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Comment by shepik | Hacker News Reader

Some months ago I tried to improve shell while keeping all it's features. So i made webkit-based terminal emulator (pseudoterminal; like xterm) with special esc-sequences to turn on html output (in a console, yes). Screenshots: https://github.com/shepik/wkterm/#readme

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This looks pretty cool. I actually spend quite some time thinking about something like that. I came up with two things that I'd add to a shell : graphics and links. Graphics you did. It seems that is doesn't degrade gracefully though, like programs that do colored output disable it when run non-interactively ?

I imagined links as something which when activated would be pasted in your command line. For example when running "git status" I would be able to get a ready made command to add a file by activating the "add" link next to it. Each file name would also be a link so that I don't have to copy/paste it. Ideally, links could be triggered with keyboard shortcuts to avoid using the mouse.

I don't think there is an issue with graceful degradation. Basically, wkterm is a terminal and a set of pretty-printers that read data from stdin and print it in html. As in my example with cpu usage graphic, there is some ./gen_cpu program which just prints cpu usage values as text, and there is graph drawing program. So, use them both for graphical output and use only the first for text.

Links, as you describe them, can be implemented with javascript. I'll try to make an example on weekend.

You might also be interrested in the Cope project (https://github.com/yogan/cope). With the same approach, you could make existing commands return nice looking output for your html terminal.

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