[zamadatix]

The confidence that "it's just going to suck" really highlight out this is really ideological rant not a technical conversation. As such I don't really think there is much to talk about the video itself, there isn't any substance.

As for the underlying question terminal emulators do seem to be REALLY hard. I don't think this has to do with language/OS complexity as much as the complexity needed to be compatible with apps that expect the terminal to work a certain way rather than just being an easy way to display text on a screen.

Would be curious to hear from people that actually work on terminal on what is it that makes them more complicated than they look if any are reading this thread though.

[ldelossa]

Terminal emulators, as their name describes, emulate old school terminals.

Terminal support in linux is built directly into the kernel. So bar minimum you need to be familiar with these syscalls, which are a little obscures, but luckily only a hand full are necessary.

Next, youll need to understand process management in the kernel, standard pipes, and job control.

The actual emulator code has to keep a mapping of terminal control characters to terminal features, and keep this working across OS's if portability is a goal. Here in lies the devil in the details. This emulation layer is tribal knowledge.

Finally you have to also be a good UI dev, who knows how to inter-op ASCII and UTF8 shell escaping.

This isnt touching on colors, GPU acceleration, and other pluses.

[zamadatix]

Very good points, reminded me when reading about the Windows Terminal announcement a lot of the work was in modernizing the underlying layers as well https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-command-l...