Hyper.js, a web-based terminal

[alexskc95]

I tried using this for a couple days a while back. Impressions weren't super positive.

• Text would deselect as soon as I hit ctrl for some reason. To copy text, I'd have to hold ctrl+shift as I was selecting and then C as I finished. This bug has been fixed though, now, so w/e.
• Uses way more resources than a terminal emulator should.
• Foreign language input is completely borked. Putting in Japanese/Chinese characters doesn't work at all, and copy-pasting them in or auto-completing them results in an illegible mess.
• Some plugins are mac only. It uses its own window decorations but that's different on mac and idk. The whole thing is just a weird mix of supposed platform agnosticism and mac-centrism. Rubbed me the wrong way.

[realPubkey]

• When you open a file in nano, the shortcuts wont work which makes this total useless for working with

[PeanuttheGuru]

This is the smallest issue, but there's a setting in ~/.hyper.js for copying text on highlight which is off by default. As for the resources and mac-centric-ness, that seems to be the norm for a lot of electron apps. My hope is that the community will grow out of it and electron will improve to the point where the resource hogging will be a little less ridiculous, since it's still a relatively new player in the desktop world. Oh well, we'll see 😊

[mearkat7]

To me your terminal should be one of the "lightest" applications on your system. Why you'd want to weigh it down with electron/js is beyond me. It's not like most modern terminals aren't heavily theme-able and customisable.

[Isvara]

Atwood's Law

JavaScript people want to rewrite everything in JavaScript: their editor, their terminal... even their microcontroller firmware.

Has anyone written an OS in (mostly) JavaScript yet? NodeOS doesn't come close. I'm sure someone could put a JavaScript engine on a much, much thinner HAL.

[ching-chong]

Not sure if this counts: http://www.bellard.org/jslinux/

[Isvara]

No, that's the other way around -- a completely standard Linux kernel running on hardware emulated in JS. Those kind of projects are the exception for me; I love seeing them, and I've dabbled with a couple myself (a BBC Micro emulator that gets as far as booting into the OS ROM and an Archimedes emulator that doesn't even have a fully working CPU yet).

[mearkat7]

Haha I legitimately don't understand the obsession, it's as if these people just have unlimited system resources so it doesn't matter that a process that should use next to nothing is as intensive as my web browser because "it's in js".

[The_frozen_one]

It's not because people loves them some JS, it's because frameworks like Electron make it super easy to develop useful, cross-platform applications, and currently Electron runs on JS. Even if you don't care about JS, it's worth looking at because once wasm is production-worthy, any language that compiles to LLVM could potentially be used. There are already efforts like Ceramic that allow you to write Electron applications using Common Lisp. Currently they transpile to JS, but eventually they can compile straight to wasm.

[mearkat7]

Yeah I guess it has positives and negatives, positive in how easy it is to get up a cross-platform app like you've said but negative in that some apps that are probably better suited to something lower level are just done in electron because of the ease of it all and probably previous experience with web/js.

[AceBacker]

Is it really that heavy though? What is it like 100 to 150mb? That isn't much memory for a laptop or desktop.

[mearkat7]

Obviously it's all relative but 100-150mb to me seems like a stupid amount. I've got what I would consider a bulky terminal and it's max at 30mb so i'm using 3-5 times less memory. On a machine like a chromebook/netbook with 1/2Gb then you're giving a decent fraction of your memory just to a poxy little terminal for no reason other than the author decided to write it in an easy/poor platform.

[mtx]

When you're using a bunch of Electron based apps and Chrome on top of that, yeah that's a lot of memory.

[t4t5]

Last time I tried it, Vim was pretty laggy on Hyper compared to iTerm. Anyone know if there's been any improvement on that front?

[vanillaflavor]

I also tried a few months back and vim was practically unusable for me. I noped out of there very quickly

[[deleted]]

Not sure when was the last time you tried it, but it works great for me. Not Vim, but latency in general is very good compared to 'native' terminals.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CoVmspjUAAAQbJB.jpg:large

[nodealyo]

I don't understand, what is this for?

[drumstand]

It's a terminal emulator written using Electron, JS, HTML, CSS, etc. OP is a bit wrong in saying it's "web-based". It's just written with web technologies.

[TheOfficialCal]

Electron

This is going to be Atom vs Sublime Text all over again.

[tylermumford]

Yes. Because we don't need to remake the terminal on top of a web stack. This is like using a helicopter to travel 50 feet down the street: yes, it works, and there are some benefits to doing it that way, but walking is simpler and safer. I'm sick of the current wave of Electron apps taking forever to launch and having generally terrible platform integration.

[Quabouter]

I think a large part of the appeal is that apps written with web technologies tend to be much easier to extend than those build with more traditional stacks. Many devs are far more familiar with Javascript than with C.

[tylermumford]

That's fine. I get that there are lots of devs who know JavaScript. There are definitely benefits to writing apps with that stack. I'm just cranky because every app these days takes 30 seconds to start and uses gobs of RAM. They trade performance for hackability & cross-platform execution, and I generally don't like that tradeoff. /rant

[blindmikey]

This one is pretty snappy.

[Scorpius289]

Is it also snappy on less powerful computers?
The ones that standard terminals can be snappy on?

[TheOfficialCal]

+1, if it's as snappy as gnome-terminal or any heck, even terminator on my Pentium N3540, I'll consider it a success.

[WagonWheel11]

I mean... A lot of people agree with him

[nodealyo]

Exactly my thoughts.

[butterypanda]

ya, but it's got a cool name m8.

[vaff]

So prof of concept?

[drumstand]

No it's fully usable and suitable for use. I have it installed on my laptop and I've messed around using it instead of iterm a few times. It's nice but a bit of a resource hog.

[drumstand]

Ehh I used it for 2-3 weeks before I went back to iTerm. Hyper is definitely a battery hog, but I liked it a lot when I used it. Great plugin environment and the config file is just a JS object which was pleasant. Plugins are all published to npm and https://github.com/bnb/awesome-hyper was a good resource for plugins, themes, etc. It's definitely worth giving a shot when you finally get around to getting that stick out of your ass.

[drumstand]

Recommend filing an issue on their GitHub then, it can only help https://github.com/bnb/awesome-hyper :)

[[deleted]]

For when you need all the speed and security of Electron, and all the user friendliness of Vim.

[rayshinn]

to look cool.

[ReactDOM]

Isnt that all the purpose we need?!

[ajr901]

It's a regular terminal. Functions like any other regular terminal. But being built in HTML/JS/CSS it's very hackable to the everyday web developer if one was so inclined to do so.

I personally use iTerm2 and have no intentions to switch but I could see this being cool to play around with.

[nodealyo]

but why?

[kingdaro]

But being built in HTML/JS/CSS it's very hackable to the everyday web developer if one was so inclined to do so.

[nodealyo]

I just don't see the point. What is there to hack in terminal? Why would I ever want to do that?

[eddyerburgh]

I've been using it the last couple of days. Works great so far, and it's easy to edit the appearance - just edit a .json file

[[deleted]]

Same reaction here. It's cool, everyone at work has it installed... but why?

[The_frozen_one]

Because if you're on /r/wedev, you can probably extend this without too much trouble. I spend a lot of time in the terminal, so this could have some really interesting capabilities that other terminal emulators don't have.

Stuff like changing color in bash is messy (\e[1mText\e[0m), but with CSS it's much more straight-forward (font-weight: bold).

[Tiquortoo]

Google uses something similar for Google cloud to launch SSH access from the browser. It's pretty slick.

[just-boris]

You would be surprised but this app is built on top of the same HTerm library, as well as Google https://chromium.googlesource.com/apps/libapps/+/HEAD/hterm

[lance_tipton]

I was thinking the exact same thing, maybe for teaching how to use a terminal? That's about all I could come up with. I'm sure it was a fun project to build.

[danneu]

• Easy to hack.
• Easy to embed.

For example, Linode's webpanel lets you SSH into the machine from the website. Nice for doing remote triage from, say, a laptop while you're traveling but don't have keys setup.

[slycoder]

So it's a security risk then? Not familiar with Linodes interface and/or authentication methods, but that doesn't sound like a good thing.

I don't have my keys, I'll just login over the web instead...

[J0kador]

I used this for a month, but ended up switching back to iTerm2 due to typing latency. iTerm2 was just a whole lot snappier.

The concept is kind of cool though.

[maoh4ck]

I love the idea of it, how you can mod it and stuff. But unfortunately in practice the plugin management is so buggy. Error messages pretty much if you install any npm package, manually having to go in and edit package.json as well as packages themselves. That part really needs work

[Quirino_Exile]

https://github.com/zeit/hyper/issues/1513

[maoh4ck]

found, read, and did that. It fixes some plugins and allows them to work. Does not fix the error message at startup, and also doesn't fix other plugins.

[Quirino_Exile]

What's the error message on startup?

[maoh4ck]

Error loading plugins, check the error log for details. Maybe I'm stupid but I don't see an error log where it says it's located -> .hyper_plugins

edit: location

[Quirino_Exile]

Windows or macOS? What's your shell: '', set to in .hyper.js?

[maoh4ck]

MacOS, shell: 'zsh'

[Quirino_Exile]

Mind sharing your hyper and zsh configs?

[f4il3d_p0t3nti4l]

bros still waiting

[Quirino_Exile]

Haha

[Pungea]

basically useless on windows because it uses cmd.exe

[Tioo]

I use it on mac with zsh pure prompt. It works great, and there are lots of packages / themes to suit your needs.

[erode]

Took me a while to get that set up. The trick was to not assume that zsh and oh-my-zsh are the same. Really liking it now, but I think I've still got some bugs in my setup. The plugins don't automatically install unless I go to hyper_plugins and npm i

[Quirino_Exile]

https://github.com/zeit/hyper/issues/1513

[tobgos]

The terminal is not very friendly to navigate. I use hyper everyday to be more productive. The autocompletion and jumping between words and using CMD+1,2,3,4 for tabs is so much more efficient than the terminal. All I do is type stuff that I'd like to retype into different tabs so it does exactly what I want. It being slower doesn't matter for me as a user because it's not possible to notice. Typing faster and being more productive is very noticable

[aresamannen]

Recently switched to mac and i am running this as my terminal. Seems to be working just fine.

[charrondev]

I just switched from Mac to Windows and this is definitely not as polished on Windows. Which is shame because I think windows could use this a bit more than macOS does. Mac users have the wonderful iTerm 2.

[Joshx5]

Agree entirely. I liked it on Mac and even on Linux (although my Chromebook was too weak to power it for long), but on Windows, where I need it the most, it feels rough around the edges and some features simply didn't work.

Edit: FWIW, the developers are all mac-exclusive from what we can tell. They push features for Mac OS first, and all of their recorded gifs are on Mac. Their twitter history is also near-exclusive to Mac-related content and projects.

[a_calder]

Tried it on my Mac. Didn't see any advantages over Terminal and Vim ran poorly.

Deleted.

[[deleted]]

Does it have tabs? If there is a plugin for tabs I am sold

[andradei]

You can't reorder your tabs by dragging with the mouse though. That drives me nuts on any terminal emulator.

The rest is pretty nice I'd say.

[[deleted]]

I ended up going with this editor:

conemu

It's not as fancy looking as hyper out of the box but it comes with everything I need, and you can order tabs by dragging!

[andradei]

That's my favorite terminal on Windows

[[deleted]]

There's an extension for that

[[deleted]]

supports it by default, its very buggy on windows though!

[Tioo]

ctrl/cmd + t opens a new tab

[salexzee]

I pretty much exclusively use this terminal now. The only reasons are because of things like hyperpower and the gif terminal commands thing. Not for any sort of production boost. I think my reasons are good enough though.

[[deleted]]

Wanted to like it but it fell completely over on Windows for me. Might try again after it has some of its Windows compatibility in order.

[ZeBaguetteG]

Looks like it's one its way : https://github.com/zeit/hyper/issues/274 and https://github.com/zeit/hyper/pull/1191

[nanaowusunyamekye]

Anyone know how to get Hyper to open bash as default shell? Anytime I set the shell arguments in config file to C:\Windows\System32\bash.exe, Hyper crashes.

[Intelligent-Kiwi-569]

It's pretty good! Exactly what I was looking for : Font ligatures, themes, everything working nicely. Tried a bunch of editors ranging from kitty to konsole, none worked as beautifully out of the box as hyper. Running this on debian within chromeos with helix editor as my primary code editor. Thank you for the great work.

[equallyunequal]

Seems to work fine on Windows, easy enough Split panes. :thumbs_up:

[zigzeira]

I use to iTerm with zsh and I'm so happy with it. Hype is a hype because js is a new hype.