Show HN: Embed a real Linux terminal on your website

DemiGuru•about 2 hours ago

By no means am I trying to troll here, I'm genuinely asking: why? What purpose does this serve that I'm missing?

raboukhalil•about 2 hours ago

The use case is for tutorials and documentation pages. sandbox.bio embeds that terminal in all its bioinformatics tutorials and people find it useful to have an environment where you don't need to set anything up before you start learning. So I wanted to make it easy for others to embed a similar environment in their training materials.

hk1337•about 2 hours ago

I don't think there is much use to it other than fun little gimmick.

To that end, I could see it being sort of fun to run like "ls" and see the list of post categories, then do like "ls posts/" to see all the general posts, then "cat posts/i-am-a-post.txt" to read the post.

raboukhalil•about 2 hours ago

A few weeks ago, I came across a blog post with 5 git tips. I would have loved having an embedded terminal with some mock repos preloaded with the exact situation. That's the kind of use case I'm aiming at, not just the basic commands!

rvz•about 2 hours ago

I don't see a point to this. Even the post itself it looks half-complete and somewhat broken and of low quality.

In fact it appears that this post was subject to an upvote ring to quickly reach the front page with little of value in itself.

So I am very suspect of this post.

raboukhalil•about 2 hours ago

Wow tough crowd, can you expand on why it looks broken and low quality?

dummydummy1234•about 2 hours ago

From my perspective it does not tell me how it works, or the give examples of why you would use it?

Is it a actual Linux kernel + filesystem under the hood?

Or did you just use the standard utilities compiled for wasm,

how does network access work (assume it doesn't because of coors)

Can you run non-wasm programs? How do entry points work - what about ctrl-c and interrupts for long running programs.

You do not discuss any of this and it seems half baked.

(This coming from someone who has explored how to do this for a vscode in browser editor playground)

ranger_danger•42 minutes ago

Please don't get discouraged, people who are rude are just projecting their own troubles onto others. The documentation/tutorial concept is a great idea in my opinion.

Whenever I see a new command-line tool advertised, I always wish I could try it right away without having to download/compile it, which isn't always easy.

randomblock1•about 1 hour ago

How exactly is this different from something like v86? It's definitely easier to embed but also not as customizable. Like if I don't need bioinformatics stuff, can I just exclude that?

raboukhalil•about 1 hour ago

Yes it's powered by v86! I just wanted it to be easier to embed and come pre-built with lots of bioinformatics tools. You don't actually have to exclude the bioinformatics tools because v86 doesn't actually load tools unless you call them on the command-line. But when you embed, you can also preload the tools you will use so they load faster the first time they're called.

Show HN: Embed a real Linux terminal on your website

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