[jacques_chester]

I often lose my place in a sea of similar outputs. It's infuriating that distinguishing which command belongs to which output at which time requires me to rely on my eyeballs.

So for example it'd be nice if my output folded up after the following command is run. If `time` was run automatically. If I could switch on autodiffing between runs of the same command. There are probably other such ideas.

[terminal-survey]

We already have a solution for this sketched out on paper (not in writing or code yet, though). The idea is that the shell can split the terminal into "frames", where each frame acts as its own terminal. The shell would then use one frame per command prompt, and one frame per command (for its input and output). The stdin/stdout that is given to the command is restricted to that particular frame. It can then write text into that frame and move the cursor around inside it, but cannot break out of the frame, so e.g. it cannot overwrite the output of the previous command.

And once you have these frames, you can give them some useful properties: For example, the shell can fold them, or apply styling hints to them (e.g. so that a command with non-zero exit code can be highlighted with a red border or similar).

With frames, you can also have multiple commands running in parallel. For example, wget could signal to the shell that it will run for a while longer, but does not require user interaction, so the shell can allocate the next frame below the frame where wget is still running, and offer the next command prompt.

It also means that fullscreen programs do not need to block everything: vim may be running inside a frame that is set to the full window size, but you can just move the keyboard focus out of this frame and scroll upwards to review the output of a previous command while vim continues to run down below.

[geokon]

I think this would be pretty easy to do in eshell. Emacs gives you frames already and supports interacting with output buffers (like compilations errors)

Its been on my to-do list for a while. I wrote a rough outline and its similar to what you've said as well: https://reddit.com/comments/6y3q4k/comment/dml16vq

[oblio]

I hadn't thought about something like this but it sounds amazing. I wonder if there's some sort of existing terminal/shell combo that can do this, at least through plugins.

[JdeBP]

Ilya Sher's Next Generation Shell aims to allow running multiple commands in parallel, with each command's output collected and displayed below that command.

* https://github.com/ilyash/ngs