Terminal Troubles
I have finally gotten to the point in Phoo’s development that I am ready to set up the web interface.
I chose xterm.js for the terminal interface because I intend for Phoo to be able to be run in Nodejs as well as in the browser, but I don’t really use Nodejs much, so I wanted to have a simulated terminal to run it in.
It took me a while to set up the terminal so that it came up properly. I then had the problem of how to get input from the user. I searched around for xterm.js addons and I found local-echo, made by a guy named Ioannis Charalampidis. With a few patches (#24, #30, and #34) I had a little shell running. It seemed to work well enough with just a simple echo backend (not actually invoking Phoo), but I quickly encountered a few more problems:
Issue #25
The first line is being duplicated in the view every time you press a key, but the actual input buffer is fine, as shown by the red text. I think this is just some off-by-one typo, but it has been quite a problem.
Issue #50
This one was completely new:
What happened here is that I just typed the text (in red), and then pressed enter. With the cursor on the last line, it works (the top part), it works fine. But with the cursor not on the last line (I put it in the middle of the b’s) it assumes it is on the last line and in doing so clobbers over however many lines of input on the subsequent lines. This is baaaaaad. To be honest I actually spent more time trying to fix this than working on the actual web app for a day or two.
As a side note I also noticed another issue (#51) where the up/down keys didn’t behave as I expected and changed the history regardless of what line you were on. Really annoying and takes some time to get used to, but not a priority.
These two issues practically make the entire interface totally unusable and I’m back to square zero.
Not to mention that there hasn’t been an official release of local-echo since 2018, so I had to manually cobble together a pseudo-‘build’ that works with xterm.js version 4. I probably broke something in there.
Hoefully either me or someone else will fix these issues.
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