Show HN: Wave – Modern Open-Source Terminal (macOS and Linux) (github.com)

I’m not in the market for a new terminal right now, but I dig your announcement: you explain the license, the languages in the stack, and the future revenue model, which are my first questions whenever evaluating something like this.

"A open-source, cross-platform, modern terminal"

"Wave Terminal works with MacOS and Linux (preliminary)."

> terminal DevEx across the board and fix all sorts of terminal micro-frustrations

I believe you believe this such a thing exists - I'd like to read/hear your thoughts on this - in my bubble of system administration, I'm not sure I do feel the pain/unique value proposition (not saying it doesn't exist).

> remote file editor, markdown viewer, image viewer, CSV viewer, and a ChatGPT interface

not sure I'd even want something of this be in my terminal at all, for example and cannot imagine why it's a big deal (would like read real life stories again)

"Cross-platform" but works only with MacOS and Linux, you should change the wording until it is cross-platform.

> We don’t require an email, login, or payment to use our terminal (it is free as in speech and as in beer).

This excites me. I was excited to try a new terminal last week and I had to sign up. I wouldn't do that, so I went back to the default macOS one. I'll give Wave Term a try!

It's clear you have put a lot of thought into the product and its delivery after reading your message above -- it is noted and appreciated!

Did you really call your company "Command Line Inc."? That's awesome!

Initial thought: meh, do we really need another terminal? Fzf, etc kinda do everything...

Views site: 'oooh' (audible)

Well done, my friend. How wonderful!

Looks neat. A screenshot or video would be much appreciated.

> What if your command line terminal could display more than just text? That’s crazy right (I can hear the screams of thousands of graybeard sysadmins).

The screams are because they remember the last... 3 or 4 off the top of my head? terminals that said that, and then fell over when you tried to cat a log file because they were using javascript in the hot path for displaying text. So how's your performance and responsiveness? Throughput and latency both matter a lot here.

OTOH, full marks for actually doing FOSS and not requiring a login to use a local terminal; you've already avoided at least some of the obvious landmines that would make me run screaming.

Honest question, why does everyone uses discord for community space nowadays? What happened to product forums that could be easily found in a web search?

This looks really interesting!

My first thought is, how often does all the structure you added get in the way? With plain text (most terminals), it's easy to grab any chunk of text. With structured text, UI elements often get in the way. As an example, in Chrome's devtools console, it's frustrating that

    for (let i = 0; i < 5; ++i) { console.log(i); }

produces this

    0   VM45:1
    1   VM45:1
    2   VM45:1
    3   VM45:1 
    4   VM45:1

instead of this

    0
    1
    2
    3
    4

When I try to copy the text. Does Wave run into this kind if issue?

I'm in the same boat as many -- not particularly excited by the idea of a new terminal, but curious enough to take a look and (unusually) a smidge interested after seeing the website. Well done, you've got further with me than most "reinvent the terminal" projects :).

Issue 88 is a blocker, though, I'm afraid. I may be monolingual, but I still need to be able to use "international" characters.

In the interests of being interested, I did install the cask and I have some feedback :P.

I have four symbols printed on my (Macbook Pro, UK) keyboard that don't render in the output: "±§€£". Curiously, they do render in the input.

My profile files are apparently too big for Wave to process. So I ssh'd to another machine and was slightly disconcerted to see it installing software on first connection? Not something I expected, I'm afraid.

In conclusion: I can't use it, and I'm not sure I want to if it's going to automatically install software on other machines.

thanks, i’ve wanted someone to build something very similar to this for a while!

Would love to get any suggestions for what people would like to see rendered inline in the terminal. Things like graphs, audio/video streams, filesystem view (that supports drag&drop from your local machine), graphviz, pdfs. Maybe a graphical way to view a JIRA or Github issue and add a comment? Visual diff? Let me know what you think?

I think I ran into this same bug: https://github.com/wavetermdev/waveterm/issues/161

I try to cd and it just leaves me in ~.

Using on mac.

Looks cool, but obviously pretty limited use when you can't cd. :-)

why is a terminal venture backed

I wish Windows had as many good terminals as MacOS does.

170+ MB resident after subtracting shared pages to show a single terminal. Added a couple more tabs and it grew to 200 without any other interactions. seems like a lot to me.

Interestingly enough, I had this recommended to me by a friend within the past month.

For those that use it, is there any reason for me to switch from gnome-terminal?

> We’re proudly built on Electron (just like VSCode, Slack, and Discord) with all of the network code and heavy lifting done in a local Go backend. This enables us to deliver a consistent cross-platform experience and the ability to leverage high-quality web components for our UI and plugins.

For my curiosity, why electron in a day when Tauri exists, or Wails since you seem to already be in the golang ecosystem?

I can see this is built on Electron.

It has tabs, but I'm using the i3 tiling window manager and Alacritty. This setup basically removes the need for tabs, so any terminal app with tabs would essentially get in the way.

I switch between windows with the keyboard.

Downloaded the MacOS application and gave it a go. Tried to add a connection to a remote FreeBSD server, using ssh key auth, and got an error:

error connecting to remote: invalid packet received from mshell client: raw[Bad : modifier in $ '~'.]

Also tried the default at setup 'sudo' for local, but the window to input the password wouldn't keep focus, so I could never input the password.

I tried it, it’s nice overall, I thought it’s CPU intensive but it turned out it’s because I have htop running in wave terminal, running it outside however seems to be normal. My only criticism would be the UI, it’s clunky and I loathe the side-menu design in sites let alone in my everyday terminal, especially when there’s a menu on top already, and the logo is there despite if you tried to hide the menu, additionally, the whole “prompt-looking” design at the bottom isn’t great either, would prefer to have it on top and the history just go on the bottom instead, but those are my personal preference from 5min test.

Love this. Though I was cautious initially - just the OSS route with "true" free was very welcome. Out of curiosity - I was surprised there was no mention of Warp.dev here (which seemed to be making waves with all that funding. Pun unintended). Again no need to mention them as this is about you but just curious given all their (and other modern terminal apps) touting their own modernity.

Why are there no native apps anymore today? Why does everyone ride the Electron bloatware?