[skissane]

> The various shells running under the multiplexer overwrite each other's history.

GitHub seems to have umpteen different variations on "store the shell history in a SQLite database": https://github.com/thenewwazoo/bash-history-sqlite https://github.com/trengrj/recent https://github.com/andmarios/bashistdb https://github.com/digitalist/bash_database_history https://github.com/quitesimpleorg/hs9001 https://github.com/hinzundcode/termmon https://github.com/fvichot/hisql https://github.com/bcsgh/bash_history_db https://github.com/jcsalterego/historian

This seems a popular enough idea, I wonder why it hasn't just added to Readline/libedit/etc? (Would the maintainers of those packages agree to add such an idea to them?)

> The shell history is specific to the machine that the shell is running on, not the machine that the terminal is running on

Once you've got the idea of shell history in sqlite – why not have a (per-user) daemon which exposes that history, some RPC protocol over a Unix domain socket, with the name of the socket in an environment variable? Then you can forward that socket over SSH? Again, something that could go in readline/libedit/etc, if their maintainers could agree to it.

> The terminal multiplexer can't give the terminal emulator its scrollback buffer.

Someone needs to come up with a new protocol here, instead of just pretending we are all still using physical VT series terminals over serial lines? The biggest problem with introducing any such protocol would be getting everyone to agree to adopt it. One could make patches for a few different terminal multiplexers and emulators, but would the maintainers accept them?

[jrockway]

My thought is to burn it all down. It's my very-background side project to do this; I have also seen a few startups trying it out. (My theory is that developers won't pay for tools, so I wouldn't start a company to do it. A few people use IntelliJ or whatever, that's about it. They're not going to buy a commercial ssh daemon and terminal emulator.)

I will say that one should be wary of combining 3d graphics and font rendering and designing a programming language in the same project, at least if you want to get it done in less than 10 years. (I did talk myself out of writing a text editor, at least. Not touching that one.)

Like I said, very backgroundy. I don't have a good programming language spec. I do have text and UI elements that can be rendered at 360fps. (Yup, I have a 360Hz monitor. If you do things right, the lack of latency is frightening. It's like that "perfectly level" floor from Rick & Morty. But it is hard work to render a UI 360 times a second, especially when you're not using C++. Sigh!)

[skissane]

> My thought is to burn it all down

I have the exact same thought. I've been working on it, on-and-off, for years. I remember starting out when our son was a baby, and he's 9 now, and I still haven't got very far. Plus, now we've got two kids, and they are older, I have far less time to muck around with this stuff than I used to.

What I've realised after a while – "burn it all down" is unlikely to produce much results. I mean, if it is all just for fun (which is kind of all it is for me now), it doesn't really matter. But if one is hoping to make an impact in the real world, small incremental improvements building on pre-existing work are far more likely to do that than starting it all over from scratch, as tempting as that is.

> I will say that one should be wary of combining 3d graphics and font rendering and designing a programming language in the same project, at least if you want to get it done in less than 10 years. (I did talk myself out of writing a text editor, at least. Not touching that one.)

My priorities are somewhat different from yours. Own programming language? Yup, been through a few of those (every now and again I get fed up with it all and restart from scratch). 3D graphics? Well, I planned on having 2D graphics, never got very far with that, didn't even think of 3D. Mostly have just stuck to text mode, at one point I had my own incomplete clone of curses written in a mixture of my own programming language and Java (this was before I decided to abandon the JVM as a substrate and rewrite my own language in C–I started redoing my curses clone in C–why didn't I just use ncurses or whatever?–but it is very unfinished, never got anywhere near as far as my Java attempt did), also HTML to render in the browser.

But a text editor? Yeah, did that. Also, somewhat bizarrely, the text editor I wrote was a line editor (as in ed, ex, edlin, etc). Never actually used it that much for editing text. I meant to write a full-screen interface for it too (retracing the historical evolution from ex to vi), just have never got around to it.

> I don't have a good programming language spec

One thing I learned years ago – unless you love writing specs, they are a bit of a waste of time for this kind of stuff. Write your language first, create the spec later. Even for serious languages like Java, that's actually what happened (from what I understand)–the implementation of the language and the runtime was already several years old before they started writing the specs for them.