Hacker News Reader

Comment by dboreham | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately the browser still can't make the kind of network connection needed to transport a terminal session to a remote computer natively. afaik all the tunneling solutions are pretty clunky/insecure.

View on HN

Have you looked into VibeTunnel? I got the terminal working in my browser and it runs on my computer. I can access it on my phone since we’re on the same Tailscale network. I use Ghostty-Web and tried to switch to Wterm but it didn’t work. I think it’s because Ghostty-Web renders a canvas and wterm normal div tags.

Yeah ChromeOS has the same problem. They have a Javascript-native terminal emulator, and a wasm (formerly PNaCL) implementation of open-ssh. But they have to use ChromeOS specific browser extensions in order to allow native TCP connections to port 22 from wasm, and Google only gives themselves this privilege, not any random dev like us.

I'm curious to see if this weird stack gets ported to the Googlebooks or if they just make a mouse-friendly Android app instead.

It doesn't take much to support a WSS to Telnet/SSH bridge or directly hosting a PTTY shell... for that matter, you can leverage path/querystring to include signed credentials (like a JWT) as part of the path statement for the underlying connection.

There's even some decent options to bridge further the other way, from a terminal to wss back to a terminal based, server hosted, application.

What do you mean - WebTransport can do a lot...

Lot but not enough still. Most web tech is like that, almost there but not really. Webaudio prob being the worst one. Webgpu being weird thing that nobody really knows who it is for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com