[chriswarbo]

> Adding tmux just to get scrollback goes against Unix philosophy.

I agree. Rather than adding scrollback support to allacritty, maybe someone could write an independent program for scrollback support (a la dtach/abduco for detaching/reattaching)?

Such a program would be useful for all terminals which lack scrollback (alacritty, st, possibly others).

For the record I use st with dtach and dvtm; scrollback is supplied by dvtm, but it would be nice to decouple it some more.

[blux]

100% agree, to the best of my knowledge there exists no tool that adds scrollback support to a terminal emulator without doing anything else. My solution now is to use tmux for this, but it is not really elegant. Piping everything through less is not an option :P

[vidarh]

If you want decoupling, look at the AmigaOS design: The console (terminal) consists of a bunch of independent elements:

- Device drivers feeds raw input to input-handler

- console.device manages a single console window. it receives raw input from the windows message port (courtesy of the input-handler) and "cooks" it into escaped character streams (which can include things like mouse reporting), and processes simple output that it translates into window output.

- console-handler receives the escape codes and interprets more complex sequences before passing the result on to the application that has the console open, and writes output back to the console.device.

Most of this would run in separate threads.

This lets any application open special filenames like "CON:" to open a console window.

Within console-handler, multiple different "units" are layered - in AROS (AmigaOS compatible open source), the basic (no copy and paste, no reflow, no scrollback) unit, the unit with copy and past and reflow, and the unit with above and scrollback, are layered on top of each other via inheritance, using a system-wide OO system modelld after Commodores old BOOPSI (basically a simple vtable based approach with a "catch-all" method dispatch entrypoint for user-added methods; it's not fast with deep inheritance hierarchies, but it's fast enough for this kind of use).

The copy and paste itself is implemented via a separate tool - ConClip - started on boot (and optional; if you don't start it you simply don't have cut and paste), which receives messages about what to cut and paste and writes it to the "clipboard.device", which by default writes each cut/copied piece of data to the CLIPS: volume as IFF formatted files, which by default maps to a directory in a ram-disk, but which can be re-mapped elsehwere. This all happens asynchronously, to accommodate cases where people e.g. remapped CLIPS: to a floppy and had to swap it in (rare, but possible if you had to deal with low memory situations).

This is something that frustrates me to date with Linux etc. - AmigaOS was far more decoupled, with clear, well-documented boundaries for people to hack on (e.g. several people wrote alternative console-handlers and console.device's that you could totally replace the original with to the point that any application that used terminal windows could be made to use your preferred console device. Even third party components tended to follow this approach (e.g. compression in AmigaOS is usually done via the XPK suite of libraries, which provided a third party API for opening compressed data streams, that let you plug in any compression algorithm as a library - as a result most apps in an Amiga system that supports compression can support most compression algorithms you drop in a system-wide library for).

[chriswarbo]

Thanks, that's really interesting. I grew up with Amigas exclusively until getting a family PC around 2000, although I didn't tend to use the CLI or do any programming back then.

I'm aware of BOOPSI, and the datatypes system which sounds similar to what you describe.

One problem on AmigaOS was(/is?) the lack of packaging and dependencies, e.g. installing many programs on a fresh copy of Workbench won't work, due to missing libraries, etc. Thankfully that's easier to manage these days by scouring Google and Aminet, but it's still manual.

Interestingly, I've found Amigas to become more stable over time, unlike e.g. Windows where some people recommend formatting every year or so to remove cruft. The more stuff you install in Workbench, the more libraries, etc. you accumulate, so the fewer problems you encounter trying to install/use other things. I'm not sure if this is a consequence of the OS design, or from developers bending over backwards to avoid problems (e.g. conflicting names, etc.)

[vidarh]

Yes, BOOPSI was the model for the OOP used in AROS.

> One problem on AmigaOS was(/is?)

Is, sort-of. Package managers didn't enter the scene until much later, but Commodore did release Installer, which while not a package manager provides a s-expression based mechanism for describing installation flow.

It's alleviated because Amiga libraries tends to very strictly insist on backwards compatibility, so you should generally be able to drop a newer version of a library over an older version and things will keep working (and the libraries and all compliant binaries contains version numbers).

But of course the community today is very small, and was smallish originally too, and so it's gotten easier and easier to deal with.

If there was to be a resurgence (there is new hardware but it's expensive niche PPC hardware; AROS runs on pretty much "anything", but is incomplete), it'd need a lot of big overhauls - in particular memory protection (some work is ongoing but it's hard due to AmigaOS APIs relying a lot on pointer passing) and SMP, but also lots of tooling we take for granted today like package management.

I'm not holding my breath for that, but I do wish more AmigaOS ideas will get picked up elsewhere. Linux still feels like a hodge-podge in comparison.