A curated list of Terminal frameworks, plugins and resources

https://github.com/k4m4/terminals-are-sexy

by febin • 9 years ago

266 80 9 years ago

github.com

NeverTrump• 9 years ago

nice list except git is not a shell and powershell is not a terminal emulator :)

seanp2k22• 9 years ago

And fish isn't for zsh :)

dozzie• 9 years ago

You know, zsh without fish is like fish without a bike.

gumby• 9 years ago

I spend most of my time in Terminal (well in Emacs) and don't use much more than I could have had on a AAA (Ann Arbor Ambassador 42x80 terminal). What am I missing out on? This page doesn't say, just lists alternative terminals.

figgis2• 9 years ago

I spent a few minutes making as many mistakes in a terminal I could to give an idea of what zsh can do. I'm not sure if it is what you are looking for but hopefully it's helpful and if not oh well.

https://asciinema.org/a/bbis1intm13ya7vw3jyk0a2rl

Note: anytime something odd happens and things pop up I pressed <TAB>

camel_Snake• 9 years ago

I press tab in my zsh and it doesn't look nearly as nice. Is that specific to the theme you have running or is it an extension?

djsumdog• 9 years ago

So many things wrong with this list. Fish stuff in the ZSH section, the FreeBSD package manager in the Linux section, Cygwin is not a package manager (you still need apt-cyg or sage to install things in Cygwin without rerunning setup.exe) ...

Sometimes I see good stuff in these lists, but this author looked like they didn't even really try.

saurik• 9 years ago

FWIW, I don't see what particularly differentiates setup.exe from apt-get, other than that the former is a GUI; people generally consider Synaptic to be a package management tool, even though it is a GUI, and it is very similar to Cygwin's setup.exe (which isn't like, overwriting everything with a new install: it manages the existing packages).

toyg• 9 years ago

People fear setup.exe because it's confusing. I remember being very very scared to break the existing install every time I ran it.

lojack• 9 years ago

The fact that easy_install even exists in that list...

thesmallestcat• 9 years ago

The author clearly tried, there are something like 100 different links, and it's BS to suggest that they didn't because there are some errors.

mixedCase• 9 years ago

The author clearly tried

...to cram as many links as possible for the recognition without putting the effort into the curation that make these "Awesome" lists worth anything more than a Google search.

majkinetor• 9 years ago

There is cyg-get:

https://chocolatey.org/packages/cyg-get

tomsthumb• 9 years ago

why not just use babun?

sotojuan• 9 years ago

Most authors of "awesome" lists just want the stars and GitHub "fame", they don't care about curation or quality.

smonff2• 9 years ago

It is sad that nobody else mentioned it or care about it.

I don't even know what most of these tools have to do with "sexiness" and find myself angry that people just enjoy. Is there any possible critics over there or is everything supposed to be considered as (awesome|cool|hip|sexy)?

teh_klev• 9 years ago

Why not send a pull request with corrections?

mikejmoffitt3• 9 years ago

Is there still no way to make iTerm2 refresh faster? When doing quick scrolling or output, it's so noticeably choppy compared to Terminal.app, or even Xterm.

Longhanks• 9 years ago

This bothers me, too. Terminal lacks some features I really want, but it's implementation just feels polished. It's just so smooth, reflows text nicely and renders fonts perfectly.

daleroberts2• 9 years ago

Terminal is great but a major lacking feature is 'true color' (https://gist.github.com/XVilka/8346728).

If you an Apple engineer working on Terminal and reading this post, please add it, it would be much appreciated :)

codezero• 9 years ago

Do you use any advanced features like triggers/alerts with captured output?

I found that a regex I was using to pop a notif was slowing iTerm2 down big time, removed it, and it feels much better now.

mikejmoffitt3• 9 years ago

Zero. I use iTerm2 when I have to use a Mac, where I act as though it's Xterm. This is just out of the box behavior. Older versions had an adjustable refresh rate slider.

gnachman2• 9 years ago

Triggers were super slow in 2.x but are much faster in 3.0. Try it again if it's been a while.

gnachman2• 9 years ago

Terminal dispensed with NSScrollView and I think that won a performance advantage in rendering. It's hard to do if you're not Apple. They also modulate the refresh rate based on load, which 3.1 adds. They're using Core Text which is very slow compared to Core Graphics but they made it up with clever hacks.

mikejmoffitt3• 9 years ago

I don't buy it as the main problem. 60fps is not asking for very much from a terminal emulator. VGA text modes can handle it, my old 486DX laptop can handle it, and XTerm can handle it (even fully software rendering everything to a buffer). It's possible core text is to blame, but this seems like an odd problem for an emulator to have in 2017.

seanp2k22• 9 years ago

Long-time bash guy, I used to use just git-bash-prompt + a few dozen aliases and functions, but recently got some shell envy after seeing a coworker with powerline on fish. I checked out ooh my fish and it was really hard to get it to do what I wanted; things like saving a function (since aliases are defined in one with ooh my fish) took a few hours to figure out because of how homebrew installs fish on Mac. It was also overly difficult to get ^r rev search working, $(foo) didn't work, the random one-liners I'd type didn't work half the time with fish.

I switched to zsh + prezto with powerlevel9k ( https://github.com/bhilburn/powerlevel9k ) and within an hour, I had something awesome. Here's a guide on installing it: http://www.codeblocq.com/2016/09/Pimp-up-iTerm-with-Zsh-and-... and I'd really really recommend powerlevel9k. Nothing against fish, but after a few weeks, it was just too hard to unlearn all my bashfulness, whereas in zsh it just works as it used to + had the extra functionality I got with fish + now is even more awesome and useful thanks to powerlevel9k.

hartator• 9 years ago

What's bringing powerlevel9k that's not in oh my zsh?

By quickly glancing at it, it just seems to be a bloated theme with no extra features.

jorvi• 9 years ago

This. I used to have that setup (Prezto + Powerlevel9k) but in the end I didn't want all sorts of needless config, and it still felt really heavy. Plus, you actually rarely use anything in the framework.

Now I just use zsh + zplug (vim-plug like plugin manager) + pure zsh theme + tiny zshrc. Fast as hell, tailor-made and no-nonsense. You can check it out over here if you're interested: https://github.com/jorvi/dotfiles

fusiongyro• 9 years ago

In fish, you do (foo) instead of $(foo), and to do rev search you just type something and press up. To save a function, do funcsave name.

It did take me a little while to get used to fish (psub was another thing that took some googling to find) but I don't think I would go back to zsh now.

dedhed• 9 years ago

I have been using MobaXterm for a while on Windows. I don't see it mentioned very often in lists like this. It could probably fall under multiple headings in this list.

http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/

haldean• 9 years ago

I went through so many terminal emulators on Windows, looking for one that could handle SSHing to a Linux box and running tmux/vim/irssi inside the session; MobaXterm was the only one I could find that could handle it. It's a shame it isn't free software, but I can't find any free software on Windows that does curses GUIs correctly.

blakesterz• 9 years ago

I was so happy to find Moba after my MacBook took a dive all I have now is a Win10 laptop. I'm pretty sure I'll survive for travel now, Moba really gets the job done!

sbuttgereit• 9 years ago

I use to use Moba and on the paid product to boot. It was the best, but it was very, very bloated and they did a fair number of annoying things related to UI.

I have since stopped using Moba and just use Windows Subsystem for Linux... there are still too many annoyances because of the Windows console host stuff; even using tools like ConEmu still fall victim to the issues and introduce their own cruft to deal with. Still, I find the overall experience just more seamless and the least annoying of the options I've tried so far including Moba.

jasonmorton2• 9 years ago

Anyone know if there is any terminal + server side piece that, like terminology or iterm2, lets me inline plot in R, python over ssh? Linux or mac.

daleroberts2• 9 years ago

If you are running a Mac for your desktop (with iTerm2) and ssh'ing into a Linux machine. These work if you run them remotely as the image gets transferred through the SSH session:

https://github.com/daleroberts/itermplot

https://github.com/daleroberts/bv

Alternatively, for any other terminal emulator with Unicode 9.0 font support and true color support, you can use:

https://github.com/daleroberts/tv

This even includes Windows (using patched PuTTY) and remotely running 'tv' on a Linux machine.

jasonmorton2• 9 years ago

Thank you, I will try these. I was looking at your repo but couldn't tell if it would work remotely.

tbrake• 9 years ago

Interesting not to see csh/tcsh there. I'm out of the loop when it comes to these things; is it pretty much dead? Did bash 'win'?

tambourine_man• 9 years ago

I still have a soft spot for tcsh for historical reasons, but yes, bash pretty much won.

Specially now with Microsoft's Bash on Windows

kps2• 9 years ago

Nor ksh, which was the common shell for the SVr4 line (Solaris et al.). It has some extensions to sh that bash picked up, some that bash imitated just badly enough to be incompatible, and some that bash never picked up (e.g. floating point expressions, which I use surprisingly often).

The terminal emulator I use, mlterm, isn't on the list either. Its killer feature for me is a configuration that solves the vim ESC/Alt prefix problem.

jwilk• 9 years ago

Does it mean that "awesome" is no longer cool and every curated list is going to be "sexy" instead?

AceJohnny2• 9 years ago

Because Awesome is overloaded: https://awesomewm.org

;)

smonff2• 9 years ago

I opened an issue about the semantic problem. What makes me worried is more sexism, harassment, rape culture.

https://github.com/k4m4/terminals-are-sexy/issues/59

kitd• 9 years ago

Good to see Cmder mentioned for Windows. Does everything I need and looks great.

Deinumite• 9 years ago

My only complaint is that it often explodes when using vim or pagination certain files over SSH.

Also ctrl+w by default in cmder closes the tab instead of the bash equivalent, I always have to unbind it.

TurboHaskal• 9 years ago

FreeBSD's pkg is listed under Linux.

stuaxo• 9 years ago

Probably worth opening an issue.

navs• 9 years ago

While technically not a terminal client, Blink is a mosh supported ssh application for iOS.

http://www.blink.sh/

Open source so if you've got yourself an Apple Developer account you can build and run it yourself.

WalterGR5• 9 years ago

I'd love to find a shell + terminal that's aware of the semantics of shell output.

One nice thing about (good) GUI programs and websites is that 'results' are quickly navigable. In a terminal, I'd love to be able to drill down into results of ls; from grep output quickly open a file and jump to that match; etc.

(Shell output can be in any format, but even if it could grok the output of only specific programs/commands (and also their switches) that would be a starting point.)

Does anything like this exist, for any platform? It seems like PowerShell could be a good match, but I don't know anything about its ecosystem.

jevinskie2• 9 years ago

iTerm hyperlinks strings that are valid paths. Cmd+click to open. It is immensely useful!!

chipotle_coyote• 9 years ago

This is something standard OS X Terminal does, too, although it's either a right-click or command-doubleclick. Terminal actually does a lot now that it didn't a few years ago.

jstimpfle4• 9 years ago

That exists, it's called GUI...

Improving on the text model is almost always premature optimization, though. Consider the incredible cost for an observer to "understand" what you are doing. Insane amounts of work (resulting in lock-in or a product never shipped) is not how the text model could become so successful.

Why can tools like grep or sed be so immensely useful? Precisely because they don't need to understand what goes in (other than a stream of lines), what does the pattern mean (other than being a regular expression), and what goes out (other than a stream of lines).

And what's the benefit of programs understanding "semantics of output" really? Everything is text. When a file is printed on the terminal, select it (e.g. double-click), type "vim " (or whatever), and middle-click. It's good enough most of the time. When there is some really dry repetitive work, bang out a command-line to automate that for you (along the lines of "while read filename; do vim filename; done").

A GUI can only help for the most common cases. If these are only a minority of cases, GUIs are only crippled tools preventing you from doing real work. (Personal anecdote: I use nothing but a browser and xterms on most days or even weeks).

WalterGR5• 9 years ago

Everything is text.

No. In PowerShell, console output is 'typically'[1] of a well-known type.

It is therefore entirely possible for a shell + terminal to be aware of the operations available on its output.

[1] For some definition of "typically"... PowerShell permits arbitrary manipulations of output, so obviously there are circumstances where this is impossible.

electricEmu2• 9 years ago

You're pretty much asking for PowerShell. I've been using it for a while, which might jade my answer. That said, I've got it being installed on my Unix systems as my one-true-shell.

You stream objects instead of text. The objects can be rich. It's a huge step forward in semantics and consistency.

WalterGR5• 9 years ago

Is there terminal support though for navigating the resulting objects?

jstimpfle4• 9 years ago

There are many people around the internet hating it with a passion. I believe them. There can't be a tool that magically reads all of your wishes.

Serious question, have you ever known a technical Windows sysadmin? I tried to backup a directory tree today as a domain administrator using robocopy, and could not do it without messing with file permissions.

Not that today's Unix is that simple anymore...

tadfisher• 9 years ago

You've described Emacs, which is a huge library of frontends to common Unix utilities. Dired, for example, just parses `ls` output.

WalterGR5• 9 years ago

It's no surprise to me that Emacs has already solved this problem... Are there examples beyond dired?

SomeHacker44• 9 years ago

You really want Genera. Just about every depiction of something beyond mere verbiage was interactable in its shell.

steinuil• 9 years ago

I'm writing a shell that does this; right now I'm working on the language itself (a somewhat functional language with basic types and records) and its parser (the syntax is like a terser OCaml mixed with Ruby, designed to be quick to write), but eventually it'll reimplement most unix programs so that their output is actually a type it recognizes, and it'll have something like a FCI (Foreign Command Interface) that would let you easily parse the ouput of commands it doesn't implement.

It's not uploaded anywhere yet (and there's not much to look at right now, just an unfinished parser and the beginning of an interpreter), but when I have time to work on it and put it in a somewhat functional state I'll post it on here too.

hawski• 9 years ago

Pretty close to what you describe is Acme [0] the text editor/shell from Plan 9. It is mouse oriented edit. You can right click on words to search them in file or open text files, directories or compiler errors. I recommend viewing this [1] introduction video.

I miss few things in Acme. A bit more WIMP-y familiarity and a 3 button mouse.

That's why I'm working on experimental text editor inspired by Acme [2].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor)

[1] https://youtu.be/dP1xVpMPn8M

[2] https://github.com/hadrianw/werf

kps2• 9 years ago

I really like Rob Pike's minimalist principles but somehow dislike most of his implementation choices. I can't be productive in acme due to missing my #3 arm, but I'd kill for structured regular expressions in vim.

Chris2048• 9 years ago

That would surely require rewriting all terminal programs, to get their output structure?

jevinskie2• 9 years ago

CRT (cool-retro-term) is a nice, free alternative to Cathode and runs on Linux too.

https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term

mastazi2• 9 years ago

For Windows, I think Git Bash/MSYS2 are worth mentioning as well.

electricEmu2• 9 years ago

Those should both be superseded by PowerShell for anything realistic on Windows.

mastazi2• 9 years ago

I like PowerShell (lately I like it a lot), but MSYS2's use case is slightly different. The latter, unlike the former, gives you a minimalistic POSIX layer in Windows.

potomak• 9 years ago

That list is missing a section for terminal music players. I created one in Haskell some time ago: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/haskell-player

bcg1• 9 years ago

Tilda should not be left off the list.

https://github.com/lanoxx/tilda

jasonm232• 9 years ago

Guake too https://github.com/Guake/guake

e5an• 9 years ago

No mention of fizsh?

therealidiot• 9 years ago

Could do with adding Finch to the list under Communication

https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/Using%20Finch

Pete_D• 9 years ago

I would add rxvt-unicode to the terminals list. Its client/server model makes opening new terminals practically instant.

Anthony-G• 9 years ago

I find it hard to take too seriously such a list if it doesn’t include GNU Screen. A terminal multiplexer really enhances the experience of working in a terminal. Even tmux only gets a cursory mention in the middle of other Tools and Plugins.

It would make a lot more sense to give terminal multiplexers their own section (even if there are only two entries) and explain the benefits of using a terminal multiplexer.

A curated list of Terminal frameworks, plugins and resources

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