
Final Term - Terminal Emulator - selectnull
http://finalterm.org/
======
pvnick
Lots of negativity and one-uppery in these comments. I just wanted to say
great job, keep up the good work. You're making everybody's lives easier,
either directly or indirectly, by pushing the envelope here :)

~~~
zobzu
I see like 90% of positive comments... 10% of criticism is too much? without
it, its easy to get lost into the "everything's great" and 6 month later
everyone complains about their new kde4/gnome3/unity etc fiasco.

For example, personally, I believe the completion belongs to the shell not the
terminal, and i'd rather not use the mouse on a terminal's displayed text
except for copy/paste. Doesn't mean its not cool.

~~~
ddunkin
It shouldn't be forced, but some of us do use the mouse on a terminal window.
I have more of a keyboard 'nipple' but it's conveniently right there when I'm
typing and I don't have to move out of a standard typing position to use it.

~~~
Veratyr
I call that thing a nubbin. I don't even know why.

------
graylights
Terminal emulators should be expected to deal with a lot of untrusted data,
such as when you ssh to another machine. With all the context parsing in this,
there is a large attack surface. I hope thought has been put into how to
handle this.

~~~
josho
Untrusted data in a terminal emulator??? I don't believe that I've ever used a
terminal to connect to an untrusted system. Ie. local login, or ssh to a
system that I trust enough to compile my programs or run my servers.

If the terminal receives untrusted data back then I've got bigger problems
than a security hole in my terminal emulator.

~~~
anon1385
Perhaps these will whet your appetite…

[http://www.shmoo.com/mail/bugtraq/sep99/msg00145.html](http://www.shmoo.com/mail/bugtraq/sep99/msg00145.html)

[https://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2003-00...](https://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2003-0063)

Also here is an overview of some of the possible ways things can go wrong:
[http://lists.kde.org/?l=konsole-
devel&m=104617524910254&w=2](http://lists.kde.org/?l=konsole-
devel&m=104617524910254&w=2)

 _The entire concept of exploiting a terminal by supplying hostile input has
been around for over 10 years now. Unix veterans and BBS users have been
exposed to this type of problem since the very beginning, a newsgroup search
can turn up all sorts of exploits, from the ever-popular "flash" program to
the abuse of logging features in xterm which were disabled in R5_

------
darkchasma
Does anyone know why we can't have nice terminal emulators on Windows? I would
kill for something that was a fraction as good as the default terms in OSX or
Ubuntu.

Oh, and if the NSA is listening, I wouldn't actually kill, that's just an
expression. Please don't arrest me.

~~~
thomaslangston
I'm assuming by terminal you don't just mean CLI, which I think PowerShell has
been a great step forward (but I wish I didn't have to keep dropping back to
the default command prompt to get certain commands working.)

If my assumption holds, I did find this article recommending Console2.
[http://lifehacker.com/5857540/the-best-terminal-emulator-
for...](http://lifehacker.com/5857540/the-best-terminal-emulator-for-windows)

~~~
lukeck
I've been using Console2 for a while and really like it. Last week a colleague
pointed out an alternative called ConEmu. It's actively developed and has a
bunch of extra features. I'm trying it out but haven't made up my mind which I
prefer yet. The decision seems like it will largely be a tradeoff between
configuartion complexity and flexibility. [https://code.google.com/p/conemu-
maximus5/](https://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/).

~~~
kidproquo
I use ConEmu as well.

I like the tabbed interface and the way it does select/copy/paste (close to
the Windows way) in the CMD console. And, it has some pretty cool support for
the FAR Manager.

Here's a nice writeup by Scott Hanselman:
[http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ConEmuTheWindowsTerminalConsol...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ConEmuTheWindowsTerminalConsolePromptWeveBeenWaitingFor.aspx)

------
dhotson
Looks like iTerm2 is adding 24bit color support soon too:
[https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2/pull/133](https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2/pull/133)

Pull request is from less than 12 hours ago, so I'm not sure how long it'll
take to get into a release.

------
tenfingers
One word: e-shell

Does everything FinalTerm does, and probably more (and can be driver with the
keyboard only).

Funny thing, I don't like e-shell. I rarely, if ever, have to interact with
the output of the previous command.

For command re-editing, most shells (zsh, bash) offer very powerful
completition/editing capabilities that probably FinalTerm cannot match.

Admittedly, I sometimes (but rarely) have to use the output of the previous
command. The problem is, if it's an url, you probably just want to click
it/copy it, and then pretty much all terminals can do this already.

If I want to process the output of the command, I just re-execute it in a
pipeline. Just compare the number of keystrokes to go up ~10 lines and the
time to type !! (or up-arrow) | grep 'something'. Heck, even copying the
output to the clipboard is faster by using a pipe: cmd | xsel

Reflowing is also something many terminals do nowdays. I personally use urxvt
because it's the fastest terminal I could test, and actually supports fallback
fontsets. VTE-based terminals (even the ones that pretend to be small and
fast) are 5-6 orders of magnitude slower at redrawing. e-shell, by comparison,
is a dog due to the much more complex display.

~~~
rbanffy
I found the collapsible output a very clever idea. I'd love to have more
collapsible blocks in Emacs buffers.

------
yankcrime
Kind of reminds me in some ways of the TermKit 'proof of concept':
[http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/](http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/)

~~~
albiabia
Poor Steven. He took so much heat then, for a concept that was way ahead of
its time.

These kinds of extra-helpful term emulators seem like the natural progression
of auto-completion and all the other goodies people love about oh-my-zsh. Once
someone gets this right, it will seem silly to use a 'dumb' terminal in a
graphical environment.

~~~
jlgreco
There is a right way and a wrong way to add advanced features to the whole
command line experience.

The separation between shells and terminals is a good thing and should not be
ignored. New features should be added to shells, and only if necessary, we can
add new features to terminal emulators to _support_ those shell features.
Many, if not most, of those supporting features are already in terminal
emulators. For example, every single modern terminal emulator supports mouse
input (pretty much by definition): this could be used by shells if they were
so inclined. If you want to add some sort of menu-based completion that
supports mouse selection, great! The shell is the correct place to do it. Want
to display some images or vector graphics? Some terminal emulators will have
your back even in those situations, though support for those things would need
to be more widespread before that stuff could really be used properly.

~~~
albiabia
I totally agree that in Computer Science there are established paradigms, but
I think sometimes these paradigms keep people from exploring different ways of
thinking.

Talking specifically about TermKit: If I'm on a Mac using Terminal to access
the local shell, why would I care if the features are coming from the shell
itself or the Terminal app?

Of course it would be 'better' or more 'proper' if all the functions were
built into the shell, but like you say, it takes widespread adoption. I don't
see what the problem is with starting to add features to your terminal and
then let the good ones trickle back down into the shell as they become widely
adopted.

Seems like a confusing nightmare, but I'm not fundamentally against it.

------
klibertp
Terminology:
[http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/terminology](http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/terminology)
looks a bit similar and it's build with e17 libraries... which means it will
reach a 1.0 version in twenty years? Just joking, but as a terminal emulator
it's worth taking a look at.

~~~
fsiefken
Terminology is certainly nice, but only does inline linking and display of
inline media content; no smart interpretation of the terminal content as Final
Term does.

------
NelsonMinar
"Final Term is written in 100% Vala, the language of Desktop Linux's future"
[https://wiki.gnome.org/Vala](https://wiki.gnome.org/Vala)

~~~
yulaow
I think that it is the language of GNOME desktop future. That's the problem

~~~
rufugee
Agreed. I have no way of being certain, but I have to believe the use of Vala
for projects like this (and Shotwell, etc) have a negative affect on community
contribution. Not saying that's a reason to use another language, but I'd bet
the choice of python, C/C++, or something else would deepen the pool of
potential contributors. I for one would rather not learn yet another language
simply to contribute to Gnome projects, much in the same way I've never been a
big fan of having to learn Obj-C for Apple-based projects; I simply don't
think I'd use Vala or Obj-C outside of those contexts.

That said, there may be very valid reasons which are performance or
convenience-related for choosing Vala. Would be interested in a discussion of
those if so.

~~~
dsego
Vala is heavily based on C# syntax. It compiles to glib C code, so instead of
.net-like garbage collection, it uses reference counting.

------
mariusmg
Is it just me or having GUI elements inside a terminal feels wrong ?

~~~
iuguy
It's not just you. It is wrong. A terminal is the most keyboard-driven
experience you can imagine. Whenever there's a context menu it should be
driven by key combination so you can move through without having to change to
the mouse. When you change to the mouse you hit a context switch in the way
you interact, that's why it feels disorienting to some people.

~~~
zokier
Graphical does not mean point'n'click or mouse driven. GUIs can be keyboard
driven too.

~~~
iuguy
If you look at the video you'll see the mouse being used. I haven't tried the
software so I don't know if that's the only way it can be used (the site seems
to imply otherwise), so I'd reserve judgement.

------
andor
Kind of neat, but very slow. On my laptop, it uses 8% CPU just to show the
shell, and 15% to run top.

~~~
keithpeter
Good heavens, what is the processor in your laptop?

~~~
andor
Core 2 Duo (T7300)

~~~
keithpeter
Intel graphics I assume. The terminal program does use 3d graphics so might
load it down a bit.

------
jlgreco
Just FYI: urxvt, screen, and tmux all support reflowing. No 'hacks' necessary.

~~~
meunier
As far as I was aware, tmux was pretty adamant about not supporting reflow.
When did this change?

~~~
jlgreco
Latest release, 1.8. That was my impression of their attitude towards it as
well.

1.8 Changelog: [http://sourceforge.net/p/tmux/tmux-
code/ci/master/tree/CHANG...](http://sourceforge.net/p/tmux/tmux-
code/ci/master/tree/CHANGES)

------
snitko
Also, if this is free software, you should put Bitcoin donations address
somewhere on the site. I would gladly donate a bit because I like the idea and
I like that it's for Linux.

------
buster
Wow.. this looks awesome, i am waiting for a new generation of terminals with
more context integration.

------
snitko
Please support panes, tabs and scripting for them. I tried tmux, worked in it
for 6 months, but what annoyed me is the lack of support for properly styling
what's on the screen. For instance, I wanted panes to be of various background
colors and font sizes, which was not really possible at all in tmux.

I'm currently using Terminator, but it's rather ugly in terms of scripting for
panes and tabs. If you could implement those two features out of the box, I'd
pay for this software.

~~~
lsiebert
if it supported different font sizes, that would be interesting. I am not
aware of any terminal emulator that does that, however.

~~~
epo
What are you calling a 'terminal emulator'? I think most support multiple
fonts at different sizes. Apple's Terminal does, as do all the terminal
emulators on my Centos systems.

~~~
omaranto
Really? I thought most terminal emulator only let you use one font at a time.
If the one I use let's you have text in multiple fonts displayed at once, I
certainly don't know how to do it. Or by "multiple fonts" did you just mean
that you can change the font on the entire window (and that you have multiple
options for doing so)?

~~~
ernesth
rxvt-unicode allows you to have multiple fonts at the same time for falling
back when a character is not present in the default font. For example my
terminal uses a different korean font for hangul and a specific japanese font
for kana and kanji in addition to my default font for european script.

------
xanderstrike
Is it just me (Linux Mint 14) or does a lot of this just not work? Dropdowns
don't drop and they stay on the screen after `clear` or input scroll, right
click is broken, scrolling doesn't always stick to the bottom, you can't
select text or middle click to paste (my keyboard doesn't even have insert),
ps aux, htop, and a few other things break it, arrow keys don't work over SSH.
Then there are missing features like tabs, hiding the menu bar, spawning new
terminals in the current directory, settings that do more than color scheme,
etc.

About the only thing that _does_ work is the autocomplete, which is certainly
nice, but not nice enough that I'm going to give up on a ton of functionality
I've gotten used to.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the work you're doing and don't want to
discourage you, the terminal is certainly due for a rework, and this is a huge
step in the right direction. If more of the features on your website were
implemented/worked I would be very tempted to make a permanent switch, but I
spend 8 hours a day in a terminal window, everything needs to just work.

------
webjprgm
This looks pretty awesome. It's also the first time I've heard of Vala, so I
read through the tutorial of that too. It's also interesting.

I don't suppose there's a way to use this with Windows, either as the shell
emulator for Cygwin or a shell emulator for an SSH connection? Then I could
actually have nice shells when I have to work on a Windows box too.

------
specialist
Drive by comment...

Looks neat.

Looks like no port to Mac yet...? That's cool. I''ll wait.

I'm a pretty basic user loving iTerm on Mac. One feature I _really_ want is
mouse positioning and selection of text (for the current command line). Arrow
navigation is okay, but I'm a casual user not a power user.

~~~
pseudonym
If you're using bash and you're familiar with vim, you can use the command
"set -o vi" and start using Vi bindings to jump around/cut/delete/modify text
in your current prompt.

~~~
zhemao
I'm sorry, he says "I'm a casual user, not a power user" and your first
instinct is to suggest that he use vi keybindings in bash?

~~~
pseudonym
My first instinct is to suggest something that already works for what he wants
to do. If he's using a Terminal window on a frequent enough basis that he's
looking for a solution, it makes more sense to suggest one than to say "Gosh,
yeah, that'd be useful, I hope this terminal emulator releases in the next
year some time so that you can do what you want to do with that!"

~~~
zhemao
Oh, I wasn't saying that. I was saying why vi key bindings and not the default
emacs key bindings? I think they are a bit more intuitive for someone who
hasn't used vim before.

------
MrBra
Great f%*ing job. Couple of years from now everyone will take these features
as granted on every linux distro's terminal. Next gen linux non-power users
will probably think terminal has always been like this before. And yet some
people here are giving negative feedback..

------
jiggy2011
Very very cool, I've wanted something like this for a while.

But: The autocomplete doesn't seem to work for me, do I need to install
something else?

Also the typing effect makes input feel laggy and I can't find a way to turn
it off.

I'm on Ubuntu 12.04

~~~
elclanrs
Same thoughts here. Autocomplete doesn't work for me and the input lag is
noticeable. I'm on 13.04. An option to turn it off would be nice, other than
that it looks great.

------
twopoint718
Love it. There are elements of this that remind me of Plan 9's Acme and the
Plan 9 shell. Contrary to many people's opinion, using the mouse in concert
with the terminal is a really powerful paradigm.

~~~
stormbrew
I was thinking the same thing. But while I've always loved some things about
Plan 9 (its security model and it going all-in on the everything-is-a-file
model), I never was able to adjust to acme.

~~~
twopoint718
Acme is the part that I use even under OS X. The regexes are cool (they are
recursive), it is easy to process a selection through a shell command, and the
compiler integration is both simple but really useful.

I think what I like so much is that it is a rare example of an expert ui,
designed for when you are really proficient rather than for learning or
discoverability.

------
Legion
Neat. I like seeing people try new things with terminal emulators, even if a
certain cluster of boo-birds shows up every time.

I noticed that the terminal does not work well with my zsh right-prompt (ends
up printing on the left and getting overwritten by what I type), and has some
issues with my prompt when my little Git status line appears when browsing
inside a repo. But I will be keeping an eye on this project.

------
Rovanion
Actually managed to cuase an X.org crash on my 32-bit Ubuntu 12.04. Can't seem
to find the error log though.

------
JacobIrwin
I am following the instructions for installing, as noted in the README on
GitHub Source page, can anyone tell me how to fix?
[http://pastebin.com/K2e2ePW4](http://pastebin.com/K2e2ePW4)

Error begins at "cmake .."

...

~~~
coolsunglasses
You need to have Vala installed. You've got a long list of dependencies before
it's going to finish compiling.

This is pretty standard for compiling and installing any software from source.

Read further down and you'll see there's a shake-n-bake PPA ready to go.

------
blackaspen
Still very much in development... Looks neat though, I admit. There are no
tabs, and tmux/emacs support seems to be a tad pokey.

We'll have to see of this Terminal Emulator goes terminal or can break out
into a fulfilling life.

------
nawitus
If it's not added yet, please consider adding a quick menu to change character
encoding (like in Gnome Terminal). It's my only main requirement for a
terminal editor, and most editors seem to lack it.

------
m0skit0
I really like this, although a lot of features (not GUI) are already supported
by ZSH. But why is this missing configuration documentation? Or at least I
couldn't find it. Keep up the awesome work!

------
mattattaque
Definitely interesting. Hate all the mousing around in the video and hope
they'll be a way to go 100% keyboard (like God intended it), but all in all I
think this looks pretty cool.

------
Osmium
I think this looks great, but it does strike me a bit of re-inventing the
wheel, i.e. if we take this to its logical conclusion, we'll have just
reinvented the GUI ;)

~~~
ZirconCode
If my GUI was as powerfully/rapidly accessible through the keyboard as this
then I would be happy. This just comes from the other side of the bridge.

------
donniezazen
After trying a lot of terminal emulator, rxvt-unicode is still my favorite. I
run it under daemon-client mode which makes it super light.

------
sspiff
I like a lot of the ideas, but I wish I could turn of the slow typing
animation. Also, is there a way to have multiple tabs?

------
chrisfarms
Hope development pace keeps up on this, and I look forward to giving it a go
once it's stable.

No mention of unicode support on the page?

------
JacobIrwin
cmake ..

should be typed in terminal, as above? or ".." should be, what? sort of a
newbie with terminal...

is ".." a location ...? can anyone provide a reasonable example (to put in
place of "..")?

I tried the install commands, as listed in the README (on the Final Term
Github Source page)... and the install failed.

~~~
bobwaycott
`..` signifies the immediate parent directory. Does it signify something else
in Final Term?

~~~
JacobIrwin
Final Term Install - Error starts at "cmake .." \-- my terminal code (with the
errors): [http://pastebin.com/K2e2ePW4](http://pastebin.com/K2e2ePW4)

~~~
bobwaycott
Check that you have all the required packages installed on your system. Your
terminal output indicates it cannot find pkg_config. There could be other
missing requirements, as well. Once you have all the reqs installed, try
again. Then, if issues persist, file an issue on the project's Github page. :)

------
mhax
a 'ps aux' seems to hang it...

~~~
sobkas
Take a look at finalterm/Termlets/ps. No wonder that it is so fast.

------
johnny22
this reminds me of some other fun terminal experiments too like hotwire-shell

[https://code.google.com/p/hotwire-
shell/wiki/GettingStarted0...](https://code.google.com/p/hotwire-
shell/wiki/GettingStarted0700)

~~~
mjs
Is it dead? The links from [https://code.google.com/p/hotwire-
shell/](https://code.google.com/p/hotwire-shell/) to the "main website" go to
[http://hotwire-shell.org/](http://hotwire-shell.org/), which has "buy this
domain" ads all over it.

~~~
zeckalpha
Yes, not much has been done in the last 5 years. It would be fun to bring it
back, however.

------
mateuszf
Reflowing terminal output also works in Mintty on cygwin/windows. Just saying.

------
drKarl
I tried it and looks sexy, but the lack of VIM support is a deal breaker for
me...

~~~
rbonvall
I can see myself using a regular terminal emulator for vim on one half of my
screen, and something like Final Term for running tests and doing other stuff
on the other half.

Since one uses terminals for several different things, it kind of makes sense
the idea to use ones specialized for each purpose. I think it's an interesting
idea.

------
ilSignorCarlo
it's really amazing, but I'm experiencing some issues with tmux.

------
ninjakeyboard
Looks good. I wouldn't mind giving it a spin on osx to be honest :)

------
tjaerv
GPLv3. Blech.

~~~
buster
Why?

~~~
jrockway
Probably because Stallman is not attractive enough, or some similarly idiotic
reason.

