terminalDiff between 2 terminals or full screen data

[jedi4ever]

Hi I'm trying the following scenario.

On the server side I have a terminal that receives the write changes. I figured from the node-terminal that I can use the Termdiff to calculate the difference since the last writes.

The downside of the current terminalDiff is that you could only use it once and then the internal oldBuffer gets reset.

The problem I'm facing is that when new clients connect they need a 'full' resync of the terminal state. I could opt to add a Termdiff.fullDiff to create a kind of 'total'screen state patch.

Another approach could be to keep 2 terminals and make Termdiff a function between (term1,term2).

To get the full state you could:

var backendTerm = new Terminal();
backendTerm.write('some stuff');

var freshTerm = new Terminal() ; 
var diff = freshTerm.diff(backendTerm);

be curious what approach you'd suggest.

[jedi4ever]

This is how the headless-terminal approaches the same on 'fresh' connect

https://github.com/dtinth/ttycast/blob/master/app.js#L67

[Gottox]

I'll think about a good solution. :)

[Gottox]

For now, just use two Terminals and write to both.

[jedi4ever]

using both Terminals is not going to solve it, let me explain:

• a web client A connects to a shell session , the node server will have both an internal term and a browser term for webclientA
• if web client B connects to the same shell session, he will only receive updates , not the beginning. I also can't use the internal term or termdiff as this will not be in sync with the (empty) term from webclientB.

I'll spent some more time on it tomorrow.

[jedi4ever]

I've started on a diff system in this branch -

https://github.com/jedi4ever/terminal.js/blob/terminal.diff-apply/lib/terminal.js#L396

It would allow you detect the changes between two terms. This could later be used for the Termdiff internally.
Notice that I had to 'break' the diff format as I had to include a way to specify meta changes, not only lines changes.

love to hear your thoughts on this!

[jedi4ever]

#14 will solve my diff & apply issue.