Comment by networked
8 days ago
Classic Xerox PARC-derived GUIs are very useful but not a replacement for the terminal. I also connect to my workstation over RDP, then use a terminal emulator.
Windows is a good example of what I mean. Windows system administration has become unmistakably more text- and console-centric over time with the rise of PowerShell. Windows has started shipping an SSH service and made its graphical interface optional on the server.
The web has avoided falling into the same trap. Web UIs are, for the most part, delivered to the user as hypertext rather than rio-style pixels. They rarely hard-require a mouse and have adapted well to touchscreens. Graphics in new web UIs is usually vector (SVG).
You are missing the part that PowerShell has exactly a Xerox PARC like experience, first with PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment, nowadays the same experience is available in VSCode.
Replicating the experience of using something like Smalltalk transcript window.
Of course Windows has SSH support, it needs to interoperate with UNIX, given that UNIX won the server room.
No need for SSH to talk with Windows Core/Nano, it can be done via Web GUI administration, or PowerShell remoting.
> Replicating the experience of using something like Smalltalk transcript window.
As far as I know from Pharo, the Smalltalk transcript logs plain text and is less capable than xterm. So what you care about is not the capabilities of the terminal but having a long-lived interactive session/REPL or a REPL integrated with an editor?
> No need for SSH to talk with Windows Core/Nano, it can be done via Web GUI administration, or PowerShell remoting.
I was thinking of the administrator connecting to Windows from their Mac or Linux/BSD machine. I don't know if that's a good idea compared to them getting a Windows VM and using Windows-to-Windows PowerShell remoting as you suggest.
The concept of an XTerm it's far inferior to Emacs either as a REPL with a shell (eshell), the scratch buffer of the whole Elisp environment. Ditto with 9front with remote mounts and device binding. When you can use a remote component you can do NAT by importing /net in the spot from a remote machine. When you import /proc from another one you can suddenly debug processes of another machine.
Acme with shells are still far superior too. I can edit and script the editor's content and panes and run scripts on them. I can reuse Acme as a Mail, Usenet and maybe Irc client on the spot. I can cut, copy and paste with a mouse faster than a keyboard and yet maintain the Sam commands which are like the ex/ed ones but easier for some tasks (recursive searchs) without getting yourself mad with classic regexps. Heck, I can run filters a la vi under Acme but without being bound to a terminal and thus worried about the input/output on pipes.
How come a graphics powered REPL is less capable than a window that pretends to be a tty from the 1970's?
You can certainly use the same Web GUIs from macOS and GNU/Linux as well, as for Powershell remoting, no need for VM when Powershell nowadays is written in modern portable .NET.
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