Show HN: tmux2html - Render full tmux windows or individual panes as HTML

https://github.com/tweekmonster/tmux2html

by tommyallen • 10 years ago

99 28 10 years ago

abricot• 10 years ago

Do you have an example?

tommyallen14• 10 years ago

The examples are linked on the github page. This was something I had a tiny internal debate about. This thing renders HTML, but I wanted something visual on the README. But, that would require a screenshot...of the rendered HTML page. I don't know why, but that was very silly to me. If it's a screenshot, who is to say that I didn't just take a screen shot of my terminal?

I posted this on /r/coolgithubprojects and one of the comments was someone thought that the linked examples were screenshots until they selected the text.

In any case I'll post a separate comment with the linked examples.

tommyallen14• 10 years ago

Example rendered sessions. Warning: The animated examples might not be impressive on low performance devices, and they may drain your battery if you leave them opened.

Color [disk: 135KB, gzip: 17KB]: https://share.esdf.io/FGlV4sufpt/color.html

Single Pane [disk: 65KB, gzip: 6KB]: https://share.esdf.io/saRkuNriJt/single.html

Full Window (Big) [disk: 134KB, gzip: 11KB]: https://share.esdf.io/h5lGMPdcZF/full.html

Animated [disk: 638KB, gzip: 262KB]: https://share.esdf.io/3qdZm2szkN/animated.html

Partially Animated (Big) [disk: 192KB, gzip: 79KB]: https://share.esdf.io/EJHQXoIQDT/partial-animated.html (Only some panes are animating)

tommyallen14• 10 years ago

Here's an example of not-so-real time rendering: https://share.esdf.io/log.html

It's a tmux window displaying the log file for the share.esdf.io domain. It refreshes every second, so the message above about animated examples applies.

fiatjaf2• 10 years ago

Whoa, that's amazing.

I don't use tmux, but I'm considering it just because of this super fancy tool here.

I would like to hear about interesting use cases. Is that when you want to show what you're doing to your boss? Or when you want to impress a novice programmer?

tommyallen14• 10 years ago

Like I mentioned there, I use it to pester my friends :)

tmux is simply fantastic for keeping a session active. Not to mention you won't need to use multiple disjointed emulator windows to do something like keep tabs on a log file while you're working. You can even "full screen" a pane by pressing `Ctrl+b z`! I love being able to ssh into a server (or even my home computer) and simply resume where I left off, from any computer! My friend, let me also take a moment to tell you about Vim.... ;)

Back on topic: I think it would be good for anything where you want things to look almost exactly what's on your screen with high fidelity. Someone submitted an issue to have tmux2html continuously write to the same file that reloads itself. That could be used to have a not-so-realtime snapshot of a pane that's accessible from a browser. Perhaps, some weirdly draconian workplace that requires all employees to use tmux can routinely take a snapshot of all workstation sessions to make sure they aren't goofing off watching ASCII youtube[1]. Who knows!

1: http://annasagrera.com/on-ascii-youtube-and-letting-go/

fiatjaf2• 10 years ago

Ok, you have convinced me. I'll try tmux! I do ssh at all times and do all my programming and other computer stuff in a VPS and remote computers, so this thing was made for me.

I've been using vim for a long time now, although I am still a neophyte.

And I have tried tmux some time ago, but couldn't get used to the keybindings that conflicted with those of vim (I'm against doing too much customization -- specially of keybindings --, because that will make me useless when using other people's computers). Is this a real problem or was it just something I did wrong?

zchee• 10 years ago

amazing!

kempbellt• 10 years ago

This is great!

I use tmux all the time. Even went as far as setting up a dedicated "tmux server" when I was more focused on systems.

This tool will definitely come in handy. Thanks for the great work!

martanne3• 10 years ago

asciinema[1] does a similar thing but captures a whole terminal session. If somebody would add key input overlay support[2], it would actually be tremendously useful for demonstration purposes of interactive, mainly keyboard driven, terminal applications.

[1] https://asciinema.org/ [2] https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema/issues/105

tommyallen14• 10 years ago

asciinema is a very useful. But, what I found unappealing about it was that I needed asciinema to play the recordings (is that still the case?). I wanted to be able to put the rendered session anywhere I wanted.

The example links are actually hosted on my server and were uploaded using Dropshare. Pretty easy peasy if I need to share something that I don't want public.

martanne3• 10 years ago

asciinema stores the raw program output including any terminal escape sequences in a JSON format[1] and then uses a javascript terminal emulation library to replay/recreate the terminal state in your browser. The player, made up of one Javascript and one CSS file, can be self hosted[2].

[1] https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema/blob/master/doc/ascii...

[2] http://blog.asciinema.org/post/self-hosting/

pimlottc• 10 years ago

That is really cool! Could you use this to "livestream" a terminal session in real-time?

tommyallen14• 10 years ago

Not real-time, but yes, kind of. Add `--stream` to the command. Here's an example of it rendering every second: https://share.esdf.io/log.html

It is displaying the log file for my share.esdf.io domain (with IPs masked). I may take that link down in an hour or two if my puny server gets hammered.

sebastic• 10 years ago

Complete the loop. Make the browser a tmux client...

tommyallen14• 10 years ago

I thought about it, but it would bring this outside of the scope of a weekend project :) Besides, gotty might be better suited for that task: https://github.com/yudai/gotty

Show HN: tmux2html - Render full tmux windows or individual panes as HTML

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