
Show HN: DomTerm – a web-based rich terminal emulator and console - Per_Bothner
http://domterm.org/
======
Per_Bothner
The article at [https://opensource.com/article/18/1/introduction-domterm-
ter...](https://opensource.com/article/18/1/introduction-domterm-terminal-
emulator) is a good overview of what DomTerm is about. I've long been
interested in how we can improve terminals/REPLs/consoles - I wrote the Emacs
term mode in attempt to integrate shell mode with a real terminal emulator
(though the attempt to replace shell mode did not "take").

(I reposted at the encouragement of moderator Daniel - thanks!)

Some of the things I've been working on since the opensource.com article
include:

\- better input editing: most of the functionality of readline with
mouse/selection/clipboard integration. Main thing to be worked on is command
(tab-) completion. I'm mulling the best way to do that.

\- more generally, I want the functionality of UpTerm/FinalTerm. But writing
out own shell is a mistake (well, I'm thinking about that, too ...). Better to
use an existing shell - possibly fish as it has builtin auto-completion.

\- Menus (menubar and popup) for "generic" (non-Electron non-Qt) front-ends:
[http://per.bothner.com/blog/2018/jsMenus/](http://per.bothner.com/blog/2018/jsMenus/)

\- better display of complex nested data, integrating show/hide buttons with
pretty-printing, wih dynamic re-flpw on window re-size

~~~
watersb
Thanks for DomTerm!

I am pleased with the current ascendancy of Jupyter notebooks, interactive
sessions of data manipulation.

When I first encountered Mathematica notebooks in early 1990s, I thought that
this would be the way forward. A few years later, XMLTerm with Mozilla.. and
it doesn't find an audience.

I was thinking of an uncanny valley between CLI and GUI, but I am writing this
in a web browser on an iPad, which is better than any interaction paradigm we
might have held in 1990.

We need more work on DOMTerm, notebook-style interaction design. I'm a bit
surprised that Windows PowerShell does not play in this space.

~~~
Per_Bothner
A main goal of DomTerm is to support "rich" REPL environments, similar to
Jupyter.

------
dfee
First, very cool.

Second, now that we've got the terminal in a browser, we've got a linux
subsytem for WebAssembly
([https://github.com/cervus-v/cervus](https://github.com/cervus-v/cervus)),
and we've got QT for WebAssembly, we seem to be ~2 years out from someone
pushing a real "web os" – as in an adult could probably boot to WebKit and
perhaps not know that they're in a WebBrowser. Sure that's an opportunity for
Google and Facebook to finally "compete" against the incumbent OS market.

The snake will inevitably eat itself again in some 30 year supercycle.

This is along the lines of the "birth and death of javascript" slides. But as
it really is happening, are we really gaining anything? Anything at all?

And again, not to take away from DomTerm which seems really cool.

------
wolframhempel
Always great to see my layoutmanager ([https://golden-
layout.com/](https://golden-layout.com/)) in the wild. Thanks so much for
using it!

~~~
Per_Bothner
Thank you - GoldenLayout is a great package.

------
gcoda
It is either my isp, or this site got some malicious js that reidirects me to
wierd places from my android device

~~~
Per_Bothner
No reports of anything like that before. DomTerm.org is hosted under my
DreamHost account, which also hosts my personal stuff, including bothner.com.

~~~
Per_Bothner
There was a bad (malicious) .htaccess file. I've removed it, but there remains
the question of how it got there.

Added: The domterm.org directory in my home directory on DreamHost (from which
domterm.org is hosted) was group and world-writable. Don't know how that
happened (probably my carelessness), but I fixed it.

~~~
buzzier
[https://discussion.dreamhost.com/t/malicious-htaccess-
reappe...](https://discussion.dreamhost.com/t/malicious-htaccess-
reappearing/56998)

------
jonny_eh
How does this compare to Hyper?

[https://hyper.is/](https://hyper.is/)

~~~
rkeene2
Or good old XMLTerm
[http://www.xml.com/pub/2000/06/07/xmlterm/](http://www.xml.com/pub/2000/06/07/xmlterm/)

~~~
Per_Bothner
XMLTerm was an inspiration to me, and you can think of DomTerm as my attempt
to combine the ideas of XMLTerm (graphics, logical structure of output, smart
interaction) with a solid xterm-compatible terminal emulator. The most
important difference is that XMLTerm is long dead! (However, XMLTerm's author
more recently wrote GraphTerm as a more modern take on XMLTerm - however, that
too is unmaintained.)

