I'm curious how you came to the conclusion that naming it 'screen' was the best thing for your project?
It's unusual to see so many negative comments on a new project announcement and yet you persist and even double down with a sarcastic "thanks for your feedback" reply.
aarondf · 38d ago
Sure I can explain it a bit.
I named it screen because the main class is called screen. It was extracted from another library to make maintenance easier. It's not a tool that can ever be used outside of a PHP project, and it has no binary. It's namespaced under SoloTerm.
A nice analogy would be a package named @clerk/auth and then everyone complaining about the package being named auth. I mean it is... but that's not really the full name or how anyone would refer to it.
Most commenters didn't understand any of that nuance and got hung up on a surface level thing that didn't really matter. It was clear to me that the suggestion didn't apply in this case so I thanked them for the feedback. I don't have to take the feedback!
Several other folks commented that it's not really an emulator but rather a renderer. I thought that was a pretty good point and something I was wrong about. So I changed the readme! I thanked them for their feedback as well.
It's no secret that HN commenters lean cynical and can miss the majors for the minors. I just don't want to fight with them! I'm grateful for feedback. Some of it I take and some I completely ignore. As everyone should!
jmholla · 38d ago
> Most commenters didn't understand any of that nuance and got hung up on a surface level thing that didn't really matter. It was clear to me that the suggestion didn't apply in this case so I thanked them for the feedback.
It's more nuanced than just that.
From your README:
> Solo provides a TUI (Text User Interface) that runs multiple processes simultaneously in separate panels, similar to tmux.
You already provide a tool similar to screen. You even call out one of its alternatives! This will lead to confusion.
Further, from another of your comments [0]:
> I use GNU Screen in Solo, where I also use Solo Screen, so I am aware of it.
combined with
> It was extracted from another library to make maintenance easier.
Looking at the code, Solo is the library you extracted it from. You built a technology on top of an existing, well-known project. Then, you extracted some of your code from it and reused the project's name that your tool leverages in that related library.
This is the first way in which your analogy is not sufficient to support your position.
The second is there is no common, well-known, age-old utility called auth in the auth space for people to co-opt.
To quote duskwuff [1] again [2]:
> They're both pieces of software which implement or interact with terminal emulators; I think some deconfliction is warranted here.
Given the context, I don't think namespacing it is a sufficient approach to reducing ambiguity. Especially since screen is often referred to without GNU.
As for this reason:
> I named it screen because the main class is called screen.
Saying you named it screen because the main class was called that isn’t really a justification - especially when you named the class in the first place.
The willful reuse of the utility's name that powers your code and pithy gratitudes all over this thread, to me, send a message of disrespect for the community at large.
Kudos to you for taking all the heat and handling it gracefully.
Perhaps adding a screenshot or video to the README.md showing what it does could help people understand it better.
aarondf · 38d ago
Thanks! I know it's probably bizarre behavior to not debate at all in the comments, but man, life is short.
Good note on the screenshot. There are some code samples but I'll think if there's a way to add a visual. It's tough cause it's just a library that you consume in PHP! But I'll noodle nonetheless.
aarondf · 39d ago
Thanks for all the feedback! I've updated the readme to use the word "renderer" rather an "emulator."
Gonna stick with the name screen though
No comments yet
whalesalad · 39d ago
script kiddies are now going to have high-fidelity shells with 256 colors for when they pwn you and get root on your godaddy drupal install
sidenote: screen is a terrible name for this as there is already gnu/screen (colloquially referred to as screen) which has 38 years head start - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Screen
also til screen is older than me
aarondf · 39d ago
I am also older than you then, probably
No comments yet
electroly · 39d ago
I'm a little confused--is it an interactive terminal? Or is it more like an ANSI renderer where you are producing a single static image of the final result of printing a series of bytes? I don't see any JavaScript to hint at interactivity.
aarondf · 39d ago
Nope. Not interactive. It's a library you can use inside of PHP to implement a virtual screen. The readme has some pretty thorough details!
jmholla · 39d ago
I don't think you can call this a terminal emulator then.
aarondf · 39d ago
Maybe not!
Help me understand then. What would you call a library that parses ANSI codes, handles scrolling, screen movement, clearing, resets, etc?
electroly · 39d ago
Perhaps something along the lines of an "ANSI terminal renderer library"? I think "render" helps suggest that it's handling the display but that the library consumer still has to handle interactivity and any UI chrome. The consumer is the terminal emulator app and this component is the renderer.
aarondf · 39d ago
Cool, thanks!
anthk · 39d ago
ANSI/VT100 renderer.
A full terminal emulator would connect to a tty interface, run subshells and so on.
aarondf · 39d ago
Nice, thanks!
atarian · 39d ago
I was hoping for an actual desktop app powered by PHP, which would be really cool having PHP as a desktop runtime.
Lol, what? Haven't heard of this...
What's your experience with nativePHP?
While i am a defender of modern (!) php for web applications, this does sound rather weird. But also interesting. Thanks for the link.
I wonder though how "native" this is? Glancing over the docs it seems to be built upon tauri / electron? Not as native as i expected, but probably more native than most people would dare to think about...
aarondf · 39d ago
I haven't used it for anything, but it is developed by some friends of mine. It's certainly a novel approach! And they got it working on iOS too
noduerme · 39d ago
Lol indeed... I also still love PHP. For most small apps that's my go to backend, because who needs to worry about keeping Node running on some server you forgot about 2 years ago? And it's a fully modern language.
I'm delighted that there's some kind of desktop API here. On the one hand, the fact that it's talking with an Electron shell seems sort of magical. But it begs questions like, why wouldn't I just use a fully JS stack? And... since I've never created a graphical app in PHP before, would this be the right time to start?
noduerme · 39d ago
I'd also say ...patterns like this that return the object you modified in PHP weird me out, even though they're common in JS going back to JQuery:
>>
Dialog::new()
->title('Select a file')
->open();
It's an interesting "modern"-ish design choice, but it doesn't feel very PHP-ish. $dialog = new Dialog('title') followed by $dialog->open() would feel more sane.
9dev · 39d ago
That heavily depends on the framework you use. Laravel uses call chains a lot, and with PHP 8.4 (or even 8.3?) you can chain on new:
new Dialog()->title('Select a file')->open();
noduerme · 39d ago
Just from a high level, chains on 'new' are actually kind of awful. They're bad in a world like JS where lots of classes need to call async functions to spin up, but they're desperately worse in PHP where you really have to consider everything to be a blocking call. Something basic like this could easily hang a whole thread if, e.g. the title chose to read from a remote file. And it would be quite hard to tell what was hanging it. This is when it feels like PHP is getting out over its skis. I understand the desire to keep up with the Joneses, but there's no real penalty to writing your example in three lines rather than one. It's not really functional either way, and it's not especially debuggable either.
9dev · 39d ago
How would it make a difference if you split the statements up? A bad API is a bad API, and I’m pretty sure you can design one in any language (e.g. hide a while (true) within an innocuous method). The way to trace it down is the same in PHP as elsewhere, too—use a debugger. All that said, just don’t design shitty APIs and give your methods useful names.
An advantage of being able to chain calls are fluent expressions that you can return immediately, for example from arrow functions or match expressions, which definitely makes for easier to read code.
noduerme · 39d ago
I can't think of a lot of examples where I'd want to call:
new API()->object->method()->subResult
particularly if the API might block. But I can think of a lot of reasons I wouldn't want to see that in my codebase. Usually starting with the fact that
try {
$api = new API();
}
should have a catch after it.
For local stuff, fine, if you want to write that way. I don't find it eminently more readable than seeing a variable created and employed. And I'd like to see the line number the error was thrown on, if I'm reading error logs in production.
duskwuff · 38d ago
For what it's worth, blocking might not be an issue in the future. There's some discussion on the PHP mailing list about adding async capabilities to the language.
noduerme · 38d ago
That would be a welcome language feature... my only question would be, how? Node accomplishes it by basically deferring things throughout the main loop. PHP has no main loop; it's not a webserver. The PHP paradigm is terribly ugly but very predictable in one way: You just rely on Apache or Nginx to spin up and kill a new PHP process with each call. In order for a call to last long enough to return something async, you can't rely on checking it the next cycle. There is no next cycle. So anything "async" basically blocks at the end, unless PHP sprouts its own endless loop the way Node does. And then you probably don't want more than one of them running. So it runs contrary to the paradigm.
Many years ago (see my profile), I wrote a PHP socket server that worked a little bit like Node does. The server itself was a CLI daemon. The webserver sent all the API calls to a normal PHP script that acted as a dispatcher. If the dispatcher saw that the daemon wasn't running, it would call the endpoint itself, block and return a result. If the daemon was running, it would accept an external socket connection to the user and keep itself alive, and open an internal socket to the daemon to route the user's API calls through, which would end up in a queue held by the daemon. The daemon responded to the dispatcher over the internal socket, and the dispatcher sent the results to the user as they came in over the external websocket. Thus it went from one PHP process per call to one PHP process per user, kept alive as long as the daemon was running. I actually think this was niftier in some ways than Node, because no one user could hang the whole server - only their own thread. This was a semi-solution for async calls in PHP.
And, if you want or need to spawn new PHP processes as workers that chew on lots of data, and wait for them to send messages back, you can already do that in a multitude of different ways... as long as the main process waits for them, or else aborts.
In any case, blocking API calls inside a multi-part single line of code are lazy and an invitation to disaster.
pocketarc · 39d ago
Sibling mentioned nativephp, but PHP-GTK[0] was also a thing in the past!
I am aware modern PHP is actually pretty good, but having grown up with PHP in the 2000s I can't help but get chills up my spine every time I read '$nonWebThing written in PHP'
djfivyvusn · 39d ago
I've seen massive cli apps and services written in PHP, it's actually pretty good for that sort of thing and given no build or compile step the devex is quite nice.
There's trade offs of course but for things where disk or network is the bottleneck it performs just fine.
zerr · 39d ago
And Delphi for PHP.
aarondf · 39d ago
Alas
felbane · 39d ago
...would it?
I guess maybe if it was PHP8 only...
mrweasel · 39d ago
Didn't we have this back in 2001. I seems to remember that we kicked a guy of our project because he installed one of the PHP consoles on our Solaris box, which basically gave it the same rights as the Apache user.
aarondf · 39d ago
Not sure, I was 12
codetrotter · 39d ago
11 at the time here. For me it would be another 10 years or so before I saw a Solaris box or even knew what one was.
I did encounter, and try, Linux much sooner. But didn’t really “get it” either at the time. Like, I understood that it was neat and different. I installed Mandriva Linux on my machine when I was 13 or 14 or so, but I was lacking any books or guidance to understand how to do anything aside from opening the GUI programs that was on it.
It would take all until the age of 18, when I started at the university, before I got the help I needed in order to understand Linux and editing config files on Linux and writing my own scripts and programs on Linux.
johnisgood · 39d ago
> I installed Mandriva Linux on my machine when I was 13 or 14 or so, but I was lacking any books or guidance to understand how to do anything aside from opening the GUI programs that was on it.
It was Gentoo for me at the age of 13 that a random Hungarian guy from Finland helped install through SSH.
I did try SUSE around the age of 11, nothing interesting though, the interesting stuff came after Gentoo. :D
cship2 · 39d ago
To be fair in 2001 php was the underdog of tech stack. It has just got ride of the PHP (Personal Home Page) taste in the language mouth. So wouldn't be surprised if some company running solaris would kick him off.
bshacklett · 37d ago
Interesting. I remember php being on top at that time, with JSP just starting to take over. I was in a rural area, though, and our local developers were far more influential than any internet community during that period.
jamal-kumar · 39d ago
It's still a mainstay of certain malware for sure. Just pop in 'php shell' to your favorite search engine, and it's basically all stuff for either red teaming or shenanigans
donatj · 38d ago
Oh, interesting!
I started a very similar project probably ten years ago and just never got it to a very usable state. My idea at the time was based in wanting to be able to write tests for the final output of scripts full of control codes.
I am very excited to see this and to play with it!
aarondf · 38d ago
Check out the ComparesVisually trait! (It's described in the readme too)
It takes some text, outputs it to iTerm and takes a screenshot. Then it takes the same output, runs it through the Screen class, outputs it, and takes a screenshot. Then we compare the screenshots pixel by pixel. So freakin fun
MrBuddyCasino · 38d ago
Does it render to plain text or styled HTML? Not quite clear from the readme.
throwaway150 · 39d ago
Commendable work but note that this is not a terminal emulator. This is a terminal renderer.
blueflow · 38d ago
What functionality does a program need to emulate to be a terminal emulator?
doubled112 · 38d ago
Interactive use.
blueflow · 38d ago
You just made that up, didn't you
doubled112 · 37d ago
Everything is made up initially, isn’t it?
aarondf · 39d ago
Thank you!
cf100clunk · 39d ago
Nice, but your terminal app has a name collision with the long lived ''screen'' terminal multiplexer utility:
To me, name collisions are only a big deal if the app or project exists in very similar use case scenarios. In this case, I'd say confusion could easily happen if ''screen'' replaced ''screen'' in the path or a call. How about "Soloterm"? Have you thought of others?
jeffhuys · 39d ago
Not only confusion, but inability to just install on mac/linux, right? I believe both come with screen by default…
Edit: let me actually think a bit before commenting - it would probably just install, but then you run screen and you might or might not get your newly-installed software (so yeah confusion). Not a great first experience at worst
aarondf · 39d ago
It's a package you install into your PHP application. It's impossible for it to collide. You cannot run Solo Screen as a standalone tool.
jeffhuys · 39d ago
Heh, should’ve thought a bit longer apparently. But, in my defense, I work an office job and it’s Friday evening. Iykyk
aarondf · 39d ago
It's a package you install into your PHP application. It's impossible for it to collide.
duskwuff · 39d ago
They're both pieces of software which implement or interact with terminal emulators; I think some deconfliction is warranted here.
aarondf · 39d ago
> Question: can you call GNU screen from within screen?
No. It's literally just an in memory buffer that you interact with from PHP.
It seems to me that you can, from within the terminal that it provides, I supposed depending on what shell you run within the emulator. Your example even shows you running tail, so I expect it's running some sort of shell I'd expect screen could be available on.
Unless, this terminal emulator is missing specific features that mean screen doesn't work in it, which would make me feel the definition has been stretched a little here.
Either way, I have to heavily agree with duskwuff's take:
> They're both pieces of software which implement or interact with terminal emulators; I think some deconfliction is warranted here.
Edit: I've learned from a different comment [0] that the latter is indeed the case. This isn't really a terminal emulator.
Thanks, good to know. You and others may have noticed some odd activities in this thread (I use Refined Hacker News and can see them) so I'm glad for your responses to my well-meant comments.
aarondf · 39d ago
Yeah someone's really got a vendetta against SA and HN right now huh? Weird stuff!
cf100clunk · 39d ago
Question: can you call GNU screen from within screen?
It's unusual to see so many negative comments on a new project announcement and yet you persist and even double down with a sarcastic "thanks for your feedback" reply.
I named it screen because the main class is called screen. It was extracted from another library to make maintenance easier. It's not a tool that can ever be used outside of a PHP project, and it has no binary. It's namespaced under SoloTerm.
A nice analogy would be a package named @clerk/auth and then everyone complaining about the package being named auth. I mean it is... but that's not really the full name or how anyone would refer to it.
Most commenters didn't understand any of that nuance and got hung up on a surface level thing that didn't really matter. It was clear to me that the suggestion didn't apply in this case so I thanked them for the feedback. I don't have to take the feedback!
Several other folks commented that it's not really an emulator but rather a renderer. I thought that was a pretty good point and something I was wrong about. So I changed the readme! I thanked them for their feedback as well.
It's no secret that HN commenters lean cynical and can miss the majors for the minors. I just don't want to fight with them! I'm grateful for feedback. Some of it I take and some I completely ignore. As everyone should!
It's more nuanced than just that.
From your README:
> Solo provides a TUI (Text User Interface) that runs multiple processes simultaneously in separate panels, similar to tmux.
You already provide a tool similar to screen. You even call out one of its alternatives! This will lead to confusion.
Further, from another of your comments [0]:
> I use GNU Screen in Solo, where I also use Solo Screen, so I am aware of it.
combined with
> It was extracted from another library to make maintenance easier.
Looking at the code, Solo is the library you extracted it from. You built a technology on top of an existing, well-known project. Then, you extracted some of your code from it and reused the project's name that your tool leverages in that related library.
This is the first way in which your analogy is not sufficient to support your position.
The second is there is no common, well-known, age-old utility called auth in the auth space for people to co-opt.
To quote duskwuff [1] again [2]:
> They're both pieces of software which implement or interact with terminal emulators; I think some deconfliction is warranted here.
Given the context, I don't think namespacing it is a sufficient approach to reducing ambiguity. Especially since screen is often referred to without GNU.
As for this reason:
> I named it screen because the main class is called screen.
Saying you named it screen because the main class was called that isn’t really a justification - especially when you named the class in the first place.
The willful reuse of the utility's name that powers your code and pithy gratitudes all over this thread, to me, send a message of disrespect for the community at large.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43439646 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43439429 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43439748
Perhaps adding a screenshot or video to the README.md showing what it does could help people understand it better.
Good note on the screenshot. There are some code samples but I'll think if there's a way to add a visual. It's tough cause it's just a library that you consume in PHP! But I'll noodle nonetheless.
Gonna stick with the name screen though
No comments yet
sidenote: screen is a terrible name for this as there is already gnu/screen (colloquially referred to as screen) which has 38 years head start - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Screen
also til screen is older than me
No comments yet
Help me understand then. What would you call a library that parses ANSI codes, handles scrolling, screen movement, clearing, resets, etc?
While i am a defender of modern (!) php for web applications, this does sound rather weird. But also interesting. Thanks for the link.
I wonder though how "native" this is? Glancing over the docs it seems to be built upon tauri / electron? Not as native as i expected, but probably more native than most people would dare to think about...
I'm delighted that there's some kind of desktop API here. On the one hand, the fact that it's talking with an Electron shell seems sort of magical. But it begs questions like, why wouldn't I just use a fully JS stack? And... since I've never created a graphical app in PHP before, would this be the right time to start?
>> Dialog::new() ->title('Select a file') ->open();
It's an interesting "modern"-ish design choice, but it doesn't feel very PHP-ish. $dialog = new Dialog('title') followed by $dialog->open() would feel more sane.
An advantage of being able to chain calls are fluent expressions that you can return immediately, for example from arrow functions or match expressions, which definitely makes for easier to read code.
new API()->object->method()->subResult
particularly if the API might block. But I can think of a lot of reasons I wouldn't want to see that in my codebase. Usually starting with the fact that
try {
$api = new API();
}
should have a catch after it.
For local stuff, fine, if you want to write that way. I don't find it eminently more readable than seeing a variable created and employed. And I'd like to see the line number the error was thrown on, if I'm reading error logs in production.
Many years ago (see my profile), I wrote a PHP socket server that worked a little bit like Node does. The server itself was a CLI daemon. The webserver sent all the API calls to a normal PHP script that acted as a dispatcher. If the dispatcher saw that the daemon wasn't running, it would call the endpoint itself, block and return a result. If the daemon was running, it would accept an external socket connection to the user and keep itself alive, and open an internal socket to the daemon to route the user's API calls through, which would end up in a queue held by the daemon. The daemon responded to the dispatcher over the internal socket, and the dispatcher sent the results to the user as they came in over the external websocket. Thus it went from one PHP process per call to one PHP process per user, kept alive as long as the daemon was running. I actually think this was niftier in some ways than Node, because no one user could hang the whole server - only their own thread. This was a semi-solution for async calls in PHP.
And, if you want or need to spawn new PHP processes as workers that chew on lots of data, and wait for them to send messages back, you can already do that in a multitude of different ways... as long as the main process waits for them, or else aborts.
In any case, blocking API calls inside a multi-part single line of code are lazy and an invitation to disaster.
[0]: https://gtk.php.net
There's trade offs of course but for things where disk or network is the bottleneck it performs just fine.
I guess maybe if it was PHP8 only...
I did encounter, and try, Linux much sooner. But didn’t really “get it” either at the time. Like, I understood that it was neat and different. I installed Mandriva Linux on my machine when I was 13 or 14 or so, but I was lacking any books or guidance to understand how to do anything aside from opening the GUI programs that was on it.
It would take all until the age of 18, when I started at the university, before I got the help I needed in order to understand Linux and editing config files on Linux and writing my own scripts and programs on Linux.
It was Gentoo for me at the age of 13 that a random Hungarian guy from Finland helped install through SSH.
I did try SUSE around the age of 11, nothing interesting though, the interesting stuff came after Gentoo. :D
I started a very similar project probably ten years ago and just never got it to a very usable state. My idea at the time was based in wanting to be able to write tests for the final output of scripts full of control codes.
I am very excited to see this and to play with it!
It takes some text, outputs it to iTerm and takes a screenshot. Then it takes the same output, runs it through the Screen class, outputs it, and takes a screenshot. Then we compare the screenshots pixel by pixel. So freakin fun
https://www.gnu.org/software/screen/manual/screen.html
Edit: let me actually think a bit before commenting - it would probably just install, but then you run screen and you might or might not get your newly-installed software (so yeah confusion). Not a great first experience at worst
No. It's literally just an in memory buffer that you interact with from PHP.
In Solo (https://github.com/soloterm/solo) we do use GNU screen though.
Unless, this terminal emulator is missing specific features that mean screen doesn't work in it, which would make me feel the definition has been stretched a little here.
Either way, I have to heavily agree with duskwuff's take:
> They're both pieces of software which implement or interact with terminal emulators; I think some deconfliction is warranted here.
Edit: I've learned from a different comment [0] that the latter is indeed the case. This isn't really a terminal emulator.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43438797#43439716