GraphTerm, a Graphical Terminal Interface

[Ramalingam Saravanan]

Hi,

       I just stumbled upon this (small) group, which appears to have been dormant for a year. I'm posting about my new project called GraphTerm to see if there is still some interest. It is usually difficult to explain what I'm doing to others, but it may be easier with this group.

This is my second attempt at this webby-cli "thingy". Over 10 years ago, I worked on a project called XMLTerm, which implemented a terminal interface in Mozilla. It worked, but was slow and had niggling problems that prevented it from ever reaching "dogfood" status.

GraphTerm is my new attempt, and I have been eating my own dogfood, i.e., using it instead of the terminal, for over a month now. GraphTerm is an improved version of AjaxTerm combined with GUI ideas from XMLTerm. An xterm has a normal screen buffer, and an alternate screen buffer for fullscreen operations (e.g., when using vi). GraphTerm adds another buffer, which displays arbitrary HTML fragments, delimited by an escape sequence. This allows GraphTerm to be used for GUI-like folder navigation from the command line, among other things, while being fully backwards compatible with xterm.

If you have the time, try out GraphTerm. If not, at least take a look at the screenshots or the YouTube demo. One of the screenshots pays homage to the Star Wars Crawl, which if you think about it, is simply a slow scroll in a terminal with a perspective theme!

Screenshots: http://info.mindmeldr.com/code/graphterm/graphterm-screenshots

Youtube video: http://youtu.be/JBMexdwXN8w

Project page: http://info.mindmeldr.com/code/graphterm

Source: https://github.com/mitotic/graphterm

I have been using GraphTerm to develop GraphTerm, and some really useful features are using inline iframes to view the HTML output (from rst2html.py) within the terminal, and using HTML forms to fill in command line options. I have even used it make presentations.

Comments are welcome!

Saravanan

PS. GraphTerm is pure python (+HTML+JS+CSS), and should run on OS X, Linux etc. There are still some minor issues with mapping control characters on the various browsers, and copy/paste is a bit iffy, but it does work on OS X and Linux in my tests.