Hyper 3.0.0

[StevePerkins]

I just don't understand the use case here. It's an Electron-based terminal... that has a thousand pretty themes, but lacks basic functionality like being able to expand your scroll buffer. It's just not usable as a daily driver.

I'm not trying to hate on Electron (VS Code is my main editor now, and I enjoy it). But I just don't see the point here other than, "Look what they wrote with Electron!". Is it the "social" aspect of posting color themes and seeing how many downloads you get, and I'm just old?

[malux85]

No youre not old, just wise. Terminals are actually pretty complex beasts and performance matters above all, closely followed by compatibility. I feel the same way as you.

Or maybe we're both just old. Lets chase the kids off our lawn, get some dr pepper and fire up the alphaservers?

[mikl]

Ditto here. Given how performance- and security intensive a terminal emulator is (who wants to add JavaScript injection to their list of server security worries?), writing one in Electron seems a bit nuts to me.

[petetttt]

We all enjoy customising our setup?

A web dev friendly developer experience and a javascript plugin ecosystem opens that up to a new audience.

It's a pretty big audience. I guess the hope is that raises the bar for what users expect from a terminal and it's plugins, while providing performance that is adequate enough for it's target audience.

[kristiandupont]

I suppose to the many JS developers out there (which is a lot), having your software built in it makes it easier and more appealing to write extensions for. I have no data, but it's my impression that the growth curve for VS Code extensions compared to VS "classic" is much steeper.

This may or may not be a good thing but IMO it does tend to make some interesting and novel things surface.

[nkkollaw]

It's just an experiment. If you try to use it and you use the terminal for work you'll see that it freezes and crashes often with more that a few hundred lines, and that it uses a lot of RAM.

It looks cool, though!

[moltar]

I think it’s just WIP. Just like VS Code wasn’t perfect from the start.

But I can imagine it following the same path. Ecosystem becomes more mature. Plugins get more sophisticated.

[STRiDEX]

its one of the few options you can use on both windows and osx with the same themes and plugins etc. However, i agree, it wasn't able to get me to stop using item2

[jug]

Yes, it was admittedly a while ago but I looked hard for killer features or at least something that makes use of this obscene abstraction of Electron, but I could only find minor features. I mean, for Windows Conemu or Cmder looks much better. And soon Microsoft’s own upcoming Windows Terminal looks better too.

[nickjj]

I gave up on Hyper about 8 months ago after only using it for a few weeks.

2.1 was close to unusable on Windows. Major prompt / cursor bugs (it would disappear all the time), ~200ms input latency (but a terminal's only job is to make typing feel awesome) and it took 5 seconds+ to open on an SSD. I reported a number of those issues but the maintainers didn't even respond even though people were commenting that it was a problem for them too.

Since then I've moved to wsltty for WSL and it's great when combined with tmux. Lightning fast with all of the terminal features you could ever want thanks to tmux (separate windows (ie. tabs), split panes, buffer searching and session saving / restoring). Close to zero input latency too as of wsltty 3.0.0.

[timdorr]

Windows Terminal was just released yesterday, which might be a good option for you. It's even open source: https://github.com/Microsoft/Terminal

[yboris]

Hyper is all I use on Mac OS but on Windows I had some trouble with it so I started using Terminus - https://github.com/Eugeny/terminus

Looking forward to trying out Hyper 3 on Windows when I get home :)

[beardicus]

In before the JavaScript gripes begin. How about we skip the Electron whinging this time?

I haven't switched to Hyper because I have found it a bit pokey and that doesn't work for me, but I'll still give this one a try. I'm curious to hear about any interesting reasons other people _have_ chosen Hyper, or particularly cool things it enables by being built on web technologies. Anybody?

[egeozcan]

> In before the JavaScript gripes begin. How about we skip the Electron whinging this time?

I have a feeling that it's used to farm hate (as karma or "acceptance"). In a less accusatory way, let me say, I think that people really like to see that other people share their hate. This is just my gut feeling though, as I don't share their passionate hate,even though I don't "love" electron.

[beardicus]

Update: Hyper 3 feels super-fast. Startup and new tabs are somewhat sluggish still but actual rendering responsiveness seems real nice.

[Joe8Bit]

Same, I try it every few months to see if its tmux support has improved. So far no luck!

I actually really like the way it's configure/managed, the whole `hyper install foo` is pretty nice.

[nfRfqX5n]

been using it for over a year on my windows machine, never really had any issues. probably gonna try out the new microsoft terminal soon tho

[neilsimp1]

I have been using Cmder on Windows for a while, but Hyper has also looked really good.

With the announcement of the new Windows Terminal, I wonder if these projects will become irrelevant. The only reason I use Cmder is for tabs, and once I have Windows Terminal with that feature, I doubt I would ever use Cmder or Hyper.

[nickjj]

If you adapt using tmux then you are free to pick whatever terminal you want because tabs / split panes are done very well in tmux.

For example I tried nearly every terminal on Windows and ultimately use wsltty because tmux offers nearly instant tabs and split panes, buffer searching and everything else you could want in a terminal.

Here's a whole write up on the comparisons: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/conemu-vs-hyper-vs-terminus-v...

[egeozcan]

IMHO windows needs a beginner friendly & built-in tiling window manager. Then nobody would care about the lack of tabs in cmd or explorer.

[egwynn]

Hyper certainly looks cool, but “looks cool” doesn’t cut it when it comes to winning me over for what might be the #1 most important tool I use on a daily basis. Is there a page telling me why I should use this over my current terminal (iTerm2, FWIW)?

[jacobwg]

This is my personal experience, but for me, considering that the terminal is so frequently used, the small improvements add up over time.

I found the font rendering more pleasant on the eyes. I'm not entirely sure why this is, and I'd be interested to see what options could be tweaked in iTerm2 to make it visually similar, but Hyper just "feels" nicer to look at for me.

Second, I've found it useful to be able to customize my terminal with web technologies. Previously I used a custom prompt with lots of different bits of context (git status, node environment, python environment, Kubernetes context, etc). With Hyper it's been fairly easy for me to create a local plugin that renders a statusbar with those bits of context. It's built with React, CSS, etc, so personally the ability to easily adjust and create is super nice.

Two things I miss from iTerm2 are infinite scrollback and the ability to search output with Command-F. I would assume there's a plugin out there to handle searching, I just haven't looked that far into it yet.

Performance of Hyper 2 was adequate enough for me to switch. I'm interested to see how Hyper 3 compares.

I'm also interested in iTerm2 3.3, which overhauls the iTerm2 UI.

tl;dr - small customizations add up. It's basically the same migration as when I moved from Sublime Text to Atom (though I use VS Code now)

[mwexler]

For those wondering, HTML/JS/CSS terminal. https://hyper.is/ gives more useful introduction.

[nailer]

I've been using Hyper 3 Canary for a while, if you're on Windows it's a MASSIVE difference from previous versions - all the normal stuff you expect to work (select to copy, right click paste, rendering, readline shortcuts etc) works (with a little tweaking, see below). It's definitely usable as a daily driver.

I've been using Windows Terminal in the last 24 hours and it still has some major bugs. While I'd say Fluent Terminal is the best in terms of being lightweight and feature filled, and Alacritty for raw power if you have big shell workloads, Hyper 3 is pretty damn good and worth a try.

Sane defaults:

Use pwsh (not cmd, that's the Windows equivalent of launching 70's Bourne shell on a *nix box):

    shell: "C:\\Program Files\\PowerShell\\6\\pwsh.exe",
    shellArgs: [],

Normal new tab, close window keys, make readline keys work:

    keymaps: {
      "tab:new": "ctrl+t",
      // Also known as 'close tab'
      "pane:close": "ctrl+w",
      // Bug workaround for https://github.com/zeit/hyper/issues/2873
      "editor:movePreviousWord": "",
      "editor:moveNextWord": ""
    },

[sirtoffski]

My choices are as follows.

* Linux:

# Tilix - probably the best option in terms of performance, customization, looks and features.

https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/

# Extraterm - in my experience the best electron-based terminal emulator in terms of performance. It has some neat features too. I catch myself using it more often than Tilix.

https://github.com/sedwards2009/extraterm

* Windows:

# CMDer - pretty much the only option. Has everything one needs, even built in bash on Windows. Useful on Windows 7 PCs at work that don't have WSL or admin rights to install more stuff.

https://github.com/cmderdev/cmder

* MacOS

# Plain old built in terminal is actually nice ;)

# Extraterm is alright too, but it's electron based and the old mac-mini does not really like it.

# iTerm 2 - never got around to fully configuring it, but everyone swears by it.

https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2

[y4mi]

cmdr/conemu's copy paste is broken on my work pc.

i tried all available copy-paste options (i think there were 4?). none worked. also, the screen keeps flickering with cmdr.

probably a byproduct from the cheap hardware or virus scanner... so hyper won by default.

i'm looking forward to the new windows terminal though. it'll hopefully get rid of that atrocity.

[qpiox]

What's the point of using hypertext-(web)-standard-oriented multimedia-capable framework to create an application that just shows plain text (ok, plain text + 16 colors + bold).

Why would one package a 50MB terminal, packing stuff that will never be needed in a terminal.

It would make sense if they were to spend all that effort to create a terminal-based web browser.

[echelon]

I thought this was the Rust HTTP client/server [1]. I've never heard of this.

When two notable projects share the same name, it's confusing. One of these projects should consider rebranding.

[1] https://hyper.rs

[nat]

I don't think there's all that much overlap between people who use Rust and people who think a terminal written in javascript is a good idea.

[mrskitch]

I'm a daily user of Hyper. There has been some gripes of pretty basic things like scrolling and resizing. These aren't showstoppers for me, however I only do pretty basic operations in a terminal (some server maintenance, git commands, and basic file operations).

The big downside I see to using the GPU for this is that it is such a hit to battery life. I was an avid iTerm user, but noticed that when I had it running I only get ~2 hours of usable battery time, even when it was just backgrounded. I hope that Hyper doesn't have this same issue -- will keep a close eye on it.

[FennNaten]

I tried hyper v2 recently, took some time to fiddle with plugins and config everything to my liking. It was usable, though missing the ability to launch different shells in different tabs (I'm a windows user, so being able to have a git bash tab, a cmd tab, a powershell tab, a wsl tab, etc. is kind of a must). This morning I was prompted to upgrade to hyper v3, I clicked yes, it refreshed. All my plugins and configs were gone. No prior warnings, no suggested upgrade path, just full wipeout. I uninstalled hyper and went back to cmder.

[msavelyev]

Here is my comparison of terminal typing latencies on mac.

https://imgur.com/yFDuVpR

Terminal.app is still going to by my go-to terminal

[eberkund]

Command prompt on Windows is pretty fast but Git Bash is still unusably slow. I guess I'll try again next major release.

[thosakwe]

Honestly speaking, I started using Hyper again this week after 3.0.0 came out, and I like it a lot.

I'm not really sure if there's any actual benefit to using it as opposed to the regular Mac terminal, but the colors are bit easier on my eyes at night.

The only thing I'm missing is the ability to move tabs around.

[1f97]

why not use iTerm if on OS X?

[thatguyagain]

If you are a developer and using hyper, what language do you work with the most?

[nailer]

JS/TS. Occasionally Python or C#.

[konart]

>Disable VSCode type checking

okay?

[lprd]

Aside from the plethora of themes and other visual niceties, can anyone explain to be the appeal of Hyper when less expensive, more performant alternatives exist?

A terminal written in Electron seems just silly to me...

[qpiox]

Well, LaTeX is also Turing complete, so I wonder why has no-one tried programming a terminal in it. It would be fun to install 1GB of TeX packages to be able to open a terminal.

[nkkollaw]

I've been waiting for Hyper to get reordable tabs (which to me is kind of a basic feature).

I wonder if this version will finally introduce this functionality.

[Per_Bothner]

May I suggest DomTerm (https://domterm.org)? It has builtin tabs and tiling, which can dragged and reordered with the mouse. It works very nicely (using the GoldenLayout package).