Hacker News Reader

Comment by dc2 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

Don't be fooled by the name, this application is not written in Go, that is just a random word that they chose for the name. The application was written in HTML and bundled with a webview powered by CEF (probably Electron). Just download the application and execute `strings goterminal | grep chromium` and you will see what I am talking about; again, this has 0% Go code.

EDIT: Here is the list of 720 NPM packages used by this: http://pastebin.com/raw/VhnuuDdX

EDIT2: To rub salt into the wound, this thing is ~620MB of HTML + JS + Electron, that is more or less how an entire Ubuntu installation was six years ago, like really? An entire basic Linux installation could have been included in all this archive and these guys decided to fill it with JavaScript code. Isn't a terminal emulator supposed to be lightweight?

720 npm packages..........................................

Guess the chances that it won't built anymore in 1 week are 99.9%.

> this thing is ~620MB of HTML + JS + Electron

Is it 620MB of source text? I'm not a web guy, so I literally I can't understand this, unless, since it's a web tech, 30 minutes of cat videos are required in the source.

Yes and no; there are some binary files too, but there are ~534MB of JavaScript code mixed with additional assets. Once you extract the content from the archive (using the tar.gz version) you will find a directory with multiple sub-directories and files that roughtly weighs 636MB distributed like this:

    9.1M - content_shell.pak
    60M  - goterminal
    9.8M - icudtl.dat
    4.0K - INSTALL
    2.5M - libffmpeg.so
    18M  - libnode.so
    20K  - LICENSE
    352K - locales
    404K - natives_blob.bin
    536M - resources
    604K - snapshot_blob.bin

The directory "resources" contains the ASAR file plus another sub-directory named "app" that contains the assets and the "node_modules" tree, this directory alone weighs 534MB because of the 720 NPM packages required by the application.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com