As a text interface lover and someone who dived deep into terminal quirks, I do think you have a valid point. We need to design a text interface without all the legacy cruft, better suited for modern needs (including colors), and better mixed-mode output and interaction, something similar to what we have with Jupyter, for example (without the Web/JS/Python baggage though). It would require rebuilding whole ecosystem from scratch though, thus unlikely to happen any time soon.
Terminal emulators are user facing. Most programs don’t care about the terminal and have no awareness of it. They communicate through streams of texts and that’s it. I use Emacs and it’s another text interface different from the standard terminal. Think dired, proced, magit…
I'm rapidly developing grumpy old man habits about this gulf between "web" and "terminal". Imagine a world where we do `ls | grep .files.size` or something.
I mean, I get why we're here, but it feels so close to giving us all the power of html/css/etc while also having pipes and shells.
As you can see from the down votes, people love emulating Hollerith machines. They've probably never tried writing a terminal emulator.
As a text interface lover and someone who dived deep into terminal quirks, I do think you have a valid point. We need to design a text interface without all the legacy cruft, better suited for modern needs (including colors), and better mixed-mode output and interaction, something similar to what we have with Jupyter, for example (without the Web/JS/Python baggage though). It would require rebuilding whole ecosystem from scratch though, thus unlikely to happen any time soon.
Terminal emulators are user facing. Most programs don’t care about the terminal and have no awareness of it. They communicate through streams of texts and that’s it. I use Emacs and it’s another text interface different from the standard terminal. Think dired, proced, magit…
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Oh hey, if only html was text based.
Oh, wait, it is.
I'm rapidly developing grumpy old man habits about this gulf between "web" and "terminal". Imagine a world where we do `ls | grep .files.size` or something.
I mean, I get why we're here, but it feels so close to giving us all the power of html/css/etc while also having pipes and shells.
1 reply →