A native graphical shell for SSH

It is pretty annoying to see all of the dismissive comments on this idea, in that it seems that the majority of HN audience are still stuck on the TUI-superiority mindset and they do not care about GUIs at all. Two arguments: - TUIs are not inherently superior to GUIs - SSH, as a transport layer, should support not just forwarding a pty (as a TUI display layer), but a GUI display layer as well In fact, these two arguments were already realized by UNIX 30 years ago, and we already have one solution: the X protocol and ssh -X. Unfortunately, X did not win out. We did not get the promised future where one can ssh -X into a remote machine, run gnome-control-center, and a settings window pops up and I can configure my remote computer. (If you believe that this works, try it out yourself. It is an abysmal experience.) However the above needs still needed to be satisfied by so much people, and apps that needed it started to be developed as web servers, stuff like jupyter notebooks. It turns out that the web’s document format coupled with a styling solution and a client-side scripting language, with all of its warts and drawbacks, became a viable solution as a display layer for interactive apps. In fact, since it started from remote documents, network transparency is built-in. It would be dumb to not realize that the HTML/CSS/JS stack did win a dominant position for desktop apps, with all of the Electron apps, and utilize the web as a display layer for the above. I see the project in a similar vein, i.e. utilizing HTML/CSS/JS to provide a display layer for remote apps via SSH. Also note that Electron apps has the same split with X, where the display server and the client are separated: it's called the "renderer process" and the "main process", and the two processes talk via IPC (where the display server would be the renderer process running embedded Chromium, the display client would be the Electron main process, and the stuff that the client sends to the server would be the contents of the renderer JS bundle). I think, theoretically, it would be possible to run the main process separated from the renderer process on a different machine, with an appropriate IPC transport. I think this would be not far from the above idea?

This appears to me like a solution in search of a problem, like many others before it...the quote below seems relevant to this effort. "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." ~Henry Spencer

I like the idea of separating the frontend and backend of a graphical app. But I feel like this is hardly a novel idea, maybe I'm missing something. I take it you don't know about "X11Forwarding yes" or "html5 web app" For browsers, capabilities like connecting to Unix sockets have been dismissed as extremely niche That is a security concern, that's why it isn't implemented. At least raw unix socks. You can have WebSockets and other ports only limited to http.

i'm trying to understand how outer shell works here. on the website you give the following as your motivation: > Apps like Jupyter and Tensorboard are not typically visible to standard web browsers if they’re running on remote servers, because it would be terribly unsafe to let the whole internet touch this app. Instead, they run on a local port on the server, which your computer can’t access directly. > Classically, to get access to these, you had to open a new terminal and run: > ssh -L 24601:localhost:8889 mrcslws@lambda4.mycompany.com & > ssh -L 24602:localhost:6006 mrcslws@lambda4.mycompany.com & is this true? isn't the normal thing just to do this ssh forwarding for prototyping, then for deployment, you set up a website like myjupyternotebook.com, and then set up auth so that others can't access it. HTTP basic auth is not too much work. if you want SSH, not HTTP, to be what's publicly exposed, there's other options too, like putting it behind a VPN or tunnel. all this to say, outer loop is super cool, but I don't get it. I must be missing something about why you built it, so could you help me understand?

Is this really the future that people want? https://raw.githubusercontent.com/outergroup/outershell/refs... https://raw.githubusercontent.com/outergroup/Top/refs/heads/... I am surprised at the lack of technical criticism. In the past, even an ignorance of history could be useful, since one would have to solve again the problems in detail, and so be forced to acquire a deep understanding of the issues. Now one can sell this paper clock with chaotic internal workings that thwarts human fabrication or maintenance.