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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)?

#121

Post by thiht »

jen20 wrote: post #72
junon wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did Qt do such a good job of driving people away from it? Yes, they did, with their hostile licensing changes and the fact that you cannot customize it as much as you can Electron apps.

Lack of customisation should be seen as a good thing. As a user I want apps built to fit into my platform, not for the app to be consistent across disparate platforms. I understand why marketing does not like this, though.

> Lack of customisation should be seen as a good thing

It’s not.

> As a user I want apps built to fit into my platform

As a user, I don’t care that about that. As long as the standard keyboard shortcuts exist, as well as reasonable integration with the OS which Electron does perfectly, I’m all set.

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

#123

Post by icedchai »

di4na wrote: post #25

For market no idea. For electron, because it is the only reasonable multi platform UI platform out there. I do not like that fact but it is true. For why, because the terminal protocol is atrocious, mix data with control signalling, mix together multiple layers making it really hard to extend it, is stuck emulating an emulator of a physical device from the 70s, is bursting at the seams and is blocking dozens of possi…

If your terminal can't work over a serial port, is it really a terminal?

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

#124

Post by shpx »

pdimitar wrote: post #91
t-3 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, if that's your workflow then I get it. I and many others keep around several persistent windows or tabs however. I don't care if Alacritty takes 1s to start. Still doesn't invalidate its usefulness, too. Alacritty in particular is often times a better Unicode-rendering citizen compared to other terminals.

I don't care either, just don't call it fast if it takes 4 billion CPU instructions to start drawing a black square to the screen.

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

#125

Post by pdimitar »

shpx wrote: post #124
pdimitar wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if that's your workflow then I get it. I and many others keep around several persistent windows or tabs however. I don't care if Alacritty takes 1s to start. Still doesn't invalidate its usefulness, too. Alacritty in particular is often times a better Unicode-rendering citizen compared to other terminals.

I don't care either, just don't call it fast if it takes 4 billion CPU instructions to start drawing a black square to the screen.

It is faster than most of the competition in all other areas though.

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

#126

Post by mamcx »

Is even worse. Is the same old, bad, ancient, archaic, obsolete, terminal thingy with a small improvement (https://github.com/nushell/nushell is the only I see that are half-there).

And it existed MUCH better tools for interactive programming (of the past) to copy instead.

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

#127

Post by cosmotic »

Human centered design research established long ago that GUI applications are easier to learn and easier to use. Terminals are a good 'lowest common denominator' due to their simple design and low cost implementation. People want the benefits of GUI with the portability of terminal applications which has resulted in ASCII-art boxes, menus, progress bars, trees, etc. These fancy new terminal emulators further enable these high-end-for-a-terminal-though-low-end-for-a-GUI features.

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

#128

Post by cookiengineer »

0des wrote: post #105
cookiengineer wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An analogy would be, vim purists with 0 config vs people who have elaborate config I find this pretty offensive. I have a vim config that automated my workflows, and integrated linters and build tools etc...and I am using Linux based systems for over 22 years now. While I consent with the rest of your comment, I think that most people don't want to deal with shitty syntaxes that are less memorable than they should…

> I find this pretty offensive. First of all stop what you are doing. This is about vim configs, it is not this serious.

Pardon my French, but everything about vim is serious.

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

#129

Post by dang »

str3wer wrote: post #22
nindalf wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is cursing anything. I don’t even know who you’re referring to when you say “admins”. There’s one paid moderator that I’m aware of, no admins.

Quoted post unavailable.

We don't do that.

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

#130

Post by Shish2k »

brodo wrote: post #49
georgehill wrote: post #12

What is the problem with that ? I've tried both warp.dev and fig.io, except thier annoying telementry events, I love them both. Developers use terminals frequently, and there have been no major improvements in terminal software in the last few years. I'd be happy to see more terminals developed because they are useful. I would rather encourage them than discourage it

I‘d even go as far as to say there have been no major improvements in 30 years.

Much like IRC, I expect the old-timers to keep insisting that this ancient un-extendable mess is “good enough” (Who cares about mobile phones? They’re just a fad, nobody really uses them) - until something like Discord comes along to show what actual user-friendliness looks like, and then a few years after that we’ll get some janky open-source clones...
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