Remote terminal

The remote terminal would be a peripheral which interfaces with the computer in a way similar to monitors. You can term.redirect to an instance of the peripheral, and it sends mouse and keyboard events. But how's it sending keyboard events? Well it's not like the monitors where the picture is displayed in the world on the block faces. No, it has a GUI just like computer terminals. If you redirected to the peripheral and used term.write("text"), the text would appear on the computer screen in the GUI. This would be useful for remotely accessing data anywhere in your base. Or having 6 screens worth of visuals for one computer in 6 blocks instead of having a wall of monitors.

This will be filled by PDA's and software when they come out.

Cloudy, on 18 April 2013 - 09:19 PM said:

This will be filled by PDA's and software when they come out.

So the PDA is going to have some inbuilt remote terminal software interesting very interesting. I have been working on just that have working alpha unreleased as of yet. Will be interesting to see how it is implemented by pro coders.

Maybe.

Cloudy, on 18 April 2013 - 09:19 PM said:

This will be filled by PDA's and software when they come out.

Although I can't know exactly how PDAs will work, based on a good guess that it's a screen in your hand, I don't really feel like it'll do the idea justice. With these remote terminals, users who haven't a PDA that's connected to the computer they want to control (they might be in a friend's base or something) would still be able to do what they need to do. Plus if I want several screens of data, I don't want to have 6 PDAs in my hotbar for a setup that I only want to use in one room.

PDAs and Remote Terminals certainly have some overlap area, but I personally think Remote Terminals are useful enough to add in.

Yeah, I took this to be additional screens in a fixed that a computer could use, which is not really the same as the PDA which is a portable device—both are useful, in different situations. Basically, you could do this by adding a pile of extra computers and using modems to tell them what to display onscreen and to pass keypresses back, but that would be incredibly wasteful of server resources (since each computer uses a few native threads) and require installing the display program onto the computers, whereas external terminal devices could be ready to use immediately.

Well this isn't going to happen. You could have multiple screens Lua side right now each with its own shell.

ElvishJerricco, on 18 April 2013 - 09:39 PM said:

Although I can't know exactly how PDAs will work, based on a good guess that it's a screen in your hand, I don't really feel like it'll do the idea justice. With these remote terminals, users who haven't a PDA that's connected to the computer they want to control (they might be in a friend's base or something) would still be able to do what they need to do. Plus if I want several screens of data, I don't want to have 6 PDAs in my hotbar for a setup that I only want to use in one room.

PDAs and Remote Terminals certainly have some overlap area, but I personally think Remote Terminals are useful enough to add in.

It is possible to redirect terminal with programing. you don't need special hardware to do it.
nsh - A genuinely good remote shell program
nsh is the best remote terminal program I have seen so far.

BigSHinyToys, on 18 April 2013 - 10:23 PM said:

ElvishJerricco, on 18 April 2013 - 09:39 PM said:

Although I can't know exactly how PDAs will work, based on a good guess that it's a screen in your hand, I don't really feel like it'll do the idea justice. With these remote terminals, users who haven't a PDA that's connected to the computer they want to control (they might be in a friend's base or something) would still be able to do what they need to do. Plus if I want several screens of data, I don't want to have 6 PDAs in my hotbar for a setup that I only want to use in one room.

PDAs and Remote Terminals certainly have some overlap area, but I personally think Remote Terminals are useful enough to add in.

It is possible to redirect terminal with programing. you don't need special hardware to do it.
nsh - A genuinely good remote shell program
nsh is the best remote terminal program I have seen so far.

Well of course it's possible. I know that. But I just think this is a nice, elegant, simple solution. But perhaps it's best off as a peripheral. I'll figure out the computercraft API and get to work on that ;)/>

I don't understand what this peripheral would do. You'd right click on it and it would open a computer like GUI which you can type into, and view things specifically directed towards the peripheral?

I'm kind of curious as to what the effective difference between this and a startup file that runs an nsh session is. It seems like nsh can cover all the functionality suggested in the first post. :)/>

Cloudy, on 19 April 2013 - 01:32 AM said:

I don't understand what this peripheral would do. You'd right click on it and it would open a computer like GUI which you can type into, and view things specifically directed towards the peripheral?

It's just a monitor with the visuals put in a GUI instead of on the block face. I would just like having the ability to control several computer screens via term.redirect without having to have entire computers + a bunch of code or monitors all over the wall. I understand why you don't want to add it. It was just an idea I thought of for convenience, and I think it would make a nice 3rd party peripheral. Which is why I'm building it right now.

I hope I explained why this could be seen as better than a separate computer that is used only to display output and pass on keyboard/mouse input: a dedicated terminal peripheral would be ready to go without installing the remote-terminal-program on it, and it wouldn’t use three native threads in the server the way every computer does.