Pushinterminalen

Pushinterminalen is an experimental concept in the field of terminal emulation and remote access. It refers to a design where terminal output is pushed from the server to the client as events, rather than the client periodically polling for updates. Proponents argue that this push-based model can reduce latency and improve responsiveness for interactive sessions over high-latency networks when paired with incremental rendering and efficient encoding.

In a typical pushinterminalen setup, a server maintains a virtual terminal state and streams updates through a persistent bidirectional channel such as WebSocket or QUIC. The client subscribes to a terminal session and renders updates as they arrive, while also sending user input back to the server. To preserve compatibility with existing terminal applications, the system must interpret standard ANSI escape sequences and other control signals; diffs or deltas are used to minimize bandwidth.

Security and management are important considerations. Authentication is commonly implemented via TLS or SSH-like mechanisms, with access controls and audit logging. State synchronization and reconnection strategies are critical to resilience; graceful fallback to polling or traditional SSH pty may be provided for compatibility.

History and status: The term appears in a small body of experimental work and discussions; no widely adopted standard exists as of now. It competes with established approaches such as SSH with pty, VNC, and terminal multiplexers. Use cases include cloud-based development environments and remote CI consoles; considerations include server load, complexity, and compatibility with legacy terminal applications.