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Comment by gjvc | Hacker News Reader

There was something similar a few years ago which ran over an ssh connection and had a zoomable ui of sorts. I can't find the link -- does this ring a bell anywhere?

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I don't completely understand what is meant by "zooming", but kitty[^1] does that: you open ssh connection with `kitten ssh user@host` and pressing <C-Enter> will open another ssh pane in the same tab, you can than IIRC <C-F> to "zoom" and make tab take full window

[1]: <https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/>

not the same zooming. imagine a text mode ZUI -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface

It really is tragedy that there aren't more ZUIs in the wild. I'd love a compositor (X11 or Wayland; it's probably not just a wm) that made all windows arbitrarily zoomable, but I lack the skill to make it myself.

Zooming all windows at once exists as a Gnome shell extension.

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/7263/better-desktop-z...

Probably it would be possible to zoom one window at once as a shell extension.

It was this very tool. It could be sshed into with

ssh vtm@netxs.online

That domain is dead now

Hooray, thank you!

When I said "zooming" I was thinking of the white tethers attached to each window which would pull them back into a centre bundle. You can see what I mean here: https://changelog.com/news/a-textbased-desktop-environment-i... at the bottom left, the lines going off to a single point.

actually, by zooming out, I can still see the tethers on the windows. The ssh version was quite mind-blowing back when...

This is the same thing as the public demo back then via 'ssh vtm@netxs.online'. There are no public demo servers running now, but you can still ssh to your running vtm instance with any number of connections. In case of using MS Windows you can even get the output in a standalone GUI window via 'vtm ssh user@unixserver vtm'.

am I imagining it, or were there more features in the original public demo?

Now vtm is the same as it was running on demo servers. In the modern version, the fading effects and window shadows are disabled by default in the settings. Perhaps the fading effects were removed as unnecessary.

There were demo apps in the menu, they are still there: 'vtm --run text', 'vtm --run calc', 'vtm --run test', 'vtm --run truecolor'... You can play with it by running them directly inside the vtm desktop, by typing (or right click to paste) commands like vtm.desktop.Run({ type='calc' }) in the 'Log Monitor' command line.

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