Terminal Mirror (Interactive CLI Sandbox) (still in MVP phase)

A high-fidelity, AST-powered sandbox for Visual Studio Code that bridges the gap between CLI declaration and interactive execution.

Terminal Mirror transforms the developer experience by synthesizing static analysis and high-performance terminal emulation into a seamless feedback loop. Instead of treating your CLI as a "black box" where you have to constantly run --help, this extension reads your source code and automatically generates a dynamic, theme-aware GUI right inside your editor.

Features

• Semantic Introspection: Automatically projects CLI structures (flags, arguments, and subcommands) into interactive webview elements. Designed to support Rust (clap), Python (argparse), and TypeScript (yargs) via Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) parsing.
• Heuristic Fallback Engine: A language-agnostic help-scraping engine that parses --help outputs to ensure universal compatibility with any executable binary.
• Asynchronous Execution: Utilizes non-blocking background processes (child_process.spawn) for real-time output streaming, fully supporting interactive stdin prompts.
• High-Performance Terminal UI: Integrates xterm.js for industry-standard terminal emulation, featuring full ANSI color support, custom keybindings, and hardware-accelerated rendering.
• Native VS Code Theming: Built with vscode-elements to perfectly inherit your editor's custom fonts, colors, and design tokens.
• Throttled IPC Bridge: Implements a buffered output model that prevents synchronous reflow and UI freezing, even when a command floods the terminal with millions of messages.

Getting Started (Local Development)

Currently, Terminal Mirror is in active development. To run the MVP locally on your machine:

1. Clone the repository and install dependencies:

   git clone https://github.com/Rakshat28/TMirror/tree/main
   cd TMIRROR
   npm install

2. Launch the Extension Development Host:

   • Open the project folder in Visual Studio Code.
   • Press F5 (or click Run > Start Debugging).
   • A new VS Code window will open with the extension loaded.

3. Activate the Sandbox:

   • In the new window, open the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P / Cmd+Shift+P).
   • Search for and execute the activation command (e.g., Terminal Mirror: Start).
   • The sandbox UI will open in your sidebar or editor panel.

Architecture

The extension relies on a strict separation of concerns:

• Extension Host (Node.js): Handles file system access, parses AST metadata, spawns native OS processes, and throttles data output.
• Webview UI (Chromium): Renders the graphical inputs using Lit-based web components and handles raw byte-stream rendering via xterm.js.
• IPC Bridge: A strictly typed, bidirectional message-passing interface (postMessage) secured by a Content Security Policy (CSP) and session-unique nonces to prevent XSS.

Tech Stack

• Extension API: TypeScript, Node.js (child_process)
• Frontend: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, vscode-elements
• Terminal Emulation: xterm.js
• Parsing: syn (Rust), ast (Python), TS Compiler API