Contents
.. index:: introduction
GraphTerm is a browser-based graphical terminal interface, that
aims to seamlessly blend the command line and graphical user
interfaces. The goal is to provide a fully backwards-compatible terminal
emulator for xterm. You should be able to use it just like a regular terminal
interface, accessing additional graphical features only as needed. GraphTerm builds
upon two earlier projects,
XMLTerm
which implemented a terminal using the Mozilla framework and
AjaxTerm
which is an AJAX/Python terminal implementation. (Another recent
project along these lines is TermKit.)
A GraphTerm terminal window is just a web page served from the GraphTerm server program. Multiple users can connect simultaneously to the web server to share terminal sessions. Multiple hosts can also connect to the server (on a different port), allowing a single user to access all of them via the browser. The GraphTerm server acts as a router, sending input from browser windows for different users to the appropriate terminal (pseudo-tty) sessions running on different hosts, and transmitting the terminal output back to the browser windows.
This flexible, networked implementation allows for several possible applications for GraphTerm, such as:
- an enhanced terminal that combines the command line with basic GUI operations like navigating folders, file drag-and-drop, displaying images etc.
- a web-based remote desktop that supports a simple GUI without the need for installing VNC or X-windows on the remote host
- a detachable terminal multiplexer, sort of like GNU
screenortmux- an inline data visualization tool to view output from plotting libraries like
matplotlib(like the Mathematica or iPython Notebook interface, but at the shell level).- a collaborative terminal that can be remotely accessed by multiple users simultaneously, to run programs, edit files etc.
- a simple presentation tool for webcasting images as slideshows (and receiving live feedback)
- a management console for a cluster of real or virtual hosts, with wildcard access to hosts/sessions (e.g., to manage a virtual computer lab using cloud instances),
The interface is designed to be touch-friendly for use with tablets, with tappable links and command re-use to minimize the need for a keyboard. It preserves history for all commands, whether entered by typing, clicking, or tapping. It is also themable using CSS.
Images of GraphTerm in action can be found in screenshots
and in this YouTube Video.
Here is a sample screenshot illustrating graphical gls and cat command
output using a 3D perspective theme (captured on OS X Lion, using Google Chrome).
.. index:: installation
To install GraphTerm, you need to have Python 2.6+ and the Bash
shell on your Mac/Linux/Unix computer. For a quick install, if the python
setuptools module is already installed on your system,
use the following two commands:
sudo easy_install graphterm sudo gterm_setup
(If setuptools is not installed, consider installing it using
apt-get install -y python-setuptools on Debian Linux systems
or its equivalent on other systems.)
For a manual install procedure, download the release tarball from the
Python Package Index, untar,
and execute the following command in the graphterm-<version> directory:
python setup.py install
For the manual install, you will also need to install the tornado
web server, which can be downloaded from
https://github.com/downloads/facebook/tornado/tornado-2.3.tar.gz
You can also try out GraphTerm without installing it, after
untarring the source tarball (or checking out the source from github). You can
run the server gtermserver.py in the graphterm
subdirectory of the distribution, after you have installed the tornado module
in your system (or in the graphterm subdirectory).
You can browse the GraphTerm source code, and download the development
version, at Github.
.. index:: documentation, support
Usage info and other documentation can be found on the project home page, code.mindmeldr.com/graphterm. Begin with Getting started with GraphTerm, and see the Tutorials and Talks page for more advanced usage.
You can also use the following command:
glandslide -o graphterm-talk1.md | giframe -f
to view a slideshow about GraphTerm within GraphTerm (type h for
help and q to quit)..
NEW There is a Google Groups mailing list for announcements of new releases, posting questions related to GraphTerm etc. You can also follow @graphterm on Twitter for updates.
To report bugs and other issues, use the Github Issue Tracker.
.. index:: caveats, limitations
- Reliability: This software has not been subject to extensive testing. Use at your own risk.
- Platforms: The
GraphTermclient should work on most recent browsers that support Websockets, such as Google Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. TheGraphTermserver is pure-python, but with some OS-specific calls for file, shell, and terminal-related operations. It has been tested only on Linux and Mac OS X so far.
- Current limitations:
- Support for
xtermescape sequences is incomplete.- Most features of GraphTerm only work with the bash shell, not with C-shell, due the need for PROMPT_COMMAND to keep track of the current working directory.
- At the moment, you cannot customize the shell prompt. (You should be able to so in the future.)
.. index:: credits
GraphTerm is inspired by two earlier projects that implement the
terminal interface within the browser,
XMLTerm and
AjaxTerm.
It borrows many of the ideas from XMLTerm and re-uses chunks of code from
AjaxTerm. The server uses the asynchronous Tornado web framework and the client uses jQuery.
The gls command uses icons from the Tango Icon Library, and graphical editing uses the
Ajax.org Cloud9 Editor as well as
CKEditor
The 3D perspective mode was inspired by Sean Slinsky's Star Wars Opening Crawl with CSS3.
Other packaged open source components include the Landslide presentation program and portions of the Online Python Tutorial from pythontutor.com
GraphTerm was developed as part of the Mindmeldr project, which is aimed at improving classroom interaction.
.. index:: license
GraphTerm is distributed as open source under the BSD-license.