[shockone]

Hey. Not snooty at all. I understand your pain: once I tried to open Vim in this Kickstarter terminal project - Xiki - and was disappointed in the same way.

Perhaps unexpectedly, Black Screen is both a terminal emulator and a shell. I tried hard to avoid going with writing a shell, but the existing ones simply don't fit. It's even hard to know when a child execution has finished. And I want smart autocompletion, so I have to at least extend a shell.

Traditionally these two are separated, and it must be a good design, but my current goal is to prove the concept. Perhaps, later I'll extract the shell.

[tatterdemalion]

I think for this to work you just have to create a shell and a terminal, to have a killer app that your terminal is the paltform for (realizing this is what kept me from ever moving on the idea). But my point is that I think the shell component absolutely must communicate with the terminal component over the tty subsystem using an extension of ANSI Escape Codes, defined in a terminfo page, so that the terminal component is only concerned with how the information is displayed, and not what the information is.

[shockone]

What problems will I face if they don't communicate over a TTY?