[gwbas1c]

I'm a Mac User, and honestly I think the Mac terminal is fine and there's very little room for improvement. But if I were to improve here's a few of the things that I would do:

- Make it easier to know what the current process is and kill it if it goes haywire. An out-of-control process can trap control C and ignore it. I really hate digging into activity monitor to kill a process when I just want to keep the same terminal window open.

- A better display of my current working directory, and my current git branch. These items should be displayed at the edge of the window, not inside the terminal itself.

- Better view and management of my previous commands in the shell.

- Do away with psuedo-gui terminal applications. My terminal already has a large scroll back buffer, so we don't need applications within the terminal to also implement scrolling and paging. I have plenty of graphical text editors on hand. We have protocols like VNC for remote desktop control.

- Try and see if there is a way to lower the learning curve of various terminal applications that I may use infrequently. Often I learn how to use terminal applications by Googling around for examples of what I am trying to do. Perhaps something like autocomplete that we have in our modern IDEs?

- Allow me to collapse the output of programs, just like we can collapse comments in hacker news.

[geocar]

> An out-of-control process can trap control C and ignore it.

Many programs that trap SIGINT won't trap SIGQUIT so ^\ will still kill the process. Even if they do, if ^Z works then kill -9 %1 will be good.

> A better display of my current working directory, and my current git branch. These items should be displayed at the edge of the window, not inside the terminal itself.

MY prompt has been \$ for ages, and I've many names complained about my failing memory, but since I don't change directories often this causes me little grief (and being in one directory means my ^R search is very useful). Have you considered just storing this information in the title? Many virtual terminals have an escape sequence that sets the title.

> Allow me to collapse the output of programs, just like we can collapse comments in hacker news.

This sounds very useful. Perhaps it would be implemented as an escape sequence that would be marked in the prompt.

[gwbas1c]

What you suggest requires a significant amount of learning and relies on hidden commands. What I'm suggesting is narrowing the use case of the terminal and making it more user-friendly without relying on non obvious hidden tricks.

[geocar]

"Significant" is relative.

What I suggest is available today: and for the cost in time of reading my message will resolve a third of your issues.

I don't know what you mean by "non obvious hidden tricks". People learn what control-C does because they read the manual; because someone shows them. Likewise with other keys and job control. Or the tab key. Or google. Very few things are obvious, and you can find what they are by putting them in a room with a potato and watching: If the potato can figure it out, then it was obvious.