Terminal Updates

As you may or may not know, about a year ago I created a webpage that looks like a UNIX terminal.

At the time, I said that I was doing it for an interview I was doing, but that was really just an excuse to myself to justify doing it. I wrote about the original creation process here.

Recently, I saw the whimsical web club by Max Böck. (I just found him a few weeks ago, and I’ve quickly become a huge fan of his work.)

I wanted to submit my Terminal page to the site, but when I checked if everything was still working, I was dismayed about it’s lack of features.

There was no autocomplete (worse, it actually caused me to accidentally navigate away from the page because an >a> tag gained focus!). And there was not command repeating (with the up and down arrow keys).

There wasn’t even a help file to tell me what it was or what commands are supported!

So last night I decided to fix all of those things.

I went into more detail about the implementation aspect on Twitter here, or you can skip all that and try out the terminal here.

I still don’t think I’d say that the terminal is finished. I guess with some ‘art’ like this, it may never truly be finished. But I’d like to add more easter eggs and secrets and interesting things and commands too.