Comment by pure-orange
1 day ago
This doesn’t sound like a “you might not need tmux” argument. It more just argues than tmux is a pita on the terminal ecosystem which I’m sure is true. But the workarounds described are just reimplementing tmux features by taping together a bunch of tools. A better argument I think is - a lot of people do need tmux, so perhaps we should rethink protocols etc to make many of these features more native
At one point I was wondering if there was a preexisting protocol for a character-based framebuffer of some sort, that we could then use to slice the problem in a different way: a framebuffer multipliexer running terminal emulators inside it instead of a terminal multiplexer emulating multiple terminals into a framebuffer and then translating it back into terminal controls for the parent.
Unfortunately, my conclusion was that the only independent character-based terminal tradition is IBM’s 3270 stuff, but even setting aside IBM weirdness it’s simply not that. (Yes, there’s also such a protocol within tmux but it’s not really compatible with anything else.)
> It more just argues than tmux is a pita on the terminal ecosystem which I’m sure is true.
Start thinking of tmux, screen, ssh, etc as terminal emulators, and everything will suddenly make sense.
> perhaps we should rethink protocols etc to make many of these features more native
I've been opposing terminal emulators (NOTE: emulators, not REPLs) for a long while. I also do believe we can collectively do better than emulating 1970s hardware. I do believe we can build applications where "ctrl-c" means copy, and selecting more than one screen's worth of text is possible. It's not hard, we're just stubborn.
nitpick: ctrl-c never meant copy until windows started to dominate. it didn't even mean that in DOS. selecting more than one screens worth of text is possible in gui terminals and also in tmux.
but i agree with your general point: we can collectively do better than emulating 1970s hardware
absolutely!
Nit: didn’t Ctrl-X/C/V come from the original Macintosh? I thought Windows initially followed IBM’s CUA, where cut / copy / paste are instead Shift-Delete / Ctrl-Insert / Shift-Insert (and those still work too).
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> nitpick: ctrl-c never meant copy until windows started to dominate. it didn't even mean that in DOS.
VT102 wasn't designed with multiplexing in mind. The device was meant as a primary way to interact with a computer, not to perform the tasks of one - your physical keyboard also doesn't understand "copy".
> selecting more than one screens worth of text is possible in gui terminals and also in tmux.
It is but it isn't. You want to copy a multiline snippet of code you just wrote, you will have to manually strip away $PS1 & $PS2. You want to copy from vi into another window, you can't use the mouse - and you have to use a side channel.
I have 20+ unfixable issues outlined, and I'm in the process of writing a blog post... But at my current rate, it could become a book.
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That's Emacs for you. No, seriously. Have a look to eshell and elisp.
I'm trying to get away from Emacs.
I've built a standalone PoC REPL with an inferior process as a uni student (2010), it was ca 200 lines of Python and Tk. Stuff you get for free: text selection, copy/paste, multiline editing, proportional fonts, etc. It's not a hard problem, but there seems to be little collective interest to push such efforts forward.
The best idea I've seen so far is Swift Playgrounds. You get a text editor, start writing a script, run it at your own convenience, standard stuff. The good stuff is, it takes a snapshot of the running process at every line, and allows you to travel back in time, inspect the state in a debugger, and rerun from any single point. When you hit run, it restarts from the first new line, so you never pay the upfront cost of a prior heavy computation.
You get every benefit of a REPL, plus every benefit of a simple IDE, plus a time travelling debugger, plus vertical integration.
If only it wasn't just Swift.
weztern has a really strong solution in this space when you use it with its multiplexing server on the remote end.
It's more like you don't need to use a webpage that offers tabs using iframes because the browser natively has tabs that you could be using instead.
Having native scroll back should be possible if you hack tmux and a terminal emulator.