Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?

I'm part of a small group that is working on a new set of protocols for terminals and shells, in order to move terminal handling out of the kernel as much as possible, and to replace the huge organically grown mess of ANSI escape sequences, terminfo databases, and so on.

I'm posting this from 34C3, where I'm asking people the same questions:

- What do you love about terminals?

- What do you hate about terminals?

- If you had to build one from scratch, how would you do it?

If you do not wish to answer in public, you can also write a mail to 34c3-terminal-survey at posteo dot de.

[I'm posting from a throwaway account because my Github links to the work that we have started on this, and I don't want to bias the survey by having you look at it before answering.]

They don't have to be! See: w3m and vimperator / Tridactyl

Edit: nvm

Here's a recent pet annoyance of mine: if you have a lot of output from a command, so you pipe it through less, and then use X cut-and-paste to copy a multiline chunk of it to another terminal, it seems to be arbitrary whether it pastes as a single line, or multiple separate lines split by newlines. (For instance, resizing the xterm can change which you get.) I think this is because cut-n-paste is handled by the terminal, but the pager is just drawing characters at cursor positions so the terminal can only make a best guess about multiline selections.

I love screen and tmux, but page up and down and copy paste are hard.