Fluent Terminal – Open-source, native Windows 10 tabbed terminal

https://github.com/felixse/FluentTerminal

by nailer • 7 years ago

187 54 7 years ago

norswap• 7 years ago

Interesting. I'm wondering how it stacks up against ConEmu [1], which has been the MVP of terminal emulators on Windows for a long time now.

[1] https://conemu.github.io/

tfigment• 7 years ago

Personally prefer ConsoleZ over conemu. Its more stable and does fewer strange things when i last evaluated it. Fluent i guess has better themes support and UWP might be some sort of advantage.

https://github.com/cbucher/console

loeg3• 7 years ago

Thanks for the pointer. I'll share a link to Cmder[1], which was what I was pointed at the other day.

[1] https://cmder.net/

(So far, it beats the heck out of cmd.exe, especially for WSL...)

_underfl0w_3• 7 years ago

My only gripe is the delay after opening a new terminal. If it takes > 5s after launching to actually get a shell where I can type things, we have an efficiency problem. It's all the python behind the scenes. The dev chose simplicity over speed.

And this terminal is "based on web technologies" so I doubt decent speed is really achievable.

It's almost ironic that web developers are creating terminals.

nailer4• 7 years ago

I wouldn't call ConEmu the MVP (if you mean most valuable rather than minimum viable) - there's a number of unfixable bugs due to the insistence on Windows XP support.

Breakdown of Windows Terminals

# Top Quality (supports line editing, history, scrollback, copy on select, right click paste, tabs, iterm colors, everything else you'd expect from iTerm2 or gnome-terminal)

- Fluent Terminal (native, lightweight)

- Terminus (electron, so heavier, but also excellent and stable)

- Hyper 3 Canary (electron, in beta as Hyper 2 has serious bugs, but a massive plugin ecosystem)

# Minimal (no tabs but fast and stable)

- Powershell 6.2's inbuilt terminal

- Alacritty

# Windows XP apps (UI has everything everywhere, some unfixable bugs)

- ConsoleZ

- ConEmu

# Not actually a terminal

- Cmder

More details, config files: https://github.com/mikemaccana/powershell-profile#for-a-dece...

xrisk• 7 years ago

Why is Cmder not actually a terminal?

reificator• 7 years ago

Fluent Terminal (native, lightweight)

The very first line of the README:

A Terminal Emulator based on UWP and web technologies.

I understand the hate for electron apps and the demand for native. While I do use VSCode as my daily editor, I've also seen some electron apps that definitely don't make the cut.

That said, I don't understand the growing trend of using the native web view and calling it "native". (Meaning it can't be ported to other platforms, so it must be native?)

If you're building it with web technologies, you might as well just go with electron for the more modern browser[1], easier portability, and isolation from browser version changes.

[1]: I haven't looked much at the windows web view since edge came out. I was going to say perhaps this doesn't matter as much if you can select edge, but now that edge is becoming chromium anyway, I suppose the point is moot. Hooray for monocultures I guess.

samanator2• 7 years ago

I used to use ConEmu but it was too buggy for my liking, especially when using docker > nano/vim. Text was displayed in the wrong place all the time.

I started using fluent when this was posted (3 days ago) and I quite like the experience so far! I haven't had to switch back to regular CMD for anything so far!

dingo_bat• 7 years ago

My entire workstation is an Ubuntu VM hosted at my office. I just need a simple SSH client that works well on Win10. Nothing has been as good as the chrome extension Secure Shell. I've used conemu, putty, mobaxterm, and countless others. But I always come back to secure shell. I hope this one is good enough to replace that because I just want to get rid of chrome.

marmaduke• 7 years ago

Have you tried bitvise?

bpye2• 7 years ago

Have you tried the Win32 build of OpenSSH in box in Windows?

h4t• 7 years ago

Interesting. I have been using ConEmu for a very long time and every time I try something new I always end up going back to ConEmu... and I have tried many others such as Hyper, MobaXTerm, Terminus and others which names have fled the hallways of my mind. I will give this one a try. I am also going to try out cmder which I hear is built upon ConEmu.

GordonS• 7 years ago

I've been using Cmder for years, and wouldn't use anything else - it is indeed built on top of ConEmu.

osigurdson• 7 years ago

Cmder is great. However, I haven't had much luck with using it to ssh into a docker container (docker for windows). Arrow keys, etc don't work.

begoon• 7 years ago

MS could buy/employ conemu guys and close the question forever.

dgellow• 7 years ago

Oh yes, please.

abledon2• 7 years ago

Theoretical question: what would be more effective rallying support for this:

1. Having 3000 developers on LinkedIn privatemessage developers working on the windows OS apps team to have this bumped up in priority

2. Having 30 000 developers on twitter tweet @SatyaNadella and other prominent figures in the MSFT world, who could rally support and make things move at the top so the orders come down the chain to get this terminal thing settled.

loeg3• 7 years ago

I don't read Linkedin messages. Do you? I think this is the kind of non-biz-demand "charity" work that needs to be driven from the top to succeed.

nailer4• 7 years ago

They were going to have tabs in native terminal (which is otherwise pretty good asides from this) via Sets until that feature was cancelled. Hopefully Rich etc has a backup plan.

GrzegorzWidla• 7 years ago

Sets have not been canceled.

segphault• 7 years ago

Looking at the source code, this appears to be a UWP wrapper around the xterm JavaScript library loaded in a system web view. It uses a WebSocket connection to facilitate communication between the embedded web environment and the application. I’m not sure how comfortable I am with that from a security standpoint.

AnIdiotOnTheNet• 7 years ago

Sadly I doubt this even comes close to being the most convoluted way to emulate simple technology from the 1970s.

jeroenhd3• 7 years ago

Is there a good reason why running this requires you to install a certificate authority?

I get that this might be because of software signing requirements on Windows, but in that case you should bundle a script that generates+signs the build using a local certificate instead of loading a random CA into the system trust source.

loeg3• 7 years ago

UWP apps are signed. To sideload, you either need to enable developer mode (allow installing untrusted app signatures), OR install the signing CA (but don't enable developer mode).

Your proposed individual CA model does seem like an improvement for that route, but I just enable developer mode.

jeroenhd3• 7 years ago

Interesting. If turning on developer options also allows you to run unsigned software, I don't see any advantages at all for installing this random certificate authority. Thank you for your explanation.

_underfl0w_3• 7 years ago

Do you know of any examples offhand that use the method you describe? It sounds super interesting. I've actually been looking for a way to deal with certificates (and ditch the warnings from Windoze) for internal C# tools at work.

jeroenhd3• 7 years ago

You can generate your own CA using common open source software (openssl is often used) and use that to sign your packages (and sign any intranet websites you can't be bothered to set up letsencrypt for). This website has a nice intro into running your own CA: https://roll.urown.net/ca/index.html You can use the CA itself or an intermediary to sign your software. However, be aware that this will only work on computers with your personal CA installed in the trust store.

I'm pretty sure network admin related versions of Windows also have tooling for operations like this but I have no experience with those.

Be warned though, a self-signed CA can be dangerous if someone else gets their hands on your private key. I myself have set up intermediary CAs to deal with HTTPS certificates or code signing certs so I can store the CA private key somewhere safe.

hs86• 7 years ago

The situation for terminal emulators is still bad on Windows.

Those web-based ones have no problems with fancy font features like powerline icons or ligatures but they still have a limitation when it comes to color support. [1] Fluent seems to be affected from this as well.

The other important feature for me is tmux with mouse support. To my knowledge, only WSLtty [2] does this right. It lacks support for font ligatures but I value a functional tmux more than some ligature eye candy.

I still hope that Microsoft will improve their own conhost.exe in further updates. Also, the upcoming 1903 update will improve the color support those web-based terminal emulators.

[1] https://github.com/zeit/hyper/issues/1968

[2] https://github.com/mintty/wsltty

bpye2• 7 years ago

I tried out Alacritty [1] yesterday - it seems to work pretty well. It's the only one I've found so far that uses the new ConPty API. It's font rendering doesn't seem quite as nice as conhost though.

[1] https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty

trigoman• 7 years ago

I didn't know about WSLtty! Thank you for the awareness, I've been using Hyper and have been hitting the tmux issues you listed.

It's noticeably faster and works great :)

l24ztj• 7 years ago

wsltty is absolute crap. Not only it is very very slow with long lines or fast output, it also freezes often with applications that have GUIs like irssi.

zerr• 7 years ago

What's the reason behind using "web tech" if you're already comfortable with C#/UWP?

felixse• 7 years ago

Author here. The main reason is that I already had some experience with 'hybrid' approaches and xterm.js made it possible to build something usable without spending too much time writing a vt parser. I'm planning to start working on a 'native' renderer next to get rid of some limitations and also improve the performance.

shawxe• 7 years ago

When I'm forced to use Windows (which is pretty much just at work), I run an X server through Cygwin then use URxvt with GNU screen. I haven't found a Windows console application that doesn't play nicely with this when run through winpty, so for me it's the best of both worlds. I have used ConEmu and Cmndr, but I found them both to be nowhere near as reliable as my current setup (much like how WSL still can't touch Cygwin for my use case).

nXqd• 7 years ago

I totally agree with WSL cannot even touch Cygwin. I will try the combo X server with unbeatble URxvt :)

peterwwillis• 7 years ago

But the X server is annoying too, because for some reason setting -dpi doesn't work for me, and the fonts render like crap. If I set fonts really small they aren't as bad.

I just use PuTTY into a local or remote sshd as it's the least bad of everything I've tried so far. Wish it supported tabs natively tho.

If this thing supports mouse, copy-paste, good fonts, and doesn't steal or disable any of my key mapping, I'll take it

namanyayg• 7 years ago

Are there any features you can elaborate that aren't present in cmder? I've been using cmder and am looking to switch.

coldtea• 7 years ago

I was expecting some Electron crap. I was pleasantly surprised.

sghiassy• 7 years ago

I’m a Mac user. But I wish the project the best of luck!!! The proliferation of powerful terminals on all platforms is a blessing for all devs!

slim• 7 years ago

Last time I used Windows 15 years ago I used teraterm. The project seems to be alive and doing well

https://ttssh2.osdn.jp/

syockit• 7 years ago

That requires you to have ssh server running if you to use it with WSL. You can't use it as the frontend to powershell or cmd.

That said: yes, it's alive and well. I'm using it at work, mostly because that's what everyone else in the office is using (in Japan)

samanator2• 7 years ago

Great stuff! Thank you. Would be great if shift would highlight text (I constantly use that in CMD to copy text).

Fluent Terminal – Open-source, native Windows 10 tabbed terminal

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