alt Hacker News > Every format that someone now wants to handle on terminal, needs to be supported by the EFL library?! Does it support LO spreadsheets? PDFs?
But if you want to be able to preview libreoffice spreadsheets or PDFs in terminology - and also incidentally and for free every other EFL project which uses that control - I'm sure they'd be happy to look at your pull request.
> And now I want to switch away from LO to some very new office tools, and I cannot, because EFL doesn't support it yet?
> And all that just in order to show some previews in a terminal emulator instead of the graphical environment around it that is perfectly capable to do so since half a century? Where all the applications already exist?
The graphical environment might be able to do the same job, but as I've pointed out time and time again, it can't do it nearly as quickly or as fluidly when I'm already working in a terminal. We've been over this ad nauseum, but I'll just point out for the 30,000th time that all the ways you talk about involve opening up some other, slower program and switching away from the teminal. Which is a less seamless experience than just viewing the thing right there in the terminal. I don't know how I can state it any more clearly.
Did I say "editing the thing" or "working with the thing"? No, no I didn't say that. Because I didn't mean "Editing" or "working with".
> Fine. Just replace tycat with EFL in what I wrote before
> But it's artificial. It solves a problem that just doesn't exist at all, and it doesn't actually improve anything, as long as it's not universally supported (at least in an actual Linux virtual terminal outside of X11/Wayland).
> But why are you trying to improve the horse riding experience, if you actually have a car that is just artificially stripped down to feel like a horse? Just use the car as a car instead! ;)
> What context switch are you talking about
> Why can't the same folks not improve keyboard support in e.g. VLC?
> I would be surprised if VLC is worse in that regard than some terminal thingy
(btw, off-subject, but there are a couple of really great terminal-based media players. And I can pretty much guarantee their keyboard controls are superior to vlc. But I'm not sure because I don't really try to keyboard control VLC. Because I don't have to. Because I don't have to launch it to preview a media file)
> You fire up a new tycat instance instead. Here VLC takes, idk, 500ms?!
I just fired up VLC. It took about 3 seconds (that's 3000ms, but what's 600% between friends?) from launch to a window being visible. According to htop, that empty VLC window with no file opened used up about 100Mb of my memory.
conversely:
$ time tycat /path/to/some_video.mp4
real 0m0.142s
user 0m0.117s
sys0m0.043s
> What's the difference?
> Yeah, make them universally work on any virtual terminals, and then it'd be at least an interesting discussion
Why do you expect me to care what terminal you're using? Do you think I write software in the hope that you in particular will use it? If you want to use worse software and not be supported by my terminology-specific stuff, be my guest.
> As long as I need some E terminal, or a particular terminal that is "popular with the kids"
> I really don't see at all why this is a good idea to spend any efforts for
Just remember to go and set your terminal to not support colour - after all it's not supported by any of those amber-screens! And while you're at it you better disable those extended unicode characters and switch back to baudot code. You can probably find a punchcard reader if you look around.
> Just use the car as a car, instead of disabling the engine, pretending it to be a horse, and then find clever ways to make it feel more like a car again. It already _is_ a car. Don't make up artificial restrictions that do not exist, just in order to find mediocre ways to somehow patch parts of them away a bit.
No.
Your terminal emulator is a horse. A tired, old horse. That's gray and boring and totally uninteresting. So uninteresting that you haven't even noticed it's got an infection in its foot.
Meanwhile, my terminal emulator is a horse with cybernetic legs and wings that allow it to break the sound barrier, and also fly. And if I keep messing around a bit I might be able to get it to do even more cool stuff. Who knows what exactly? Will all of it be groundbreaking and super useful immediately? Maybe not. But it'll be fun and interesting and it can already do shit you never even imagined was possible and can't even comprehend when I tell you about it, insisting on asking backwards questions like "well yeah but if it's flying then what happens with the horseshoes?"
Have fun with your old nag!
> Give Dolphin a chance!
"patched terminal font"?? What the fuck are you talking about?? It's almost like you don't understand what you're talking about.
> Bonus: It can display emojis
> because the actual glyph width differs from what the "API" (i.e. dancing some escape sequences and somehow intercept the answers from somewhere) tells you.
Argle bargle snerf blu carn delg bling blong blu barg sneh bork mert.
> Why would you want to work with a spreadsheet in the terminal when there's a perfectly capable spreadsheet application right there?
Well, if these quick previews are such a vital thing, it would be odd to just support a handful of formats. Any format should be supported, then. Furthermore, it shouldn't be just a static preview. I also want to navigate around there a bit then. And in my Blender model, I also want to play around with textures there. Hell, I basically want to just have Blender there. If it's inherently quicker, we should eventually do everything there. Quickly watching a video clip from some website. I don't want to unnecessarily waste ages for something that I can get quicker for free!
>> And all that [...]
> And all what? Raster already explained that it's like 3 lines of code.
We all know this is oversimplified in so many ways... ;) This was just about adding the video support (which was already implemented and just needed to be called), not for the graphics support in general, right? Also, the code isn't even my primary concern at all. Some "improvements" would be just a single line of code, and you'd definitely hate them.
> The graphical environment might be able to do the same job, but as I've pointed out time and time again, it can't do it nearly as quickly or as fluidly when I'm already working in a terminal. We've been over this ad nauseum, but I'll just point out for the 30,000th time that all the ways you talk about involve opening up some other, slower program and switching away from the teminal. Which is a less seamless experience than just viewing the thing right there in the terminal. I don't know how I can state it any more clearly.
Yeah, indeed, you did! But just the repetition doesn't make it sound more reasonable to me tbh. It's either a cult, or you do a kind of work there that I just cannot remotely imagine. Believe me, I also love when thing go quick. I get nuts when I feel blocked. Srsly. Everyone who know me will instantly confirm that. In emotional ways. I just cannot imagine any task where I could imagine to get a relevant speed-up by my terminal being able to render some jpeg/png/mpeg thumbnails. That might very much be my fault! Unfortunately, you didn't help me in that regard either so far. :-/ I still don't know for what kind of workload this might help.
> Did I say "editing the thing" or "working with the thing"?
Well, if you have a superior approach, which is quicker and more seamless, I'd definitely want us to see it using for everything! Mouse and keyboard is already there. It's probably just another three lines of code to make the mouse position available in pixel granularity. And then we can basically start porting everything into that new paradigm. Why should we then stick with the inferior one?
> It could allow an entirely new class of incredibly rich hybrid terminal/gui applications, for one thing. And I've already given examples of it tangibly improving things. Just because you don't understand doesn't make it useless.
That sounds indeed interesting, and it indeed resonates with me. But in my mental model, this is basically a gui application (again; as your terminal emulator also is), maybe even sth like a gui file manager (at least as entry point), but then i allows me to enter commands, and it would behave like a terminal: You ask it something via a command, and it gives you an answer. Basically like a terminal. Maybe with all kinds of additional features. And maybe it could actually integrate all kinds of applications eventually. Not just previews. Exactly as I described above in a slightly sarcastic way. Maybe I can actually open my Blender model in that "hybrid environment", and then I can either click around as today, or type some commands. And the same for all kinds of other applications.
I had hoped that, once someone starts to develop such a "new class of [...] applications", we could have a more modern foundation for it than ttys.
Anyways, as soon as I read about such a technology, and it does a little more than static previews of three or four file formats (or whatever EFL supports), I'd definitely give it a try!
> By your analogy, a GUI application is somehow better than a terminal one. Which it just isn't.
Technically, the application that runs your terminal _is_ a GUI application. I'm not aware of any terminal-based X11 emulators. That's just what I meant. Not more, not less.
> I just fired up VLC. It took about 3 seconds (that's 3000ms, but what's 600% between friends?) > conversely: > $ time tycat /path/to/some_video.mp4 > real 0m0.142s > user 0m0.117s > sys0m0.043s
Okay. Let's take these numbers. I definitely had machines where it took 3 seconds. How many video previews (or if you want: any previews) have you looked at in this week so far? Doesn't need to be precise. After 600 ones, you saved half an hour, let's say. I'm not sure how long it would take for me to need 600 previews of something. A year? Five years? And all these must be separate occurrences. If I need thumbnails of a directory with 50 files, well, Dolphin (or hundreds of other apps) gives me all these thumbnails at a glance.
> Do you think I write software in the hope that you in particular will use it?
Ahh, you're also one of the authors of some parts of that software stack? Okay, then I understand your stance a bit more. Or are you refering to the hybrid project? Either way, no I don't expect anything, I just give my 2 ct; which is what comments are for, no?
Can I somehow find at least some early versions? I mean, I liked the idea behind at least.
> I wasn't able to easily determine the ram used by tycat
No worries, my machine has 32 GB RAM. Even with 8 GB, the difference between tycat (assuming it needs no memory at all) and VLC is then about 1% of the machine's capacity. I never need 100 video previews in parallel; that's for sure (and even then, it will not be another 100 MB per instance)!
> Just remember to go and set your terminal to not support colour - after all it's not supported by any of those amber-screens!
No worries here either. A useful baseline seems to be the actual Linux terminal. It can do 16 colors. Unfortunately, it doesn't even support emojis, though.
I ask myself since years: Does this terminal still switch to an actual text mode, or does the text get rendered in a framebuffer by the OS. Anyways... That's another topic... Maybe both variants exist...
> Your terminal emulator is a horse. A tired, old horse.
And even more so all the applications that I know that I could run inside it. Again, I'm always open for something exciting. :)
> If I'm being honest, the chance of me ever trying any kde trash again is about 0.1%. Which in its defense is about 50 times more likely than me trying gnome trash. I'm sure it's just as bloated as the other ten thousand bloated file managers.
Sure it's "bloated" by your criteria. You've already said what crazy things it does. And I'm absolutely fine waiting a second or two for startup, for all the comfort I get back, compared to mc, or even just plain bash (or whatever *sh).
But yeah, my basic point was not actually to evangelize for Dolphin or VLC or any particular app.
> "patched terminal font"?? What the fuck are you talking about?? It's almost like you don't understand what you're talking about.
Well, how do "the kids" get their Git icons etc? As far as I can remember, they call it "Nerd Fonts".
> [Emoji support] Like every terminal emulator I've seen for a very long time can
Yes yes, they somehow can... But all I've tried are buggy sometimes in what glyph widths they report. For some codepoints. mc even seems to apply some explicit tricks against it, when file names contain emojis, but it cannot perfectly hide the issue. If terminology does better in that regard, good news! Nice!
As an application developer, I still cannot assume that my users all have terminology, so it's still no solution. :-/
> Argle bargle snerf blu carn delg bling blong blu barg sneh bork mert.
I wish you a nice weekend too!