Torch Web Terminal

This is a browser-based terminal for Torch7. The goal of this project is to supersed the Qt4 interface, and to enable full graphics capabilities within the browser.

This project is built around Node.js, a super lightweight asynchronous framework to build servers. In our case, the server is only use to connect clients (browser terminals) to Torch7 kernels. For now, one server instance can support an arbitrary number of clients, but each client only has access to one Torch7 kernel.

Dependencies

You will need to install a couple of dependencies to enable this web terminal:

Node.js, which can be found here, and should also be installable with your system's package manager
NPM: Node's package manager (sometimes comes with Node.js)
Three Node.js packages: ejs, stripcolorcodes and express (version 2.x)

For instance, on MacOS:

$ brew install nodejs
$ curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh
$ npm install express@2.x ejs stripcolorcodes

Installation

This project is bundled as a torch-pkg project, and can be easily installed like this:

$ torch-pkg -local install webterm

Or, if you have downloaded this repository on your machine, and you are in its directory:

$ torch-pkg -local deploy

Note1: you have to deploy webterm locally (-local flag), as the node packages are only available to the current user. This could probably be fixed, but I still don't know how.

Note2: depending on the version of Node.js, you might have to do the NPM install in the package directory, i.e.:

$ cd ~/.torch/usr/share/torch/lua/webterm/
$ npm install express@2.x ejs stripcolorcodes

Running it

webterm is a standard package, so you can either require it from a running torch instance, or start torch with it like that:

$ torch -lwebterm

This should produce the following output:

Try the IDE: torch -ide
Type help() for more info
Torch 7.0  Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Idiap, NEC Labs, NYU
==> Torch server listening on port 8080
==> Open http://localhost:8080/ in your browser!
=><= Torch instance started for [t7]

At this stage, you just have to open a browser and go to http://localhost:8080/. The cool thing of course is that you can access this adress remotely. Beware though that this might open up serious security issues.

Functions

In the broswer, you will see a terminal, which provides full history and live completion. Completed entries are shown on the left pane, and are actual hyperlinks to documentation:

One cool thing about a browser-based terminal is that all the plots and renderings you can generate during your session can be transparently piped to the console:

The mechanism we use to do this is very simple: the image, or plot, is dumped as a png into the root of the Node.js server; and we then simply print a string of that form: <img src="dumped.png"/> to the terminal.

In fact, this mechanism is completely general: try doing this in the terminal:

print '<h1>Some title</h1> <p>a paragraph...</a>'

Now even more powerful: you can really print arbitrary html there, so printing something like:

print '<script> console.log("this is javascript!") </script>'

... will just work perfectly fine!

Multiple Users

By default, the user is set to t7, which is what you should see in the terminal. You can create a new user by appending the string ?user=bob to the URL. That'll create a completely new Torch7 kernel, which only Bob sees.

TO DO

completion is still buggy: it starts screwing up after too many nested parenthesis
inline help (triggered by the ? symbol) is shitty: we should use the full html help instead of the poor text-based help
I'd love to have notebook-like capabilities, where we can load a markdown file into the browser (using the URL would be ok for now, e.g. ?file=myscript.md), and the text part would get rendered as html, and all the code blocks will be transformed in interpretable code blocks, ala Mathematica/IPython.
that last point implies that we need more flexible code entries, where we can go back and forth to edit the code.
ctrl+C: not working yet. It generates a INT signal, but it doesn't seem to do much for now.

akfidjeland / thwebterm