[StevePerkins]

I just don't understand the use case here. It's an Electron-based terminal... that has a thousand pretty themes, but lacks basic functionality like being able to expand your scroll buffer. It's just not usable as a daily driver.

I'm not trying to hate on Electron (VS Code is my main editor now, and I enjoy it). But I just don't see the point here other than, "Look what they wrote with Electron!". Is it the "social" aspect of posting color themes and seeing how many downloads you get, and I'm just old?

[malux85]

No youre not old, just wise. Terminals are actually pretty complex beasts and performance matters above all, closely followed by compatibility. I feel the same way as you.

Or maybe we're both just old. Lets chase the kids off our lawn, get some dr pepper and fire up the alphaservers?

[mikl]

Ditto here. Given how performance- and security intensive a terminal emulator is (who wants to add JavaScript injection to their list of server security worries?), writing one in Electron seems a bit nuts to me.

[malux85]

well as long as it's not EVAL'ing the .... wait they wouldn't ... OH NO

[petetttt]

We all enjoy customising our setup?

A web dev friendly developer experience and a javascript plugin ecosystem opens that up to a new audience.

It's a pretty big audience. I guess the hope is that raises the bar for what users expect from a terminal and it's plugins, while providing performance that is adequate enough for it's target audience.

[StevePerkins]

I dunno. An audience that's fine with a 1,000-line scroll buffer probably aren't heavy terminal users in the first place. Before you can "raise the bar", you need to reach feature parity with the built-in OSX terminal, or any of the hundred Windows apps like ConEmu.

[petetttt]

That's kind of what I mean—the audience for this isn't heavy terminal users. You can still raise the bar for them!

[fluxsauce]

Just because you don't consider yourself part of the audience doesn't mean this isn't intended for heavy terminal users. I'm using it right now and I'm impressed by the performance with dozens of production logs that aren't limited to a thousand lines of scrollback.

Gatekeeping isn't inclusive.

[axelf4]

Hey! No need to play gatekeeper. FWIW, when using tmux, a scrollback of 0 is more than plenty.

[StevePerkins]

I'm not sure what a "gatekeeper" is, or the concern with it being "not inclusive". I suspect this is Twitter jargon, leaking out more broadly.

Terminal apps are a 1970's concept. We're discussing the possible use cases for a brand new one, which has yet to implement a number of basic features common to virtually all existing ones.

If anyone happens to not need those common features, and does have use cases satisfied by the new entry, then that's great! Your existence is not invalidated, there is no membership card for anyone to revoke.

However, while I'm not sure if there's a contemporary jargon term for expressing this in a single word... you should perhaps avoid "raise the bar" boasts, if you're simultaneously sensitive to anyone else pointing at a bar.

[iptq]

tmux has scroll back, just hit ctrl-b [

[kristiandupont]

I suppose to the many JS developers out there (which is a lot), having your software built in it makes it easier and more appealing to write extensions for. I have no data, but it's my impression that the growth curve for VS Code extensions compared to VS "classic" is much steeper.

This may or may not be a good thing but IMO it does tend to make some interesting and novel things surface.

[nkkollaw]

It's just an experiment. If you try to use it and you use the terminal for work you'll see that it freezes and crashes often with more that a few hundred lines, and that it uses a lot of RAM.

It looks cool, though!

[moltar]

I think it’s just WIP. Just like VS Code wasn’t perfect from the start.

But I can imagine it following the same path. Ecosystem becomes more mature. Plugins get more sophisticated.

[STRiDEX]

its one of the few options you can use on both windows and osx with the same themes and plugins etc. However, i agree, it wasn't able to get me to stop using item2

[jug]

Yes, it was admittedly a while ago but I looked hard for killer features or at least something that makes use of this obscene abstraction of Electron, but I could only find minor features. I mean, for Windows Conemu or Cmder looks much better. And soon Microsoft’s own upcoming Windows Terminal looks better too.