[torben-friis]

I’ve seen many times descriptions of how original teletypes work and how that influences modern terminals.

However, something that I have not seen yet and I’d love to check is an attempt to redesign the terminal from scratch separating historical baggage from the parts that still make sense nowadays.

How would a designer create this tool without the historical precedence? Is tradition holding us back? What new standards could we reach ?

[szgupta]

I love this sentiment. Your questions would make for a very interesting post.

While we haven't rebuilt from absolute ground zero, Warp is definitely trying to extend the capabilities of a terminal (emulator) from what's historically been possible. For example, we introduced a dedicated input editor so you can have an IDE-like experience in the terminal. It's fundamentally different from how input is entered in a traditional terminal. But with this innovation, we've had to be careful to ensure that all the input features you expect in a normal terminal (even obscure ones like `alt-.`) work how you'd expect, _and then some_.

Overall though, starting from scratch is hard because we need to stay backwards-compatible with all the CLIs we use everyday.

[JdeBP]

That was already done in the 1980s and early 1990s. Microsoft/IBM operating systems evolved the notion of consoles, still-handle-based I/O devices that responded to additional first-class I/O system calls (beyond the read/write/ioctl model) for 2-D addressing, direct output buffer manipulation (including reading of the output buffer), keyboard input that did not hide the decoding of key chords into characters, and mouse input.

[nixpulvis]

We like some of the baggage for two main reasons. 1) some designs were well thought out back when resources and performance really mattered, a lot, so they make for fast and efficient implementations enforced by spec. 2) perhaps more importantly, we like our old tools to continue working, plain and simple.