Termkit - Graphical Terminal

Termkit is an interesting project that focus on the improvement of terminal.

The UNIX terminal we use right now is established in the time of mainframe.

It is still powerful because it's simplicity and ability to script. The terminal output can be pipelined as input to other programs, and the command can be easily scripted and recognized by programs. Unlike GUI, it's hard to script the simple action like: click this red button and open this file. However, because the command is used by both human and machine. It is pretty unfriendly for beginner and unfriendly in terms of today's UI design. The target of termkit is adding a visual layer for terminal. like we can output the command in different color, the folder and files type with icon, autocomplete with commands and tooltip of command switches.

The structure is like this:

input => process => output for program
||
termkit => output for human

and termkit is using webkit for visual presentation, and node.js for glue the process with webkit.

Install:

install node.js , npm

npm install mime (for webkit to distinguish content type)

git clone https://github.com/unconed/TermKit.git --recursive

run the termkit demean

cd TermKit/Node; node nodekit.js

run client

cd Termkit/Build; unzip Termkit.zip; open Termkit.app


This project is still on an early stage. But it show an different aspect of GUI improvement. Like an different approach of sikuli.
https://github.com/unconed/TermKit