Alas, it is too late for me to delete this submission or edit/remove the initial comment. I did nuke it on /r/java though.

Followup:

* I've locked my Twitter account and blocked a lot of Java ecosystem "evangelism" people. RT'ing my 12-follower thread to your 20K account and gassing up total strangers to talk about how Jexer sucks compared to projects that started in 2021 and have some funding behind them is a dick move, dude.

* If you like it, great. If you don't, great. If you report a bug that would be lovely, but I am not writing code for you, and I don't work in IT thankfully.

* If it looks like crap on your terminal, that's your terminal's fault: open an issue with them. In 2018 when I first got this working, the only terminals that didn't outright crash with it were xterm, yaft, and RLogin. I've crashed just about every other sixel or iTerm2 terminal I've seen since then (mine included). Most of them fixed it; some of them -- including the most popular terminal bar none for one particular platform -- have not. And that's totally fine, they don't write code for me either.

* If you think the bland look is bland, you're right. So go change it, I javadoc'd everything. Are you a coder or not?

* If you want a better "console" for your Docker/Kubernetes/BizCloudAzureWhatever application, why are you talking to me? Go write some code. Don't blame your language: you can have total control of the terminal in anything that can do I/O to stdin/stdout and spawn "stty -ignbrk -brkint -parmrk -istrip -inlcr -igncr -icrnl -ixon -opost -echo -echonl -icanon -isig -iexten -parenb cs8 min 1 < /dev/tty". (But do also spawn "stty sane cooked < /dev/tty" on your way out.)

Anyone wanting to code pretty things for the terminal is strongly advised to check out notcurses: https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses . Nick is brilliant and awesome. It's in C, and very fast.

Goodbye, Hacker News.

> Enthusiasm and loneliness are killing factors

Yup, I know this one quite well.

My day job is Not Programming and Not In IT, and I need it that way for my sanity. But my hobby has been coding for...35 years now? It's hard to have a few projects so far "out there" and no one IRL to talk to about it.

Got some nice folks online though. :)

If you code in Java, and like TUI (console type applications), then you might enjoy Jexer: https://gitlab.com/klamonte/jexer

I started Jexer in 2013, and off-and-on it's gotten better. I think my favorite part has been crossing paths with other terminal emulator ecosystem folks over the last few years. This release brings a few prettified effects inspired by other projects that you are all hopefully quite familiar with (notcurses, chafa, and vtm):

* Translucent windows, including images under/over each other and text.

* Animated/pulsing text

* Animated gifs

* A new XtermVideoPlayer example that uses ffmpeg/JavaCV to play movies inside a text-draggable window. (No audio though.)

* New button styles: round, diamond, left/right arrows. The button ends and shadows are drawn with images so specific font support is not required.

* A _much_ faster and _much_ higher quality sixel encoder.

* Different window border styles: single, double, none, and rounded corners.

* A femme theme option.

Some screenshots are posted here: https://twitter.com/AutumnMeowMeow/status/148922891703050240...

It's on maven and Sourceforge.

    <dependency>
      <groupId>com.gitlab.klamonte</groupId>
      <artifactId>jexer</artifactId>
      <version>1.6.0</version>
    </dependency>

Terminals that are known to work include:

* xterm https://invisible-island.net/xterm/ - X11 - Linux

* contour https://github.com/contour-terminal/contour - OpenGL - Linux, OS/X, Windows

* foot https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot - Wayland - Linux, OS/X, Windows

* mintty https://github.com/mintty/mintty - Windows

* mlterm http://mlterm.sourceforge.net/ - X11 - Linux + others

* RLogin https://github.com/kmiya-culti/RLogin - Windows

* wezterm https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/ - OpenGL - Linux, OS/X, Windows

What a lovely tale! These are just the best. :)

This is really cool, even if you didn't post I'm glad you mentioned it in a comment. :)

I remember compiling Linux kernel on my Cyrix 486SX 25MHz (the one with a disabled-by-default L1 cache!) and it took an hour. Got it on a P60 and it was like 5 minutes.

Good times.

Another one of my silly retro computing projects: https://github.com/teknoman117/m68k-fpga-bridge. I wanted to try and make an MMU for it, hence the 68010 specifically (which added some additional data to the bus error exception to allow restarting the failed instruction).

I also managed to get someone on utsource to sell me a tray of 386EX33s for like $2 a pop so eventually I can make some 386 systems. I managed to track down a few of the old IIT 3C87 FPUs that had the hardware matrix by vector multiply so I'm going to try to make some 3D renderer if I ever get around to putting it together.

These are so cool! :-)

I like retrocomputing too, but more virtually: https://jexer.sourceforge.io/evolution.html

I wanted to make a cycle-accurate 286 system once, just because it was such an interesting architecture. Protected mode, but 16 bit, and 16MB max RAM, but with segment:offset addressing. What's not to love about all of that?

Hardware multitasking and context switch on interrupt as well.

Admittedly I didn't live through that time period, but reading about them, they are quite interesting. It seems that the main reason they were considered "brain-dead" was because you couldn't run 8086 native and 286 native software at the same time, and backwards compatibility and interoperability started becoming something people considered very important.

Interesting enough that I went and bought a static core 286 (the 25 MHz Harris one) to play with. Since it's a static core I can run it at whatever frequency I want, even if that is only a few hertz.

https://imgur.com/gallery/LKAh7fB https://gist.github.com/teknoman117/342b43db8b79652c1c91e78e...

Things to keep me sane during the pandemic isolation :)

> I remember compiling Linux kernel on my Cyrix 486SX 25MHz (the one with a disabled-by-default L1 cache!) and it took an hour.

I remember compiling Linux kernel on my AMD 386SX 25MHz. It took a whole day (only awake hours, so probably around 12 hours or so).