Comment by geokon
12 hours ago
terminal emulation keeps playing a central role in "computing" not withstanding it being an ugly prehistoric crocodile. Do you ever envision creating something modern, without the warts and with a design that incorporates half a century of lessons-learned? Something that fills this need but in a more elegant package? I'm asking because you're one of the few people that seems well-positioned to make a clean-slate replacement
I personally avoid using the terminal as much as possible b/c the whole things feels very archaic/fragile/baroque - but the central idea seems great and I'd love a modern take on it
Certainly parts of terminals protocols are archaic, but overall it's not nearly as fragile as you make it out to be.
problem is not the terminal, it is the Unix philosophy for CLI programs. Non-structured text piping and bash scripting being major pain points for me personally.
There is no reason why programs input/output can't be schema'ed, consumed and piped in a type-safe manner. And why there can't be a better standard than bash for simple scripts.
But it is really hard to pull this kind of thing off unless you redesign most of the common tools by scratch and do so through a committee and somehow push it down people's throat through strict platform control.
the number of gotchas involved in bash scripting indicates to me it's very hard to make robust solutions using the terminal. Trying to understand how things like colors work in the terminal makes the whole thing look very duct-taped together