Comment by WD-42
15 hours ago
Mitchell,
What has it been like witnessing terminal emulators make such a huge comeback with the advent of Claude Code et. all? I remember comments here in the early days of Ghostty along the lines of "Why is he working on a terminal emulator? We need people working on future problems, not the past!" Pretty funny considering I regularly hear people say they are in the terminal more than the browser now. Crazy times!
Overall I would describe it as "amusing."
If you told me 3 years ago that terminal usage would _increase_ I would've laughed. Beyond that, I'm now having regular conversations with the frontier agentic coding companies (since they're far and away the largest terminal users at the moment) and if you had told me 2 years ago that that would be happening because of a terminal, I would've laughed even harder.
So, it's amazing. But overall, its amusing.
Would a terminal deal with them have added another billion to your account if it hadn’t been nonprofit?
Probably not. I don't know. Who cares.
Wait, really? So I’ve used the terminal for everything for decades, and now, because of vibe coding, all The Kids have joined me? I don’t even know how to feel about that. Better terminals are nice though.
Right? It’s been kind of funny watching everyone “rediscover” the terminal and I’m over here feeling like a true graybeard “silly kids, I’ve been here the whole time.”
What’s old is new again is apparently just as true in tech as it is in fashion.
The terminal was _always awesome_, the bar to realized that was just a tad high for many people. Until now!
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It's because the web developers who destroyed the web are now taking their mess with them into more obscure places, such as terminals, hardware and AI.
That's probably why it is so hyped up as it is right now.
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I think terminal workflows are intimidating for a lot of people, because the discoverability is lower than GUIs. You can't necessarily intuit how a CLI works, you have to read the documentation or watch a tutorial, which my 10 years in the IT industry has taught me a big barrier even for really experienced SWEs. The new coding TUIs are a more gentle introduction to that.
> ... because the discoverability is lower than GUIs.
The UI paradigm created by the emacs transient package [1] can improve the discoverability of CLI commands significantly. It's one of the components of magit, the famous git frontend, that makes it so awesome. It's discoverability is very close to that of GUIs and somehow even more pleasing to use than GUIs. I wonder if someone is trying this on terminals.
[1] https://github.com/magit/transient
The program perhaps most responsible for the renewed interest in the terminal, Claude Code, is made with React. Life moves pretty fast.
I think people simply don't like to read or write. --help is probably as discoverable as it gets.
Yeah it’s been amusing to see people rediscovering tmux as well
/* Claude Code is the strongest case of the return to the mainframe: a closed, bespoke, paid service that nothing locally run compares to. Terminals are just a natural part of the mainframe world! */
Once he fixes the past he will have more time to fix the future
He was on a podcast recently where he talked about that a little. It’s on Youtube.