[franze]

made me think about my NEED of what I have regarding terminals.

I think I am using about 2% of the potential of what the terminal is offering me.

So my need for a new terminal app would be one which - undisruptive - trains me to unlock more and more power of the terminal.

first idea, a panel on the right hand side which explains what I just did, highlights pot improvements (how I could have chained the last 5 tasks) and explains similar or pot. next steps.

A beginners terminal.

What are your unmet needs in regards of the terminal app?

[aardshark]

I agree. I always feel like my use of shell scripting and unix tools to perform basic tasks is so much less than it could be. I enjoy the ideas of portability and speed that comes from these tools, but often I just want to get the task done and end up writing something in Python.

Things that always get me:

- Meaningful whitespace in bash.

- Differences between Mac BSD-derived utilities and POSIX utilities. (Perils of using a Mac, I guess, I know I can install the GNU versions of most things but ugh)

- Not being able to just use PCRE everywhere

- The magic of awk

- Differences in parameter/flag placement between different tools

- The amount of edge cases that you have to account for, usually to do with various levels of globbing, or special characters or even spaces in file names or utility output.

- More, I'm sure, that I can't think of right now.

there's just this underlying sense of inconsistency that I have when dealing with these tools that I feel results in me always having to check the man pages or StackOverflow whenever I want to string together more than a couple of operations.

[jen20]

> Mac BSD-derived utilities and POSIX utilities.

BSD-derived utilities in macOS are POSIX-compliant. The gulf is between GNU and POSIX.

[enlyth]

I agree, discoverability has always been a paint point of command line interfaces, and I'm not sure what the best solution is. The most annoying thing for me is having to switch back and forth between some documentation of the commands I'm trying to use and the terminal.

Also I hate how clunky the interfaces feel when you're trying to view something which happened prior. It might be there, might not, some command you ran might have cleared the terminal at some point, some overwrite over themselves to do things like progress bars, and god forbid if you resize the terminal at some point because this will reflow everything that was written to it earlier into garbage.

[hansel_der]

> The most annoying thing for me is having to switch back and forth between some documentation of the commands I'm trying to use and the terminal

have a look at screen/tmux

[nicoburns]

I would like:

- Better support for multiline editing. Including full mouse support so that I can click to highlight a word in the command I want to replace rather than having to slowly arrow key to it and then backspace it out. And automatically stripping the newlines so I don't have to end every line with a backslash.

- Support for things like multiple cursors, again so that I can edit my terminal commands efficiently.

[pikaynu]

I like the idea of beginners terminal. To make them used to using keyboard instead of hunting for icons and menus. Once they are comfortable, they will find faster alternatives and end right back to the default plain terminal.