Is there a reasonably decent JavaScript library that allows me to have a reasonably terminal-y experience in the browser, so I can implement a shell? Ideally with history, autocomplete, colors, etc. - and then with the ability to add DOM nodes too, so I can click, show images, etc. Preferably no backend necessary.

Xterm?

Interesting. It seems to be really close to, well XTerm, i.e. it also uses \033[1 instead of just <b>. I wonder if there is something slightly more webb-y in addition to being a shell

I wonder if there is something slightly more webb-y

Sounds like a bug 😝

It seems like it might be easier to implement it from scratch than to fight with all the xterm / ansi compatibility

Personally I try to avoid terminals these days after investing 20 years in them. On the other hand I also try to avoid the web 😅

how else would you do a CLI? (Lemme guess, the answer is you'd avoid CLIs)

Depends on how you define CLI. We tend to think of CLIs (and even TUIs) as requiring a terminal. But if we notice that modern terminals are all implemented atop a canvas of pixels, then arguably everything I build is a CLI. Some examples: • https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/driver.love is my current favorite REPL. • https://archive.org/details/akkartik-pensieve-2022-08-29 is a less general CLI for browsing a set of text files using a command palette rather than a scrolling session of commands and responses. It seems like you can get all the behaviors we tend to look for in CLIs with very little code if we give up various intermediate levels of abstraction and just go back to drawing text on a canvas of pixels.

Thanks! Interesting thoughts, thanks!

tty

and

pty

, the core of terminals, are definitely archaic feeling. It feels even crazier as I watch modern terminals add support for sixel (which is an old hack to push images over those protocols). However, there's a ton of tools that understand how to talk with them, so starting from scratch means reinventing most of the toolchain. My approach right now to building a richer renderer/theme is to map the protocol output to an assumed semantic layer (ie red means bad, green means good, other colors are highlights). Then, themes/config target the semantic layers rather than the ANSI stuff. I figure as long as it works for 95% of the toolchain, I won't have to reinvent the world.

An old one but take a look at https://domterm.org/ If you dont care for escape sequences/interative TUIs, just a command->rich response REPL, consider Jupyter, or similar notebooks.

I did mean a REPL with tab completion, history etc, not a Unix shell. I think a bit of do it yourself is what my use case is calling for.

Do you know what language it's going to run?

Something I'm making up myself