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Ask HN: Why are there so many companies trying to reinvent the terminal (badly)?

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Re: Ask HN: Why are there so many companies trying to reinvent the terminal (badly)?

#111

Post by munchbunny »

nicoburns wrote: post #57
Kelteseth wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For electron, because it is the only reasonable multi platform UI platform out there. I do not like that fact but it is true. Why do people constantly repeat this? Did we all forget about Qt? Did Qt do such a good job of driving people away from it?

I think QT has two problems: 1. It's based on C++. 2. The licensing makes it very expensive for non-open-source applications.

Having used both QT and Electron, my subjective experience is that Electron is just more ergonomic to use. And it's not because I'm new to C++ either. I have more years logged writing C++ than I do in the JS ecosystem. It's also not because I actually like Electron very much (I have several big problems with it), but if I needed to build a new cross-platform UI app these days Electron would be my default.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so many companies trying to reinvent the terminal (badly)?

#112

Post by toastal »

raghavbali wrote: post #44
trevormcneal wrote: post #38

Same with "MLOps" tools... same with every niche, bunch of useless tools just trying to grab some market. But this is not a recent thing, every time the current thing gets flooded with crap ideas competing for some market share (ie longtail theory). Sometimes the old ideas are just rebuilt, nocode is just RAD with different branding, event sourcing is just ESB, microservices is basically SOA... What is scary that act…

I like the part " _microservices is basically SOA_ " , want to say that loud so many times myself :)

I'd like to know more of this *microservice band that is basically SoaD

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so many companies trying to reinvent the terminal (badly)?

#113

Post by leephillips »

t-3 wrote: post #88
pdimitar wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How often do you restart it though? Mine lives for days or even weeks sometimes, and is only restarted when it gets updated. When saying "fast" I definitely meant it as "all the operations it does while alive" and not "how many times per minute I can restart it" (lol).

When I need a terminal, mod+enter spawn one and close it. I'll often do this to download a file, start yt-dlp, mpv etc. The session is all tmux so I never keep the window around when not in use.

Me too. On my systems, running Debian with dwm, a Kitty terminal appears instantly. It’s the fastest terminal I’ve ever used, by a big margin, including xterm. The fact that I can do things such as ssh into a remote machine and see an image in that machine’s filesystem displayed in the terminal are bonuses. I mainly use it because of its speed and Unicode support.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so many companies trying to reinvent the terminal (badly)?

#114

Post by this_is_eline »

tjpnz wrote: post #80
this_is_eline wrote: post #31

I believe that this is partially because default shells (mostly bash) are not 'really' beginner friendly, and you usually need to spend some time configuring them to be comfortable working with them. That said, i use fish shell so what do I know :)

These companies are not even trying to re-imagine the shell, just the terminal you use to interact with it.

They are trying tho? Warp terminal has experimental ai command search that allows you to translate natural language to bash (shell) commands. That means that you could use your terminal without ever learning how to use the shell, effectively replacing not just your terminal but your shell too.

Terminal is just the program that shows text. New terminal emulators (not all new terminal emulators, but the ones mentioned in comments, the ones op asked about mostly) are way more than just programs showing text, they are also replacing/re-imagining the shell, or re-imagining the way you interact with the shell; thay are wrappers around the shell (and more).

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so many companies trying to reinvent the terminal (badly)?

#115

Post by shreyshnaccount »

pikaynu wrote: post #18

The inflow of new engineers which are not so familiar with traditional tools like a basic terminal and a text editor. That was all which was needed to write software. Most of the software stack was quite flat back then. Today, the way everyone starts is by installing a bunch of tools, frameworks and an IDE to navigate through those tools. Even a simple web page requires to install 100MBs of dependencies. Trying to le…

The purists got it wrong. The maximalist JS devs got it wrong. Imo the best way for most things in life is to have it as simple as possible without abstracting away everything, kinda like a middle path- like using zsh with autocomplete and highlighting in st, huh?

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so many companies trying to reinvent the terminal (badly)?

#116

Post by cyberprunes »

I like the interest in modernizing the terminal as an interface. There's still room for innovation and improvement. That's probably the big reason. Unfortunately this push is mired in app culture yak shaving bloatware bullshit (with a few exceptions). I'm surprised the market hasn't been flooded with Web3 DAPP terminal apps that will "revolutionize the terminal somehow, bro". Anyway, I love the enthusiasm but I'm not using a 100MB+ terminal app that requires a cloud account. I'll keep on BASHING like its 1989, thank you.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so many companies trying to reinvent the terminal (badly)?

#117

Post by antifa »

jrh206 wrote: post #78
jen20 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not negative to state the facts - all of those things are true.

The point is that you can choose which facts to present. In any case, “(badly)” is clearly an opinion and not a fact.

More trackers and "one more standard utility in electron" are both objectively bad trends that need to be pushed back on.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so many companies trying to reinvent the terminal (badly)?

#118

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

KSPAtlas wrote: post #52
hestefisk wrote: post #41

Those who do not understand Unix are doomed to reinvent it…

What about plan9? If the guys at Bell Labs didn't understand UNIX I'd be worried...

Just because those who don't understand UNIX are doomed to reinvent it doesn't mean that those who do understand UNIX aren't also doomed to reinvent it.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so many companies trying to reinvent the terminal (badly)?

#119

Post by BiteCode_dev »

anonymoushn wrote: post #74
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

QT talent pool and ecosystem is a rounding error compared to what we have with the web ecosystem. If you want to make something with medias, graphs, a few custom widgets, a reactive layout and deep routing, it will take 10 to 30 times longer with QT. I myself prefer the snapiness of QT apps, but budget and time to market will win.

What does "deep routing" mean?

Views, sub views, partial views and complex hierachic workflows. Url base routers are great for those, but QT controllers let you reinvent the wheel.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so many companies trying to reinvent the terminal (badly)?

#120

Post by BiteCode_dev »

krageon wrote: post #98
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

QT talent pool and ecosystem is a rounding error compared to what we have with the web ecosystem. If you want to make something with medias, graphs, a few custom widgets, a reactive layout and deep routing, it will take 10 to 30 times longer with QT. I myself prefer the snapiness of QT apps, but budget and time to market will win.

Electron apps are always resource hogs, frequently slow and generally integrate extremely poorly. As a consumer I care not one whit for how large the "talent pool" for the web ecosystem is, I care about how terrible the application is. As a developer I must say calling it talent is in most cases a huge stretch, as I do believe you can probably make something in Electron that performs passably, integrates passably and…

Sure but most teams do the maths for the cost/benefit ratio and make the call.

In this context the argument is moot: a better app that is too expensive or slow to make is simply not going to be released vs the worse one that actually gets published.

That's all there is to it.

That's why people still use wordpress, excel or jupyter notebooks for important stuff.

You may want things to be different, and for good reasons, but it's still what's the market has decided.

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