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by terminal-survey
3095 days ago
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> I would love to use one of those fancy graphical terms that comes up on HN every now and then One of these (Black Screen) is among the many inspirations with which we started. > Any attempt to improve the terminal has to be something that I could switch to on a whim and then gradually grow into. Backwards-compatibility is a hard requirement for us because of that. And oh boy, it causes a lot of pain. > I've essentially duplicated the evolution of HTML+JS webapps This is a huge fear of mine. We need to find a way of opening the GUI can-of-worms without ending up with terminals that are as bloated as contemporary web browsers. |
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Yeah, it's a bitch. Sorry. :( I've seen one or two "rewrite everything and make it better enough that people switch" big-bang efforts succeed - I run fish, 'nuff said - but this is a rather more invasive change, and it doesn't have good fallbacks ("run bash for ten seconds").
I'm not sure there is a good solution here, not when I look at it from the formal languages perspective. The existing language (what's relevant to current functionality) contains nearly all sequences of elements of the available alphabet (bytes), so anything we do will collide with something. Nobody was able to leave a specific exception to permit extension the way HTML did when it decided to silently ignore unrecognized tags. Though maybe the ANSI "application program command" escape codes might be usable? Either way, this really seems like a question of what you're going to have to choose to break, and that's never fun.
> This is a huge fear of mine. We need to find a way of opening the GUI can-of-worms without ending up with terminals that are as bloated as contemporary web browsers.
Pretty much. You have a titanic advantage, since you don't have to deal with styles at all and can probably start over with a non-hierarchical layout based on integer constraint satisfaction, but you're still stuck trying to bootstrap a small OS/environment. Maybe "only" the size of something like a well-designed video game modding API (factorio, kerbal space program, MMOs, etc).
Heh, emacs might be another thing you could look at, they're having some of these issues themselves.
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What are the "killer apps" for these features? `cat foo.jpg` is a parlor trick; what could you do that'd actually make me want to switch? We'd probably be looking for small but effective quality-of-life things that anyone can use - for example, fish-shell got me with "it just works" completion and syntax highlighting.
Hmm. Every tabular output (ps, ls, df, docker, random stuff massaged with awk and cut) magically having sortable columns in the original data, no rerunning the command with a different flag? Parse `--help` to make a checkbox/textbox for each flag and a "do it" button that assembles the resulting invocation? A standardized set of "quick invocations" that a command can give to the terminal to be quickly invoked with something like `M-[[:digit:]]`, so that, say, the suggestions from `command-not-found` would be a single keystroke away, or ls could provide "cd to directory 1, 2, 3"?