Wave Terminal: A Modern New Terminal That You'll Love If You Hate Command Line

https://news.itsfoss.com/wave-terminal/

by tracymiranda • 3 years ago

29 37 3 years ago

news.itsfoss.com

philipswood• 3 years ago

Huh?!

"The perfect swimsuit for those who hate water?"

otabdeveloper4• 3 years ago

Spoiler:

it is an Electron app

Saved you a download.

sdumi• 3 years ago

Saved you a download.

You did, thank you!

postalrat4• 3 years ago

It's an electron app because there isn't a better alternative.

eddieroger• 3 years ago

In what sense? There isn't a better alternative to package a web app as native, or there isn't a better alternative to writing Electron apps? I think many would argue native dev is a better alternative.

mixmastamyk4• 3 years ago

Spoilers II and III:

    > There's telemetry (and)
    > a terms of service to agree to

sawka6• 3 years ago

Telemetry is completely optional and anonymous (and we provide a switch to turn it off when you launch the app).

noergl4• 3 years ago

Its true, that a browser engine has a higher resource usage initially - it can easily hog 50-100MB without any content being loaded, but seriously, thats not much of a concern anymore these days. On the other hand it provides a great programming environment for web devs with many bells and whistles (which arguably might not even be needed for certain electron apps).

What concerns me more is what web devs actually do within that environment - it's almost like many devs have lost a basic sense of resource management, like memory comes for free, gets garbage collected anyway, so why should I care. Many electron apps are overly shiny in appearance, backed by tons of graphics and animations, but in fact are lousy managed under the hood. I am not quite sure if this is a direct effect of using a GC language, or if Javascript+HTML in particular makes it too easy to get quite far without some comprehension of inner works of the browser and the machine underneath. This is also a pain with modern webpages - I really dont get it, why a browser with 8 tabs opened can easily grow to several GBs after a while.

There are a few counter examples - electron apps that do heavy lifting while still being nice to your RAM and CPU. Sadly thats exceptional, not the common case. I tend to blame sloppy web devs here.

sawka6• 3 years ago

Wave uses electron for rendering, but a Golang backend for networking and heavy lifting. This gives Wave the ability to be cross platform and still efficient under the hood.

KerrAvon• 3 years ago

I wonder if the right way to sell this is really "CLI for CLI haters" -- if you really find the CLI scary/painful -- distinct from being frustrated with the typical Unix UI limitations -- this doesn't look any less scary.

sawka6• 3 years ago

Hah, we did not come up with the headline :). Really the vision for Wave is to have an out-of-the-box excellent terminal experience that's consistent across all of the machines that you log into. We also bring cool new features to the terminal like command blocks, output renderers, persistent sessions, and universal history (across all of your sessions, local and remote).

SebastianKra5• 3 years ago

The next generation replacement for CLIs will be Raycast.com or similar. Seriously.

It's significantly more discoverable, faster to use, and provides a high quality interface out of the box.

Composability is currently lacking, but Launchbar shows how that could be done.

Most importantly, it's ridiculously easy to write extensions for. Chances are, if your shell script needs to handle interactive input, you can write a Raycast extension in fewer lines of code.

Developers who seek to advance the terminal should probably focus on building a FOSS equivalent to Raycast instead.

mixmastamyk4• 3 years ago

Terminals are primarily for folks who want to direct their computer, and not be controlled by it.

Always on chatgpt and cloud sync are non-starters in the first realm, terminals in the second.

SebastianKra5• 3 years ago

You just cherry picked two unrelated optional features to justify dismissing an entire interaction-concept.

sawka6• 3 years ago

Interesting take! By implementing our UI in React, we're hoping to make it significantly easier and more accessible to write cross-platform terminal extensions (and renderers / apps for different types of content). One of the interesting directions we're looking at is providing native web-based UI for terminal programs. Like a TUI library that renders to actual UI :)

SebastianKra5• 3 years ago

I agree that React is a good choice for extension developers, but not necessarily react-dom. The web lacks efficient keyboard navigation. What you have is effectively a Jupyter Notebook for the CLI. I by no means want to dismiss the value of that, but there are two possible paradigm shifts that also deserve your attention:

1. The Command-Palette pattern. See [The History of Command Palettes: How Typing Commands Became The Norm Again](https://www.vendr.com/blog/consumer-dev-tools-command-palett...)

2. Keyboard-accessible UI primitives. Raycast have recognised common terminal use-cases and built general-purpose interface components [1]. They implemented a custom React reconciler for their UI.

The downside of Raycast is, that it's proprietary for MacOS only. I believe a Terminal that capitalises on the above two points while staying FOSS could revolutionise Unix/Linux CLIs.

[1] For example https://developers.raycast.com/api-reference/user-interface/...

marssaxman• 3 years ago

I love the command line, and I doubt I'll use this terminal, but "each command and its output is a separate box" is a way of using a terminal that I've long wished for. My day is full of `clear && bazel build`, not because I want to clear my history, but because I want to treat the build output as a single unit.

kwkelly• 3 years ago

warp (warp.dev) does this

tracymiranda• 3 years ago

yeah, though unlike wave, warp is not open source and only really works on mac

noergl4• 3 years ago

Is it just me or does the article read a lot like disguised paid promotion? I have no problem with paid promotions at all, but rather would like to see a disclaimer then.

sawka6• 3 years ago

Hah, 100% not a paid promotion, although it is kinda awesome that you think it is! We were thrilled with the coverage (our first article!) after we soft launched on /r/opensource.

noergl4• 3 years ago

Thx for clarification. And sorry that I raised that suspicion, seems I misinterpreted the enthusiastic style of the article.

YeGoblynQueenne• 3 years ago

> You can edit files inline, be it on your local system or the remote machine. And there is no learning curve here. Just use it like a regular text editor.

Oh, like Vim, or Emacs.

Or like ed ?

sawka6• 3 years ago

Wave is a terminal, so you're free to use any editor you'd like, including vim, emacs or ed. We just provide another option for users who don't find vim or emacs very intuitive. I've used emacs to code for over 25 years and have no problem using the CLI or text editors (and it seems like neither do you), but there is a learning curve to teaching intro CS students or semi-technical folks how to use vim on the CLI ("type escape colon w q enter to save")

Wave Terminal: A Modern New Terminal That You'll Love If You Hate Command Line

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