webterm

Because I wanted a terminal app neither sang nor danced… but then I got a little wild with it.

webterm comes in two flavors:

• an Electron app
• a version that can be served by a web browser

Building

webterm is a monorepo that contains both flavors as well as common code split out into packages.

To get started:

npm install
npm run build

To develop, use the turbotree-based watcher, which will watch and keep up-to-date both libraries and the browser web app, including starting and restarting the server when needed:

npm run watch

Using the Electron app

The Electron app is a pretty standard Electron Forge setup.

In the app directory:

npm start

Currently only supports macOS, but it shouldn't take much to bring it elsewhere.

A standalone app can be built:

npm run make

Universal builds do not work due to packaging problems.

There is also an issue with electron-forge and NPM workspaces that is not yet resolved. electron-forge is configured to copy packages from the monorepo root node_modules to work around this, but this breaks "npm start" due to issues not finding the Electron framework. Running "npm install" again will repair this temporarily.

Using the browser app

The browser app has its own Express server that uses express-ws for WebSocket communication.

You will need a TLS certificate. I use mkcert, then rename the resulting PEM files to "cert.pem" and "key.pem".

In the browser directory:

npm start