it seems the primary way to use them is by putting your keys into your 'Downloads' folder, which isn't exactly ideal.

Looks like this will eventually replace the inbuilt ssh supplied with crosh (Chromium OS shell)

Can you explain this a little more? I cant quite get it to work.

For work I do UI stuff for our web product so much of my day is doing something in iTerm with tmux and then switching to the browser tab to refresh.

So with the Chrome keyboard shortcuts to switch between tabs, it makes things a little quicker.

The whole "Chrome as OS" thing will benefit from this.

Because!

Windows! I spend most of my time coding in PuTTy + Vim when I'm on windows. In my limited testing this works as I expect with xterm-256, tmux, and Vim on my Ubuntu 12.04 Server without having to configure anything. PuTTy is a pain to configure on a new box.

How do you save yourself the trouble of configuring this extension?

What sorts of configs have you had to do for Putty?

Setting unicode, changing backspace, setting xterm-256 as the TERM variable, etc ... PuTTy configuration is unintuitive when you first try to configure it. There's a well known page dedicated to configuring PuTTy properly on Windows.

I haven't tested this extensively myself, but have you looked at ExtraPuTTY?

http://www.extraputty.com/features.html

Seems like one of its goals is to make it easier to move PuTTY configurations from one machine to another.

In addition to Putty being far from native...

tmux didn't work as expected for me. i.e. I could attach to my tmux sessions, as well as switch between the "panes" - but I couldn't see the status bar.

I also started a new tmux instance (rather than attach to existing one) still no status bar. Any suggestions ?

Edit : Problem solved. I went into Full screen mode (F11) after clicking in addressbar (When focus was on the terminal, F11 printed ~) Anyway, when I started tmux in full screen mode, I could see tmux status bar. I continued to see it even after I left full screen.

Not sure what was the (temporary) problem.

it's a toy for now. don't over think it. But it have fun possibilities.

One use case would be ssh over http. Corporate proxies often disallow ssh traffic.

No. from the page "It uses Native-Client to connect directly to ssh servers without the need for external proxies." it IS a ssh client. no http proxies.

That's right. But Secure Shell also knows how to connect to an HTTP-to-ssh relay.

Most clients yes. That one, not sure.

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