
Show HN: Gter – A terminal for GUI apps - raoof
https://github.com/raoofha/gter
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com2kid
Only slightly related;

My favorite 3d Modeling Program, Rhino3d, has a built in command line stemming
from its Autocad heritage.

It is absolutely amazing, and has been for two decades now. Rhino3d is by far
the best 3d modeling program I have ever used, and I'd say it is downright
_fun_ to use!

Auto-complete, discoverability, and the way it mixes keyboard and mouse input
all come together to make this wonderful experience. A basic example, tell it
to draw an ellipsoid, click the starting point, type the width in one
dimension, and then click the mouse for the third point.

In comparison to Sketchup I am easily 5x-10x more productive in Rhino (not
just because of the command line, lots of other reasons, Rhino3d really is
awesome).

I wish more applications had built in command lines that mixed mouse and
textual input so well together. IMHO the greatest contribution VS Code has
made is bringing that sort of combined UI to the programming masses, and doing
it really well.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
Yeah, the one thing that I love about autocad is that they made a system where
the GUI and CLI are actually fully integrated and equal. I'm actually
surprised that I've not really seen anything like that elsewhere, especially
in the *nix world.

~~~
com2kid
AutoCAD's integration is a historic legacy from its roots back when GUIs were
more limited.

Rhino3d was, AFAIK, one of the earlier re-imaginings of that paradigm. (The
CAD world doesn't move too fast!)

Autocad has released slews of products since I last looked at any of this, but
I still _really_ enjoy using Rhino3d. It feels like a natural extension of my
mind and body, it is _that_ good to use.

I don't even have a reason to do 3d modeling anymore, and I'll still open it
up sometimes just to do something in it.

Gah I can't believe Blender and Sketchup became popular with their WTF UIs. Or
why they didn't just copy a good UI from the get go.

Bleck.

------
Aloha
Part of me wonders what a clean sheet redesign of a text terminal handling
system would look like, would it still use inband signaling, or would you
presume network and break it up into multiple sets of communications channels.

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thetanil
I don't get it. What can you do here that you couldn't otherwise? You already
have a term and an xserver to make it work right?

~~~
raoof
it's just a proof of concept. I think it's cool to have a unified UI to the OS
it's like you're chatting with the OS and it/(she/he in the future) can
show/ask you anything in response. my core idea is to make it easy to create
something like Mathematica or Jupyter(IPython) by creating set of tiny GUI
program that follow the same convention to talk to each other.

~~~
kragen
That's a really interesting idea! I wrote a bit about it in Dercuano last year
but I don't have a prototype to show. I look forward to seeing where you take
it!

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fallat
You don't even need to make it vt100 compat. Just temporarily spawn the
lightest vt100 compat terminal in the terminal.

Very cool.

~~~
fizixer
Could you elaborate? Thanks.

~~~
einpoklum
The "terminalish" part of this terminal doesn't need to actually be
implemented. Instead, it can run another terminal as another X app, as the
full backgroudnd.

~~~
arnoooooo
Except you'd need to keep track of windows inside the terminal, which is not
obvious.

------
Per_Bothner
With DomTerm (https:://domterm.org) you can get similar functionality by
embedding browser windows. In a running domterm window do:

domterm html '<iframe src="[https://example.com"](https://example.com")
width="100%" height="400">'

I think this is potentially more useful than embedding X applications since an
application with an embedded http-server can conceptually do anything an X
application can do but with a more portable (and remote-able) toolkit.
(DomTerm itself is an application with an embedded http server.)

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fiatjaf
This makes me think we might need a terminal for web apps.

~~~
fiatjaf
By this I mean actually a way for people to publish standardized web
interfaces that can all be accessed from the same local terminal, with built-
in identity, text-editing and JSON filtering with jq, who knows what else.

~~~
JadeNB
> By this I mean actually a way for people to publish standardized web
> interfaces that can all be accessed from the same local terminal, with
> built-in identity, text-editing and JSON filtering with jq, who knows what
> else.

Unfortunately, the interfaces which need this treatment the most are the ones
least likely to get it, since big companies (even those that do not
intentionally profit by obscuring what they know about you from you) are
terrified of what you might do with your own data if given anything more than
laboriously point-and-click access to it.

(EDIT: Hi, PeopleSoft! I hate you!)

~~~
fiatjaf
I think there are a ton of services that could be more easily built (at least
as proof-of-concept) if this kind of UI existed and developers didn't have to
worry about pretty flashy GUIs. Also something like this could have more
access to "native" stuff than current browsers.

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qihqi
This could be the start of a whole new world:
[https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new-
world](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new-world)

------
Accujack
Xnest II: Electric Boogaloo

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akhilcacharya
This is extremely cool. Hope to see it gets further development.

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proxybop
This is really neat, you did an awesome job. I don't know why everyone is
being so negative about this.

Hearkens back to another time...

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cryptonector
Can this run over ssh/mosh?

~~~
jxy
It runs

    
    
        xinit ./xinitrc -- /usr/bin/Xephyr :100 -screen 960x540 -dpi 96

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techntoke
Who still uses X11 when Wayland works great?

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
If/when Wayland works great, I'm sure more people will start using it. In the
meantime, it still breaks stuff that people use.

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ConfusedDog
Would be a much better Show HN if the demo picture works on the page...

