Terminal (how improve)

I like terminal, in haiku terminal is fast and very ugly.

Keyboard:

  • How changing font to hacker?
  • How switch keyboard to next prew tab? (how switch next window if i glue or join it)
  • How increase size of font
  • Is possible set transparent background? for example 40%
  • mc is usefull, but no have norton commander mode (half box and half terminal) meybe creating this ideas?

When I dowload package pkgman i not see how many second to ending download packages.

I have trouble with ~ when i hit this nothing happened

Well, mate, just read the user guide and the docs, open the preferences panel (magic happens there!), and you will get answer for 90% of your questions, you don’t really have to open a thread for everything.

But TLDR: guide, guide(maybe guide), guide, no way, docs.

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why this ideas not in menu and keyboard shortcut

Too long, nobody would read it, i assume.
But it isnt impossible to do it, just nobody did it yet.

@extrowerk: You put it very politely. Standard computer operating procedure is “Read the Manual”. I know everyone wants a shortcut (put the manual under your pillow and sleep on it), but I personally have very little patience with people that do not do some research on an issue they are having before asking for help.

For what it is worth.

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My quick addition:

  • What extrowerk said.
  • What extrowerk said.
  • What extrowerk said.
  • In addition to what extrowerk said: Haiku is opensource, feel free to make any enhancements you see fit. I personally like transparent terminals. But I have other improvements that I wish to work on before working on this.
  • What extrowerk said.

Perhaps try using a verbose flag with pkgman. I’m not sure if it has one, I haven’t tried or really cared. If it doesn’t exist, feel free to add it.

As for ~, did you try hitting [tab] immediately afterwards? I have no issues with the ~ as the home shortcut. It works as I expect it to.

As for Haiku’s terminal being fast, that’s because it doesn’t do transparency. Ricing is a resource hog. Cool features are often a trade-off with performance. I don’t think terminal is ugly. But then again I’ve set my preferences. Fonts, colors, etc. Check them out. There’s a lot that you can customize Haiku with. But you’re going to have to look at the preferences. Many apps have preferences within their menus, as does the OS at large as can be found in the preferences menu in Deskbar.

Nothing? The ~ character wasn’t echoed back to the screen, like any normal character, or it was echoed back and that wasn’t what you were expecting?

Anyway … may have a bug here, though not in Terminal. Here’s what I see:

  1. Type in “r” “~” “a” … get “r~a”
  2. Open Keymap preference utility, see “Select dead keys” item “Tilde trigger” set to “~”
  3. Set it to “<none>”, close Keymap.
  4. Open Keymap, set Tilde trigger to “~” - as it was before.
  5. Type in “r” “~” “a” … get “rã”.

What this suggests to me is that “<none>” is actually the default in practice, until Keymap starts writing out explicit values. I didn’t succeed in figuring out just exactly where that happens - it appeared to me that Keymap could write its “Keymap settings” file and still not interfere with the default behavior, but … I have only so many fresh installs to work with. Anyway, set those “triggers” to “<none>”, and Terminal and everything else should start behaving more normally.

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The Tilde Tribulation has a FAQ entry.

Second idea for package
powerline with git https://fedoramagazine.org/add-power-terminal-powerline/
is no necessary python version.

for ~
is too complicated
i need cp file ~
no other char after ~

This behavior: rtfm was the reason why i left Linux (back in 2000) and joind in BeOS - sad to see the same development in Haiku…
I think everyone was a beginner once and he was happy so get help also this ment that the “pros” need to tell things 10 tausend times… :frowning:

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I don’t really see how a “open the preferences brah!” is the same as “RTFM”.

The questions doesn’t even dive under the hood, where the differences between Haiku and other OS would play a significant role. I have seen some Terminal clients already, and according my experiences, changing it settings happens mostly in their prefpanel, like in Haiku.
But YMMV.

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No. Having things written down in wikis and a user guide means not having to type out the same thing a thousand times. Posting a link to it should suffice, in case the document isn’t a link directly on the user’s Desktop anyway…

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Just “RTFM” is rude when the question is not obvious.
But look carefully at the second part of miqlas reply:

open the preferences panel (magic happens there!), and you will get answer for 90% of your questions

There is actually an answer here. So it was not just RTFM. This is an important difference.

when someone does not take the 10 seconds it requires to find this, why should we spend the time for them? Asking a question without spendin a few seconds doing your own research is also not nice, and can ruin the community just as well as people just replying RTFM without any extra info would.

Anyway, there was a misunderstanding as the original poster is actually looking for keyboard shortcuts. These should also be mentionned in the user guide. And let’s see, indeed they are:
https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/fr/keyboard-shortcuts.html#terminal

Not all the needs are covered, and a shortcut for changing font size would indeed be nice (I use this a lot on linux and have it on control + mousewheel there)

As for a Norton-like utility, you may try BeFAR: GitHub - HaikuArchives/BeFAR: A filemanager for Haiku. Classic NortonCommander look with modern multithreading inside.

My favorite terminals (urxvt, xterm) outside of Haiku use man pages and config files. Perhaps @nerd is used to this. I think it was another of his posts that mentioned i3wm (tiling window manager), which I also use. There’s really not much in the way of prefs panels there. Just man pages and config files. Coming from a man-page/config-file world to a mostly GUI prefs world can be confusing at first. Our system is much more intuitive, so a little bit of RTM, mixed with a welcome and nudging in the right direction is appropriate here. I see nothing wrong with how this was handled. “I see you came from an RTFM world. Welcome to ours. Have you checked out the Preferences in GUI? Our docs are warm and friendly. Have you browsed them yet?”

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I seem to remember BeOS had an app that dealt with handling keyboard shortcuts by mapping them to applications and other commands and scripts. It was similar to QuickKeys for Mac. I’m not sure if it was OSS, or got updated for Haiku. I can’t seem to find it anymore. Do we have something like this? All of my query in Google and our webpages seem to come up with related content, but not quite on target.

SpicyKeys was converted into our Preferences->Shortcuts, but it can only run commands, not send messages directly to applications. Well, you can combine it with hey, I guess.

In this particular case anyways, it makes sense to add the shortcuts to Terminal instead of hacking up something.

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They already exist ALT+‘+’ ALT+‘-’

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I’ve started to add a shell argument for calling the Terminal and setting the initial working directory. There are times I don’t want the default working directory, such as when calling Terminal with a Preferences->Shortcuts key combo. The default working directory there is “/”, which isn’t very useful. This could have uses elsewhere that I haven’t thought of.

The syntax will be:
$ Terminal -w /boot/home/
Or:
$ Terminal --working-directory /boot/home/
This example will set the initial working directory in Terminal to /boot/home/

I have the argument implemented in Arguments.h and Arguments.cpp. I also have the -h/–help updated to reflect the new argument. Next step is getting TermApp.cpp and TermApp.h fleshed out for the new command. I already have the new argument being received by TermApp.* I hope to have the rest of it working within a week.

I think this feature was present in BeOS.

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Great work on the working directory idea… but why not just call a script to do what you want? That would be faster.