Comment by sime2009 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sime2009 | Hacker News Reader

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I share many of the frustrations mentioned in the article and it motivated me to make my own terminal, Extraterm http://extraterm.org/features.html . It already supports many of the workflows listed in the "Enter Eshell" section.

* Long command output is a PITA? fine, Extraterm will 'frame' it and you can easily get to the top of it (Ctrl+Shift+PageUp).

* Want keep that output for later? No problem, you can move the frame into its own tab. Hell, you can even drag and drop it into your desktop file manager.

* You should have filtered that last command output but you forgot? Extraterm's `from` command will let you feed the contents of a frame back into your shell pipe line.

* You did a `cat file-list.txt` and now you want one of those paths? Just go into cursor mode, move up into the frame, edit in the rest of the command and run it. It's a bit like the C=64 again! yay!

* You just want to see that image? Sure, `show` command can show it directly.

* Sick of composing paths for `scp` to move stuff across machines? Use `show` and `from` directly to download and move binaries.

It also integrates with your favourite shell (as long as it either bash, zsh or fish!), and happily works across SSH. It runs Emacs too and any other normal terminal application because it is a proper terminal emulator.

Here's how I tackle these problems on Linux:

> Long command output is a PITA? fine, Extraterm will 'frame' it and you can easily get to the top of it (Ctrl+Shift+PageUp).

* Shift+Home to scroll to the top

* Shift+PageUp to scroll up

* Ctrl+Shift+F and search for " $" to find the beginning of the output

* ... | less

> Want keep that output for later? No problem, you can move the frame into its own tab. Hell, you can even drag and drop it into your desktop file manager.

* ... &> output.txt

* Select the output with the mouse and copy it

* F10 -> Right -> a (keyboard shortcut for Select All), copy and paste into an editor, remove parts I don't want

> You should have filtered that last command output but you forgot? Extraterm's `from` command will let you feed the contents of a frame back into your shell pipe line.

Use one of the methods above to get the output into output.txt and then use `cat output.txt`.

> You did a `cat file-list.txt` and now you want one of those paths? Just go into cursor mode, move up into the frame, edit in the rest of the command and run it. It's a bit like the C=64 again! yay!

Triple-click to select the path, middle-click to paste it.

> You just want to see that image? Sure, `show` command can show it directly.

`xdg-open` (has the advantage that it opens my image viewer which can also zoom, rotate, show next image, etc.)

> Sick of composing paths for `scp` to move stuff across machines? Use `show` and `from` directly to download and move binaries.

I'm using my file-manager for uploading / downloading files via SSH.

Of course Extraterm will work better for some of these tasks (the first two points are a lot more cumbersome with my methods), but not by that much that I think it's worth it.

Your comment makes some great arguments about just how awful the traditional ways of working in the terminal are. They're often very clumsy and tedious or require additional tools and foresight, e.g. remembering to redirect output to a file.

I'm not saying that we couldn't do these things in the past. I will say that easy-of-use matters.

Also, a lot of the methods you outlined don't work well across SSH. Extraterm's methods do.

> Your comment makes some great arguments about just how awful the traditional ways of working in the terminal are.

IMHO it's not that awful and 99% of the time you're doing other things anyway.

> e.g. remembering to redirect output to a file.

But when you forgot to do that, it's not the end of the world, just a little inconvenience involving the mouse.

> a lot of the methods you outlined don't work well across SSH.

Which ones and why not? The only one I can think of is xdg-open and that can work with `ssh -X`.

I was going to be all "yeah, but I don't run a Linux desktop because I'm not a masochist, so my only use for a terminal is over SSH from Windows.", but you actually support win32 so I assume I can use it with SSH from there.

Unfortunately all it does is complain about not having any session types configured, offering precisely no guidance as to what to do about this. The documentation doesn't mention it at all either.

> I was going to be all "yeah, but I don't run a Linux desktop because I'm not a masochist, so my only use for a terminal is over SSH from Windows."

I purchased a Windows laptop a couple of years ago as an additional machine (my main platform is Linux), and honestly it’s using Windows which feels masochistic: ads, system prompts which pop up beneath windows[0], ads, the login screen swallowing my first few characters, ads, massive over-use of the trackpad (but this could be my fault, ads, very poor update experience (compared to Debian), ads, sluggishness, IE, Edge, ads, lack of free software and — oh yes, lest I forget — ads. Did I mention that an OS I paid for shows me ads all the time? ’Cause it does.

By comparison, my Debian machines are a joy to use. Every time I have to use my Windows laptop I physically deflate; every time I return to one of my GNU/Linux machines I sit up straight & smile.

0: When I'm using a site which requires a smart card login, Windows pops the smart card certificate & PIN prompt up beneath the current browser window — so it appears that nothing is happening, unless I move the mouse down to the taskbar & hover, revealing the waiting prompt. This is … odd … behaviour.

Don't get me wrong, Windows has it's issues and lately Microsoft seems to be doing their best to make it worse, but Linux is just completely unsuitable for the ways I use a Desktop OS. And apparently the other 90% of people who also don't use Linux as a Desktop.

> I don't run a Linux desktop because I'm not a masochist

Just run Ubuntu, like I do. Almost as easy to maintain as Windows.

Anyway, with Emacs as your OS, whether Linux or Windows is your bootloader is of secondary concern ;).

Agreed. I've run Linux for years with no issues whatsoever.

I feel that people who criticize the platform have yet to try it...

Though to be fair, if your are running Photoshop or final cut Linux is not a great use case

> I've run Linux for years with no issues whatsoever.

So clearly no one else has issues, right? None of the people complaining about poor power management, insane application deployment model, poor support for high-end GPUs, general fragmentation, poor backwards and forwards compatibility, or any of the other innumerable problems have ever tried a Linux desktop.

This attitude of "it works for me, therefore it is good enough for everybody" is one of the biggest problems I have with Linux. It isn't so much that there are flaws, it's that the community refuses to recognize that there are flaws.

I think there are many problems running Linux like everything you said and things like HiDPi but I just don't think I could dev on windows.

That's fair, as long as you aren't an evangelical trying to convert me to the linux desktop I don't have a problem with you using whatever you want.

> Just run Ubuntu

Doesn't actually solve any of the problems I have with Linux as a Desktop. And if I listed those problems someone would just tell me to use a different distribution, which is itself a problem. Or alternatively try to convince me they aren't actually problems "for most people" as though I should give a damn what is and isn't a problem for someone else.

I have to make a small apology here. Only cygwin is supported on Windows and there was once a useful error message but it died during recent development. This week I've been working on Windows console app support (think: cmd.exe, powershell) and WSL support. Then at the very least you would get a cmd.exe session by default.

For Windows users though, the shell integration stuff is only going to work with WSL and cygwin because anything Windows console based doesn't use or pass VT style escape codes, thus I can't extend the protocol there. This may change in the future as the MS console team is working to add more support for VT and unix style terminals. Making Extraterm into an SSH client itself is also an option for Windows but I've having trouble gauging how important a feature that is and whether it should get some prio.

That's a shame, but understandable. I think plink does in fact pass raw escape sequences though, so I think that could be wrapped.

The thing is that on Windows it isn't really possible to make a terminal/console app which talks directly to the shell (cmd.exe etc) running in it. What everyone is doing is opening a hidden 'console' component which runs cmd.exe/powershell.exe and then screen-scraping the contents out of it and rendering it elsewhere. Most emulators on Windows which support cmd.exe and friends are using a little bit of software which handles the hidden console, monitors its contents and then outputs a VT style stream of the updates. It is not pretty. MS have been working to improve the situation though: https://github.com/Microsoft/console/issues/57

The bizarre twist to this story is that it is going to be easier to add shell integration features to PowerShell Core running on every platform which ISN'T Windows.

What you're describing is necessary when going the opposite direction and trying to translate windows console buffers into VT data streams, but that's not really necessary for something like this since the native console interaction isn't used. Just grab plink's stdin and stdout and you'll get precisely what comes through SSH, escape codes and all. Well, almost, I think plink does some EoL conversion.

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