wTerm: The WebOS Terminal Emulator

[PuffTheMagic]

I just wanted to inform all of those who do not follow me on twitter that I am working on a new Terminal application for WebOS called wTerm. wTerm is a PDK/Hybrid/Enyo terminal optimized for the TouchPad (although phone support will come down the road). wTerm features a custom 74 key virtual keyboard complete with ctrl, alt, fn, esc, arrow and function keys. wTerm is also hardware accelerated (meaning its fast) and supports customizable font sizes. More features to come!!!

You find wTerm in the Preware feeds. Please submit bug reports and feature requests to the issue tracker.

If you find this app useful and/or want to support further development please send a donation using the link below.



Here are some screenshots of wTerm running htop, irssi and mc (midnight commander):

[kayphoonstar]

Nice App!

-- Sent from my Palm Pre using Forums

[geekpeter]

looks pimp already.

[giggles]

good stuff. cant wait for the phone version.

[johnsonx42]

is this just a terminal for the local host, or does it also do telnet and ssh to other hosts?

[PuffTheMagic]

Originally Posted by johnsonx42

is this just a terminal for the local host, or does it also do telnet and ssh to other hosts?

Just for local host, but if u install openssh from optware you could ssh into any box from wterm.

[grazzt]

Love it so far, but can we customize the keyboard at all?

Would like to see the / key in its normal spot. And maybe move the tilde to the left of the 1 key, and thus the numbers would line up more properly.

[b3d0u1n]

It's good, but how about some love for portrait mode?

[PuffTheMagic]

Originally Posted by b3d0u1n

It's good, but how about some love for portrait mode?

Thats on the todo list, need to come up with a whole new layout for portrait mode and idk how I am going to do that yet.

[PuffTheMagic]

Originally Posted by grazzt

Love it so far, but can we customize the keyboard at all?

Would like to see the / key in its normal spot. And maybe move the tilde to the left of the 1 key, and thus the numbers would line up more properly.

I haven't thought about supporting custom layouts yet. The VKB code is sorta ugly having custom layouts in its current form is out of the question, maybe down the road.

I chose this layout (and to have non standard key locations for 2 of the keys) because I needed to squeeze the arrow keys somehow. Moving tilde next to the 1 will make the backspace key tiny and unusable. I suppose if people want to loose RSHIFT I can shift things around a little but that first row under the function keys is already packed and I can see much fitting there with out making the size of the keys smaller.

Also on my todo list is to make <, Left, Up, Down, > and Right behave like the Insert/Delete/Home/End/PgUp/PgDn respectively when the Fn key is held down.

There are also a lot of key bindings that are not defined yet (which I plan on having exposed in the prefs). If you want Fn+1 to be tilde that could be possible in the future.

[grazzt]

I think you could possibly lose a little from the left shift and a little from the right shift to put the / in? I type a lot of cd commands, so use the / a lot. Although if it stays where it is, I probably would get used to it.

I guess an option to add click sounds would be a nice option?

Should add, also does not work with bluetooth keyboards?

Also, fairly cpu intensive eh? Even carded its taking 30% of the cpu, and about 65% while active and running top.

Again, please dont take these as complaints, the thing rocks, seeing I usually do a fair amount in either an xterm or xterm under the ubuntu chroot (which i no longer have).

Maybe I should just post these things to the bug tracker. lol (if you want me to, I will)

[GMMan]

The app's really nice. It has a better look and feel than XTerm, plus the almost-full keyboard is really useful.

Some suggestions:
- Use images for the arrow keys (I manage to hit the key beside Left a lot of the time)
- Key repeat (Tapping the arrow keys over and over gets tiring)
- Hold modifier key in pressed mode and adjust other keys as necessary (namely Shift; it gives better visual feedback)
- Have another panel for the rest of the keyboard keys (home/end/pgup/pgdn/numpad)
- Do something about the jail (I sometimes need to run PDK apps from the terminal, and I can't do so while the jail is in effect.)

[PuffTheMagic]

Click sounds are on my mental todo list (feel free to add it to the issue tracker).
Bluetooth kb support is also on my todo list but low as it is pretty useless for terminal work.

About the CPU usage, yes it uses a lot right now. It currently polls for events, I need to change it so that it waits for events but some how the fps should still be limited. I will work on that once more basic stuff is complete.

Originally Posted by grazzt

I think you could possibly lose a little from the left shift and a little from the right shift to put the / in? I type a lot of cd commands, so use the / a lot. Although if it stays where it is, I probably would get used to it.

I guess an option to add click sounds would be a nice option?

Should add, also does not work with bluetooth keyboards?

Also, fairly cpu intensive eh? Even carded its taking 30% of the cpu, and about 65% while active and running top.

Again, please dont take these as complaints, the thing rocks, seeing I usually do a fair amount in either an xterm or xterm under the ubuntu chroot (which i no longer have).

Maybe I should just post these things to the bug tracker. lol (if you want me to, I will)

[PuffTheMagic]

Originally Posted by GMMan

The app's really nice. It has a better look and feel than XTerm, plus the almost-full keyboard is really useful.

Some suggestions:
- Use images for the arrow keys (I manage to hit the key beside Left a lot of the time)
- Key repeat (Tapping the arrow keys over and over gets tiring)
- Hold modifier key in pressed mode and adjust other keys as necessary (namely Shift; it gives better visual feedback)
- Have another panel for the rest of the keyboard keys (home/end/pgup/pgdn/numpad)
- Do something about the jail (I sometimes need to run PDK apps from the terminal, and I can't do so while the jail is in effect.)

You can add the arrow images to the issue tracker as well. If you read my previous post you will see I have plans for adding ins/home/del etc, keypad is prob not viable as it would waste so much space. Repeat is already in the issue tracker.

As for the jail, this app is unjailed.

[Grabber5.0]

Looks awesome, nice work as usual. Will have to re-enable the beta feeds and check it out.

[ggendel]

I've got a strange issue with ssh under wterm. It works fine for my Linux servers, but on OpenIndiana (Solaris), it doesn't drop into an interactive session properly. The last few lines of verbose output are:

debug1: Authentication succeeded (keyboard-interactive).
Authenticated to 10.101.1.7 ([10.101.1.7]:22).
debug1: channel 0: new [client-session]
debug1: Entering interactive session.

where it never returns the prompt. It is actually in the interactive session since it properly responds to typed commands (i.e. "exit"). So it looks like wterm doesn't turn back on keyboard echo after the password has been entered.

This server works as expected using xterm under eXecutah.

[don_falcone]

OMFG. Seems like this is the first usable & feature-complete webOS Homebrew application (for the TouchPad at least). Nice!

[PuffTheMagic]

Originally Posted by ggendel

I've got a strange issue with ssh under wterm. It works fine for my Linux servers, but on OpenIndiana (Solaris), it doesn't drop into an interactive session properly. The last few lines of verbose output are:

debug1: Authentication succeeded (keyboard-interactive).
Authenticated to 10.101.1.7 ([10.101.1.7]:22).
debug1: channel 0: new [client-session]
debug1: Entering interactive session.

where it never returns the prompt. It is actually in the interactive session since it properly responds to typed commands (i.e. "exit"). So it looks like wterm doesn't turn back on keyboard echo after the password has been entered.

This server works as expected using xterm under eXecutah.

My guess is that Solaris is sending one of the device attribute request escape codes that I haven't implemented yet. I will make sure all those are implemented for the next release. In the mean time, try setting your TERM=vt100 or vt102 before sshing and see if that helps.

[mtiberio]

the lack of a decent linux command line terminal in 2.1.0 on my pre plus (one that supported vi) was enough to make me go back to 1.4.5.1. Wterm may bring me back to the 2.1.0 fold (and maybe 2.2.4... 8^))

[PuffTheMagic]

I just added support for customizing the color scheme. This feature will be in v0.2.1, till then, check the first post for a new screenshot!