Show HN: HTerm, The Graphical Terminal for iOS, MacOS and Linux | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: HTerm, The Graphical Terminal for iOS, MacOS and Linux

41j.com

67 pointsnew29912 comments

I've been writing this in my spare time. It's a cross platform terminal client which lets you draw graphics inline using Regis. This means you can quickly plot data using gnuplot without and serverside support.

It also lets you render PNG graphics inline by streaming it as base64 encoded data. Which I find handy for displaying email attachments from mutt.

It's open source, and a iOS version is available for 99c (though you can also compile it yourself of course). I hope to make a Cydia version available if the project gets any traction.

At this stage I'd love feedback, bug reports and of course users to push me to do more development.

Ah, ReGIS graphics. Sometimes the past comes and taps you on the shoulder.

You mentioned the VK100 as the original ReGIS graphics terminal which I'm fairly sure is correct. It might be worth mentioning that terminal's more familiar name, the "GIGI". It actually came out a fair bit sooner, certainly earlier than '85. I'm pretty sure I was working in a lab stuffed full of them in '82, '83 at the latest.

They were a pretty fun terminal to work with. Among other things, they supported the ability to upload bitmap fonts. A friend of mine put together a "Rogue Font" which put those terminals in demand in our lab for playing "rogue". I did a multi-terminal chess board system for them.

ReGIS was supported in later DEC terminals, the VT-240, VT-300 etc. By that time I was working in the TBU's (Terminal Business Unit) QA group which was '85 and on. That was the same era that DEC released their first PostScript based printer (the LPS-40) not too long after the Apple LaserWriter came out. It was a fun time for early computer graphics.

I've updated the site, thanks for the comments. That lab sounds awesome, I would have loved to have played with those terminals. It's unfortunate that we lost ReGIS support in modern terminals.

The ReGIS support I currently have is pretty basic, mostly just designed to support gnuplot line graphs. If you have any old code that generates ReGIS graphics I'd LOVE to see it.

I probably do, but it would be on DEC Rainbow 5.25" floppies; gave up trying to find PC software and drive that could read them long ago (they're pretty non-standard) and the real hardware has been skipped. Some DEC archive somewhere probably has the equivalent. Perhaps ftp://www.decus.org/pub/lib/v00365/vaxregis.zip ?

Have you thought about contacting the Archive team? They might be able to help you out. I'd hate to see that stuff get lost.

Could access that path, but found: /anon/public/decus/vms/library/v00365

Looks great! All fortran 77 code by the looks of it, will certainly be something fun to play with, thanks!

Have you looked into providing compatibility with Terminology for the features that you share? At the moment, that's mostly image display, but if you refactor Regis rendering into a separate library or tool you might be able to share significantly more. http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/terminology

In addition, it looks like you use a plain-ASCII inline sequence to signify the start of image/media data. I think Terminology uses a special escape sequence to begin its media rendering, and that seems like a more robust approach which you might want to consider; echoing ASCII text to a terminal should probably stay as ASCII when rendered, imo.

Wow, Terminology looks like a lot of fun.

I'll have to ping them and see which escape sequence they use, would be great to use the same ones. I'll have to dig into terminology a bit more, I think we have slightly different design goals though. My main requirements were "no server side support required" and "works when bouncing ssh across multiple boxes". It looks to me like they're either rendering local content, or require a special toolset to be installed serverside (which I wanted to avoid as I bounce between lots of different client machines).

Have you put any thought into submitting a patch for iTerm?

That's a pretty good idea, I've tried to write the ReGIS rendering and inline PNG code in such a way that it wouldn't be too hideous to factor them out into their own libraries. If I get any traction with this, I'd love to see terminals generally regain ReGIS support and support some from of support for inline image rendering.

Would love to try it, but the "Linux" link points to a DEB package (I'm on RPM distro ..) that's missing (404): http://41j.com/hterm/hterm_0.0.1-1_amd64.deb

Can you provide a generic binary?

Whoops, I've fixed the deb link now. I'll look into creating a static binary which should work on most platforms. It should also be pretty easy to build from source:

https://github.com/new299/hackterm

Though the source needs quite a lot of work!

Let me guess, H stands for Hollywood :)

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