

Show HN: HTerm, The Graphical Terminal for iOS, MacOS and Linux - new299
http://41j.com/hterm

======
new299
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.

~~~
kfieldho
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.

~~~
new299
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.

~~~
jrabone
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 ?

~~~
new299
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!

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

~~~
new299
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.

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Nux
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?

~~~
new299
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!

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sedatk
Let me guess, H stands for Hollywood :)

