[user911302966]

"And we, the users, play along, pretending our machine is a video terminal presenting a grid of ASCII characters in all of 256 colours. This is ridiculous."

Not everybody uses their terminal to churn out HTML pages and add 'Nyan mode' to our 'newly discovered' emacs program. For those who do that, just buy a Macintosh or whatever is this week's hip flavor of Best Buy PC. Otherwise, use a language that doesn't require >256 different colors to be represented meaningfully.

"Typography is the future"? Thank goodness X.org/XFree86 has supported custom fonts since the 1990's.

"Opening a man page would scroll gently to the top of the page, letting you scroll down and read, or search through it as you would any text"

See: MANPAGER.

"We then add syntax highlighting and hyperlinks, so you can easily navigate between man pages"

Many terminals and shells support these features already.

"Finally we add visualisations so you can view plots of lines of code, etc., without having to context-switch."

Huh? I read that as 'code folding' and clang compilation.

I think the main takeaway here is that most of his "ideas" can be easily achieved within the current ecosystem of available programs, most of which are stock on modern UNIX-like OS distributions. I do think he misfiled this article under "Ideas"; it's more akin to a polite rant.

edit: colours/color killed due to conflict with reality (and irrelevance anyway).

[pnathan]

No downvote, but I believe its worth thinking about ways to advance power-user use beyond the emulation of teletype machines (first deployed in 1910). It may be that they are the optimal power-user text interface, but it may also be that they simply occupy a local optima and we need to keep searching.

[lubutu]

You don't seem able to see the forest for the trees... Taking quotes out of context and dismissing them is not sufficient to dismiss the entire article.

Also, I'm British.

[user911302966]

All quotes save for one-liners are out of context. The points you make stand on their own.

I don't dismiss the entire article; I appreciate thought and innovation in the space of the terminal, but I disagree with your ideas. Thanks for putting them out there to begin with.

[1010100101]

I'm curious, have you used Plan9? If yes, how long did you use it?

[lubutu]

I have, yes. I own a Pentium 4 which runs Plan 9, and have done for two years or so.

[1010100101]

I'll throw in my .02.

I see the context-switch as one between text and graphics.

If I'm working on the command line, then most times I have no need to have X11 running. I'm working exclusively with text. I can boot to a command line and start working. No X11 is needed.

But when a need arises for graphics, e.g., to read a PDF composed of scanned images (not pure Postscript), then I have to "context-switch" to the X11 context.

I find that switching back and forth between these two contexts is not smooth and can easily lead to instability.

There is often a presumption, as in Plan9, that we will just switch once: to the graphical environment. And not return to the original console.

To me, neither an X11 terminal emulator nor the Plan9 environment is "the console". It's another layer of abstraction on top of the console.

That is a lot of overhead I do not need if I'm just working with text.

[gnaritas]

Isn't that problem solved by virtual terminals?

[101001010101]

Sort of. But you have to keep X11 running on another vt. Stopping and restarting X many times in a session is a different story. At least for me.

And even in the case I keep X11 running on another vt, I've found that when using no wm, or a simple one like evilwm, switching back and forth from console (on one vt) to X11 (on another vt) many times does not work well. Eventually it fails.

This is on {Net,Free,Open}BSD.

I don't think that Plan9 has vt's as such. It's more like what the article envisions, with graphics capabilities seemingly woven into the terminal. But you're pretty much stuck in an X11 type environment. Plan9 experts correct me if I'm wrong.

I've always found this "context switch" from console to graphics is like a one-way street. You're not really expected to keep shutting down the graphics and going back to the console. At least I've never found anyone who does that.