I’m excited to announce the first public release of Terminal Access for NVDA: an add-on focused on improving the NVDA experience when working in terminal/console applications.

@FreakyFwoof Ah. Crap. I thought I'd changed the NVDA+f3 combo. I'll double check that.

@ysotomayor @lerven Play with the different profiles to see if they work better in WSL. I have a WSL specific profile. It should launch automatically.

@FreakyFwoof The other keys should be terminal specific and not global. Somehow, the search keys got coopted by global.

@FreakyFwoof Is this on Windows 10 or 11?

@FreakyFwoof This is definitely a problem. I'll get right on it. Thanks for letting me know.

@ppatel

I'm sure there are some people on here who know wtf you're talking about.

I'm not one of them.

@Captain_Jack_Sparrow Luckily for me, there are plenty of people.

@Tamasg @ppatel I'm curious, VIM is mentioned in the list of modified profiles but it seems to just quiet the status line. Is using VIM properly actually feasible with the addon as it currently stands? There's a number of issues that may make it tricky, most notably that a lot of navigation doesn't necessarily use the arrow keys, so I'm curious

@zersiax @Tamasg I believe it should work. Someone will need to test it though. I'm not a huge fan so I'm sort of avoiding testing it. Most of the reading is done through the review cursor, which avoids issues with terminals and system cursors.

@ppatel @Tamasg I'll give it a look later. I'm no vim expert myself but can probably at least find a cheatsheet to figure out the basics.
One thing I do know is that it has the insert and command mode, which I believe is conveyed through the status bar. That bit, you MAY not want to silence as it's a bit of a thing to figure out otherwise Maybe that was already taken care of, will check and report back later

@zersiax @ppatel @Tamasg
@pixelate should be able to try this as well

@FreakyFwoof I fixe it. Apparently there was a regression. I'd managed to fix it at one point and then somehow reverted it. Download the latest. Let me know if you have more trouble.

https://github.com/PratikP1/Terminal-Access-for-NVDA/releases/tag/v1.0.45

@ppatel Can you please explain why this seems to duplicate a lot of NVDA's settings in the add-on itself? This is something we very badly need in general, I think, NVDA's terminal support is so shit it can't even use ed properly, but NVDA already has 4 levels of punctuation, indentation reporting, character code announcements, word/character nav, etc. What does this do different?

@TheQuinbox @ppatel My thoughts exactly. There are some interesting features (on paper at least - haven't tested this properly yet) but there is certainly a lot of overlap.

@tuukkao @TheQuinbox I considered all of that. When I started thinking about the features I wanted to implement, the one that made me pause was apps/terminal profiles. I knew that I could apply NVDA's profiles to different windows. But, I wasn't sure that profiles could go down to terminal app levels. For that, I needed to duplicate these settings. If it proves to be not necessary, I'll remove the extraneous stuff. A lot will depend on feedback.

@tuukkao @TheQuinbox If the community really tells me that they don't want something, I'll be happy to remove it.

@FreakyFwoof It's a combo of manual coding and Claude/Codex. I'm not confident enough in my Python writing skills that I can avoid LLMs

@tuukkao @TheQuinbox I've tried a couple of tricks to avoid some of the NVDA's performance issues. Whether they work long-term needs to be seen. Where I hope this thing should shine is things like bookmarks, windowing, highlight tracking, etc.

I've bumped up the version number for Terminal Access to v1.0.45 with a fix for global keys issue. If you haven't updated it or got to the v1.0.43 release, you can update it here. I've also submited the add-on to the NVDA store. Hopefully, new updates will show up there once approved.

https://github.com/PratikP1/Terminal-Access-for-NVDA/releases/download/v1.0.45/terminalAccess-1.0.45.nvda-addon

@ppatel Wait I'm confused. Looking at this readme, are a bunch of these features redundant? The review cursor already can move by line, word and character and output the character at the cursor, with char info I can even output Unicode name. Why do you define separate gestures for that which are likely to clash with everything else? What makes this different from NVDA"s normal terminal support? Better selection and automatic profiling? How doe sit know what app you're running?