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Enlightenment Terminal Allows Video Playback, PDF Viewing

Posted by Unknown on from the symbolics-did-it-better dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The E17 Enlightenment project has released a new version of its Terminology terminal emulator. With Terminology 0.3 comes several fancy features, including the ability to preview video files, images, and PDF files from within the terminal. There's new escape sequences, inline video playback, and other features to this terminal emulator that's only built on EFL and libc."

4 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Security implications do not look good by tamyrlin · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The demo video they have look really cool and I like any idea that improves the usability of the terminal. I just hope that they have some strategies in place to minimize the security impact of adding a large amount of potentially vulnerable code to a critical service such as the terminal (e.g., using securecomp or other mechanisms to sandbox the potentially vulnerable code).

    1. Re:Security implications do not look good by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Most users are already running a file manager which decodes files willy-nilly for the purpose of thumbnailing. This is directly comparable.

      I would also have imagined that by now there are image decoding libraries which never, ever trust the contents of the file, which have limits-style protection for excessively large images, and the like. It has always boggled my mind that anyone would ever write a file decoder which trusted the file's contents. Even in a world without malware, there is still data corruption.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  2. Terminals with graphical capabilities... by phrank · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...have existed for a long time. For example the DEC dxterm supports escape sequences for drawing line, box, circle and oval primitives.
    Nonetheless I am really impressed by this newfangled Enlightenment thingy. Image previews in file listings are useful. Also horizontal and vertical splitting.

  3. Re:Seems logical.. by Dixie_Flatline · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is for people that like to work in the terminal--instead of a file browser--but still want to look at all their files.

    When the UNIX terminal was invented, there weren't a lot of things to look at other than text files. Times have changed somewhat since then.

    The terminal is often the best place to get work done, and sometimes you don't want to go into a file browser or fire up an external viewer just to look at a PDF. Being able to preview a file so you can correctly sort it into a directory, for instance, seems like a good use of this upgrade.

    In OS X, you can get something like Pathfinder that lets you manage your files graphically, but has an attached shell if you need one. This is just a more terminal-centric view of things. You can still work text-only, if you like.