History

In the beginning, terminal-plus was the king of Atom terminal plugins. It filled a badly-needed gap in the Atom coding experience for many developers, providing access to the power of the CLI without having to leave the code editor. Such was its popularity that it garnered over 265 000 downloads and 565 stars on its Atom page, plus another 20 watchers, 378 stars, and over 100 forks on GitHub.

And then suddenly, development stopped. Bugs remained unfixed, with no acknowledgment from the maintainer. By the time Atom 1.10 was released, I and many other fans could no longer use terminal-plus in Atom. It just hung, a blinking cursor on a black screen, with no way to input or run commands. Even rebuilding it, a trick that had worked previously, changed nothing.

So, I switch to platformio-ide-atom-terminal. It worked very well, but the design just felt strange. Having been designed to integrate with the PlatformIO IDE, rather than "pure" Atom, it looked very different than what I was used to and didn't fit my workflow. Besides, I'd spent too much time with terminal-plus. The UI and I just couldn't get along.

As a bit of a private experiment, I decided to see if I could combine platformio-ide-atom-terminal (or "pio-terminal" from here on) with elements from terminal-plus, so I could keep the UI and workflow I prefered but actually have a working terminal. My first couple tries didn't go so well, but I eventually found a way to use pio-terminal's code with the stylesheet from terminal-plus. This gave me exactly what I wanted, and we stuck with pio-terminal code/ terminal-plus stylesheet until v0.3.4, when we reworked pio-terminal's stylesheet to create the same UI as terminal-plus. Familiarity of terminal-plus and the excellent code of pio-terminal - what could be better?

With this, I present Termination to the world, with the humble hope that it can help others as much as terminal-plus and pio-terminal did me.

-- Fred