Go Terminal_ Elegant and Efficient Linux Terminal (opens in new tab)

There's literally nothing about this I like.

A terminal with a gradient background might look pretty for screenshots, but for long sessions it just adds to fatigue and makes text harder to read. "Saving your favorite commands" in a normal terminal involves writing an alias into your rc file, not a bunch of button clicks. Same goes for the whole "interactive flags" thing.

Whoever made this clearly hates the terminal and wanted to bring a hipstery web 2.0 approach to the terminal. My question is, WHY?

Oh, and it's PAID? Fuck that. Learn to use a proper terminal or don't bother, simple as that. That isn't me being a crotchety old timer, that's me giving you serious life advice. You will always be faster in the terminal if you learn to use it properly. a 2 hour tutorial in shell scripting and learning to use `man` is worth far more to your career than 10 bucks. Learn it the right way if you're going to bother.

</rant>

It's a paid terminal emulator, written (by all appearances) in some kind of Electron-like (so a much much higher footprint), with a GUI for what can already be done via aliases, functions, and scripts.

And no telling how well $TERM detection works (show me vim! Show me something that wants 256 colors!)

If it was free, I might still not use it, because my terminal emulator needs to be lightweight and bulletproof, not heavy and shiny. A terminal emulator is a hammer -- simple, solid, good for constant use -- not an art piece.

Just what I've always wanted from a terminal - things I can only do with a GUI and mouse. /sarcasm

This product seems to fundamentally misunderstand people that use terminals. Perhaps it would do better to instead become more of a thing that puts quick GUI wrappers around terminal commands and tries to parse the output and present it in a pretty GUI way for people who'd prefer not to get their hands dirty? Otherwise, this seems like what aliases and functions in my bashrc are for.

Either way, why is there a group of people that seems to think we desperately need to take applications that we are already running natively, wrap them in HTML/CSS/JS, throw them inside of a webview, embed that webview into a separate Chromium instance, and string it all together using a tool and execution environment designed to take a client-side single threaded web scripting language and use it for making servers? (Mugatu: I feel like I'm taking crazy pills - does nobody see this?!?)

This appears superficial, and that this is paid as well with no (visible) published open source turns me off. The mistakes in the GIF communicate that this was a slapped-together product.

Additionally, requiring mouse clicks for a visual replacement of the alias command with a few extra bells and whistles is not the greatest appeal to a community of developers.

I hope that the fact that this was written in Go does not outweigh its shortcomings in the eyes of HN.

Amusing idea, and this kind of "quick GUI-builder" mechanism reminds me of ifttt or zapier in the way it gives more scripting/glue power to people who normally have access to less of it. And this would be useful for a mobile or tablet application, where GUI shortcuts to save typing help a great deal.

But the demo video shows one major issue that breaks its primary functionality as a terminal: the font rendering has a vertical spacing problem going on, with lines 1.5x spaced, which would break many screen-oriented applications, especially those that use line-drawing characters. Notice how at 22s into the video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbDxvJn1jV0#t=22s), the inverse-colored character shortcuts at the bottom of nano's UI have space between the white boxes; the white boxes should touch, like this: https://imgur.com/q0TERnM

This is either a bug with the terminal itself, or a bug with the font used. I looked for a bug tracker to report the bug, at which point I noticed that it wasn't FOSS, and promptly lost all interest in taking the time to make such a report.

Also, while I realize that this uses a browser engine for its UI, there's something surreal about a terminal emulator bundling libffmpeg.so.

This isn't even a decent terminal emulator in the basic ways. It has an enormous memory footprint, abysmal compatibility, and very little in the way of novel features to offer.

If you use a better shell (like fish) it leaves this even less appealing. I'm sure this took some work to do, but I don't know anyone with a job to pay for it, which would use it.

The word "efficient" describes the exact opposite of what this is.

In addition to all of that, the package includes all of the build-time dependencies with it. And the package they use for the terminal emulator part of it is explicitly abandoned by its author (https://github.com/chjj/term.js/)

Nobody should pay 10 dollars(let alone 20 dollars for limited ongoing support) for more than half a gigabyte of unmaintained, deprecated open source code, plus about 2000SLOC of proprietary code for a sidebar which does something which is basically already built into the shell.

Also, there is no clear roadmap for this; so it's totally unclear what "3 years of updates" means when half of the thing is deprecated and it hasn't even left beta!

If you're like me, you'll think, "aliases!"

But, the shell is a bunch of nontrivial things to learn. Tools like Go Terminal_ could make a less discontinuous learning path for shell. I recently had to teach[0] someone a bit of shell, and I kept tripping over explanations of:

    command -[flags] arg1 arg2 arg3 | something else

Merely explaining that -xvf modified tar and how was a challenge. After I explained it, the user appended -xvf to cat in a different session. The above line would be a dozen lines of code in a blub. Shell takes a long time to grok.

All that said, I wouldn't call Go Terminal_ "efficient" ;).

[0] I did a terrible job.

Interesting concept, but I'm not sure who this is directed towards. I can see some people using this, but not that much. (experienced) Developers will naturally go towards the features that shells like bash/zsh offer (e.g. aliases), and most inexperienced developers... well, I don't see them putting that much effort into configuring their terminal, and besides this, most people in the Linux world will hardly pay for something that they can get for free from somewhere else, unless it really is a necessity, which doesn't seem to be the case here. That said, I wish you the best on that. Always good to see different stuff.

I was trying to install this .deb package with ubuntu software center. My system warns with the below message.

"This package is of bad quality:

The installation of a package which violates the quality standards isn't allowed. This could cause serious problems on your computer. Please contact the person or organisation who provided this package file and include the details beneath.

The package doesn't provide a valid Installed-Size control field. See Debian Policy 5.6.20."

You've been lambasted!

While I agree with pretty much all the criticisms raised by others, I would just like to qualify that I like the idea of attempting to disrupt the traditional terminal.

A terminal will always be a window from GUI land to the shell, but that doesn't mean we can't play with it! :)

In my experience, terminals like xterm and rxvt ran extremely efficiently on machines 23 years ago, like, oh, a 66 MHz 486 DX2 with 8 Mb RAM. I can't say that I ever had a complaint with the speed of scrolling, or rendering of characters, or general responsiveness.

Looks like a visual version for an alias list.

Here are somethings which might be more substantial improvements.

A status bar which helps in understanding what a command does. So you type 'command -xva a b' and the status bar gives an English description that the command is going to do such and such(based on flags) on files a and b.

Simple discoverability like an interactive version of reading man pages or apropos, where after typing something like git or ls, the user who doesn't remember the exact options, can press some shortcut and type a english description like 'hidden files' 'reset' and the status bar displays the relevant flags and their description. This kind of semantic autocomplete, would save a visit to a long man page.

Why is the download 100MB big ? Isn't it a bit heavy for a simple terminal ?

Is this some type of sponsored post shit?

I don't know how much of an advancement this is for a seasoned user, but I do think this would be a great learning tool since you can visually see all the commands generated by the terminal.

That's what shines in my eyes from this project.

I might not see a developer using this, but an administrator I could. Needing to run one-off scripts and server management. However only if it would work remotely, and with host specific configuration and command options.

IMO, it makes no sense.

alias is free