Enlightenment Terminal Allows Video Playback, PDF Viewing

Can it do... by c0lo · 2013-03-27 00:59 · Score: 3, Interesting

Can it do all the above inside lynx? 'Cause if not, I'm going to wait a bit for the emacs module.

(grin)

(tell me again: why would someone want to do any of the above in a terminal?)

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Re:Can it do... by Ash+Vince · 2013-03-27 01:40 · Score: 5, Interesting

(tell me again: why would someone want to do any of the above in a terminal?)
After having watched the full video of its capabilities I am pretty amazed and certainly some of it will be useful.
I particularly liked things like the ability to use ls to a get a list of files but with small thumbnails next each. You were then able to select the thumbail and see a bigger preview for images and movies. I also like the ability to do things like hover over a file in a "ls" output then just click and drag it but getting a full path to the file.

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Re:Can it do... by raster · 2013-03-27 02:14 · Score: 5, Interesting

'Because I can' ... yup.
Seriously though it's zero extra code to handle video in a bg when it's already supported in Popups. It's the same object. It's supported in popups because it's helps people who use terminals for irc, email and more and when they have a link to a video stream they get easy one click access. Users of irssi have been singing terminology's praises for this. There are tonnes of legitimate normal uses of such features. You might not see it now or your usage of terminals is incredibly narrow, but many who live in them all day find these features a godsend.

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--------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------------
Re:Can it do... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-27 02:25 · Score: 2, Informative

> Because if you're working at a terminal, leaving the command-line is always a pain in the ass?
OSX has a cool feature that makes it a bit less of a pain. It has a command-line "open" tool that has the same effect as double-clicking a file in the file browser. In particular, I often use "open ." to open the current folder in the file browser.
A GUI-aware terminal is of course way cooler.
Re:Can it do... by raster · 2013-03-27 02:40 · Score: 2

Terminology also does this if it doesn't know the media file type or it's a directory and it asks a generic open tool to deal with it. ( Configurable). Thus it opens with your favorite tool or even a file manager view.

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--------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------------
Re:Can it do... by c0lo · 2013-03-27 03:20 · Score: 2

(tell me again: why would someone want to do any of the above in a terminal?)
Because if you're working at a terminal, leaving the command-line is always a pain in the ass?
Ass... mmchhh... that's not what I fancy.
But I'll grant you the point: for some terminal (ends of the body) to be worked at, this could be tremendously effective. Exempli gratia (adjust to your taste):
cd ~/MyCollection find -type f -name "*.ogg" -exec grep --video-frame-content "wild-riding|yeehaaa" {} \; | play

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Re:Can it do... by Vaphell · 2013-03-27 03:37 · Score: 2

gnome-open or xdg-open ftw
Re:Can it do... by Hatta · 2013-03-27 06:54 · Score: 2

it's helps people who use terminals for irc, email and more and when they have a link to a video stream they get easy one click access. Users of irssi have been singing terminology's praises for this
You don't need viewers integrated into the terminal for that. Just an URL aware terminal(e.g. urxvt) and something like xdg-open.
Solutions already exist that follow the UNIX philosophy. Do one thing, and do it well. Don't stick a PDF viewer into the terminal. Make a kickass terminal, and a kickass PDF viewer, and glue them together.

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Re:Just like the other cool kids by c0lo · 2013-03-27 01:02 · Score: 2, Funny

For every window manager, there's a terminal wishing it were a window manager.

Why have a window manager at all when one may have emacs?

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Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.

So by mybeat · 2013-03-27 01:12 · Score: 5, Funny

How long will it take for the "Terminology is a great OS, all that is lacking is a terminal" joke to be relevant?

Re:So by chromas · 2013-03-27 08:07 · Score: 4, Funny

Judging by the time it took to get E17 out, I'm not so sure that any of us will still be alive by then.

Security implications do not look good by tamyrlin · 2013-03-27 01:15 · 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).

Re:Security implications do not look good by drinkypoo · 2013-03-27 02:12 · Score: 2

It's no more dangerous than having those programs around for the user. Let programs run a less-enhanced terminals when they need to run one automatically, let the user launch the fancy terminal from an icon.

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Re:Security implications do not look good by tamyrlin · 2013-03-27 04:00 · Score: 2

In theory, yes. In practice no, if you consider the fact that ls might very well be exploitable through malware infested files in this scenario. (I think all sysadmins shudder at the thought that merely listing the contents of a directory with malware in it could be dangerous...)

However, there are ways around this. IIRC chrome decodes images inside a seccomp jail, causing an exploit in the image decoder to be very hard to use for anything except showing a a naughty image and eating CPU time. (I don't know if the enlightenment guys are doing this or not, but I hope they are considering it at least.)
Re:Security implications do not look good by drinkypoo · 2013-03-27 04:22 · 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.

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"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Re:Security implications do not look good by lennier · 2013-03-27 08:45 · Score: 2

Do not innovate. It is guaranteed to not be secure.
Very much so. That's the depressing reality of the Internet in 2013.
Things might be different if we had languages and platforms which didn't actively conspire against us.

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Re:Security implications do not look good by lennier · 2013-03-27 08:53 · Score: 2

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.
That's what I imagined too, but it seems like all the professional working programmers who wrote industrial-strength image parsing libraries just didn't bother to do any security checking at all and took all sorts of unsafe shortcuts. And then were really surprised to find that their 100% bulletproof code had been exploited.
I suppose I shouldn't really be surprised, given the corruption and meltdowns going on in other 'industrial strength' fields like, say, mining, or global banking -- but I always used to think that programming was a world apart, that we lived in a more ethereal plane and were a bit smarter, less easily swayed by snake oil and more honest than the average corporate executive or politician.
Seems not! Internet security is our generation's disaster - we built it, we didn't bother to check our premises, we own it. Oops!

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You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC

WOW! by Saija · 2013-03-27 01:27 · Score: 2

I am the only one impressed by the demo? I mean, it's a terminal displaying pictures, videos and letting you set that as background, don't know how util that could be but, wow! my inner child have a birthday party just seeing that demo video

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Can it access media over ssh? by hankwang · 2013-03-27 01:27 · Score: 3, Interesting

I wonder whether it works if you ssh into another machine. I have been wanting something like that while logged into my media server, which doesn't have X11 applications installed. It's not mentioned in the feature list and I can't judge whether the underlying architecture would allow tunneling these functions over ssh to a box that doesn't have enlightenment installed. I'd think that a special ssh client on the client side would suffice to have simultaneous channels for command-line data and multimedia data to the host machine.

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Re:Can it access media over ssh? by raster · 2013-03-27 02:27 · Score: 5, Informative

Sorry. Doesn't work over a remote shell. Has to be local atm. Haven't figured out how to sensibly do it remotely.

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--------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------------
Re: Can it access media over ssh? by raster · 2013-03-27 03:01 · Score: 2

I say this as the guy who wrote it... came up with the escaping side Chanel data scheme and wrote most of the library code it depends on in efl. :)

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--------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------------
Re: Can it access media over ssh? by raster · 2013-03-27 03:54 · Score: 3, Interesting

it already does uri's... just provide http://blahlahblah.com/blah instead of /path/to/file and it'll fetch it. here's the catch - that;s not useful as WHO will serve it? what URL? what webserver? won't work over ssh. wont work OVER your connection. it has to work VIA it to be feasible.
now to display a thumbnail i could have tyls generate small low res thumbs itself and embed the thumbnail image inside escapes and send it down the terminal pipe, but this will only work for small thumbnails - what if i want to ... play video? then we have to stream the entire video via an escapecode... and that;s just awful! i am not ready for THAT level of evil.
btw. thanks so much for being an informed user who will bother to look at the code before rabbiting on about vague unfounded assumptions. :) i guess it's sad that i have to even say this. :) anyway - and tyls.c is ugly as. it was a quick test program i brewed to test the escapes it is not at a nice piece of code... :) it needs some love.

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--------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------------

VERY poor choice of escape sequences by ciggieposeur · 2013-03-27 01:27 · Score: 4, Informative

They should have used the future-proofed OSC, DCS, SOS, PM, or APC prefixes instead of this new ESC{ sequence. And then they terminate the sequence with a control character (NUL)! This is worse than "ANSI music".

Terminology authors, if you are reading this, could you PLEASE talk to Ted Dickey (xterm and ncurses maintainer) about the RIGHT way to do this? Otherwise you're going to find yourselves with your own version of brokenLinuxOSC.

Re:VERY poor choice of escape sequences by raster · 2013-03-27 02:25 · Score: 3, Interesting

And what is wrong with this? It's the same style as xterm title set escapes. ?

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--------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------------

Terminals with graphical capabilities... by phrank · 2013-03-27 01:56 · 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.

Re:Terminals with graphical capabilities... by Rude+Turnip · 2013-03-27 02:11 · Score: 4, Informative

In the financial world, you also have the Bloomberg terminal. It's very heavily command line driven, although it does have some pointy-clicky functionality for noobs. You get a mix of text, graphics, audio and video from what I'd call a self-contained semantic web.

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Turing Test Completed by organgtool · 2013-03-27 02:01 · Score: 4, Funny

Who cares about image and video preview in a terminal? I'm more blown away by the fact that the terminal is self-aware!

a material improvement to terminals by segfault_0 · 2013-03-27 02:02 · Score: 2

Cmon, this is a real improvement to the functionality provided by modern linux terminals. I think it's cool as hell.

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Re:Seems logical.. by JasterBobaMereel · 2013-03-27 02:06 · Score: 2, Interesting

Terminal : Low bandwidth, low resources way of accessing the system often remotely by experienced technical users

This Terminal : High bandwidth, high resources way of accessing the system bad for remote access and friendly to inexperienced non-technical users ....

Who is this for ...?

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Re:"only built on EFL and libc" by raster · 2013-03-27 02:22 · Score: 5, Informative

Me (author) doesn't care about this as these are already the requirements of e17 anyway, so for the target audience or doesn't need extra dependencies they don't already have. By the time you have any featured desktop installed you have at least this much installed.

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--------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------------

Re:Seems logical.. by flymolo · 2013-03-27 02:27 · Score: 2

I like it. I'm often annoyed at the split between the GUI and command line. What if I want to run a find and view the images or videos that result? Or I write a program that produces images, and I want to test many parameters without having to write a GUI to view the results. This allows shell script style programming to interact with graphical data, and that is something I've wanted for a while.

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Re:"only built on EFL and libc" by realityimpaired · 2013-03-27 02:35 · Score: 2

You're clearly not already running e17 from that list of dependencies... your complaint is akin to somebody complaining that installing kopete on their gnome system pulls in a ton of unneeded deps.

From a system that's already running e17:
tara@MarchHare:~$ sudo apt-get autoremove Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. tara@MarchHare:~$ sudo apt-get install terminology Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following NEW packages will be installed: terminology 0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 839 kB of archives. After this operation, 3,118 kB of additional disk space will be used. Get:1 http://packages.bodhilinux.com/bodhi/ precise/stable terminology amd64 20130326-1 [839 kB] Fetched 839 kB in 1s (480 kB/s) Selecting previously unselected package terminology. (Reading database ... 279968 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking terminology (from .../terminology_20130326-1_amd64.deb) ... Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils ... Setting up terminology (20130326-1) ...

'nuf said?

Re:Seems logical.. by Dixie_Flatline · 2013-03-27 02:43 · 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.

Re:Seems logical.. by raster · 2013-03-27 02:47 · Score: 2, Informative

Please become informed before claiming things you have no clue about. It does everything your current terminal does (more or less if we talk of vt100/200 and friends) the same way. It ALSO adds extended escapes and inside these all it sends is file paths or uri text. If you call a file path high bandwidth then ok, guilty. But I think you are simply living up to slashdots reputation in the users category of blowing hot air.

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--------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------------

Re:Why is this big news? by raster · 2013-03-27 03:58 · Score: 3, Informative

it's modular. just at the library level which does make for a lot more efficiency. :) and what is new here - bringing the usability to your regular cmdline terminal without the need for launching other apps in windows... oh and did you read? it can render with opengl.. THAT is not exactly old hat.. AND it works in the framebuffer without x... and gives u moue control and copy and paste... IN the framebuffer... AND.. its like 20 TIMES faster than the kernel text console (try see how long u ait for a file to cat in the console vt)... and then in your console u can view pdf's, images and videos... the SAME as you do in x... oh and tabs and splits will work in the fb too... oh and it works in wayland too... not like there are a lot of terminals for wayland atm.

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--------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------------

Re:Why is this big news? by Samantha+Wright · 2013-03-27 04:26 · Score: 2

If you want something to really get hopping mad about, terminals that can do this have been around for years. Ages, in fact.

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Re:Seems logical.. by lahvak · 2013-03-27 10:15 · Score: 2

The reason I like this is that it seems to be good for everybody. inexperienced non-technical users will find it easier using a terminal, while experienced users will get to use a terminal just like before, with added stuff that does not seem to get in the way. I would like to know how configurable all the graphical stuff is. Can I add graphics into my shell prompt? I guess since it works using escape sequences, the answer is probably yes. Including a little sparkline displaying system load, or a miniature image of the filesystem tree into your prompt, that sounds pretty useful to me.

I bet that we can probably find old usenet posts from people complaining about color terminals, saying that that sort of eye candy is good only for inexperienced users, the real men use only green phosphor.

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Enlightenment Terminal Allows Video Playback, PDF Viewing

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