3 steps to emulate a terminal in Google Colab

Let’s make it confortable

photo by Anders Jildén on unsplash

A demo is available here. Below the process to emulate a terminal in your Google Colab.

Part 1

Just copy past this code in a cell of your colab and run:

from IPython.display import JSON
from google.colab import output
from subprocess import getoutput
import os
def shell(command):
  if command.startswith('cd'):
    path = command.strip().split(maxsplit=1)[1]
    os.chdir(path)
    return JSON([''])
  return JSON([getoutput(command)])
output.register_callback('shell', shell)

Part 2

In another cell copy/past/run the following:

#@title Colab Shell
%%html
<div id=term_demo></div>
<script src="https://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js"></script>
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/jquery.terminal/js/jquery.terminal.min.js"></script>
<link href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/jquery.terminal/css/jquery.terminal.min.css" rel="stylesheet"/>
<script>
  $('#term_demo').terminal(async function(command) {
      if (command !== '') {
          try {
              let res = await google.colab.kernel.invokeFunction('shell', [command])
              let out = res.data['application/json'][0]
              this.echo(new String(out))
          } catch(e) {
              this.error(new String(e));
          }
      } else {
          this.echo('');
      }
  }, {
      greetings: 'Welcome to Colab Shell',
      name: 'colab_demo',
      height: 250,
      prompt: 'colab > '
  });

You should be close to that:

Part 3

Hide the code:

and the magic happen

the part on the below is the terminal

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