Any plans to officialize a terminal for Pulsar?

[trusktr]

My theory is that an official built-in Terminal is really the only thing that put VS Code ahead of Atom (besides speed) back in the day. Well, also the initial default TypeScript support, but that's been long overcome.

An official terminal increased productivity in VS Code, and it worked on all platforms (Windows, macOS, Linux).

There are a lot of unofficial terminal plugins currently, some of which may not work well with new Electron or Node, may not work in all platforms, may have limited extensibility, etc.

Because of this discombobulation in the terminal ecosystem of Pulsar, it is too difficult to make any meaningful plugins on top of terminal features that can be reliable across platforms, because there isn't one main terminal to rely upon, so there is no consistent API surface.

An official terminal solution could help focus the community around one interface for plugins, without them having to worry about platforms, with a stable extensible API, while allowing Pulsar to expand the features without breaking plugins (f.e. add remote connections, add multiplayer mode, swap out terminal renderers as needed, build AI agents features, etc).

As an example of consistency developers would have, take the "swap out terminal renderers as needed" idea. Regardless of the terminal is rendered with a library that uses DOM, or one that uses <canvas>, there could be a set of common CSS variables (f.e. --terminal-font-bold-weight, etc) that user could target. Then either they map to DOM CSS, or JS can read them off <canvas> to apply values via JS, without breaking the user style sheet. At the moment there isn't anything like this for Pulsar, so centralization could really help unify the community as far as terminals.

[savetheclocktower]

Yeah, I opened #1371 a while back and have made steady progress on it. Once we ship Electron 30 (hopefully in a week or so), the next regular release should be able to bundle the new official terminal package.

[savetheclocktower]

Extensibility isn't at the very forefront of my goals, though it's certainly possible. It's not currently written in a way that envisions swappable renderers, but it wouldn't be too hard — the PTY library is independent from XTerm.js (which handles rendering). And theming will, in fact, hook into CSS variables so that community syntax themes can style the terminal similarly to the editor.