Edit: nvm
Frankly speaking, your love, hate and suggestion have nothing to do with the terminal, but everything to do with the shell and userland.
Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?
11–20 of 204 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?
#12Re: Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?
#13Love: I think it's the best way to do things without GUI
Hate: I cant use mouse for copy command or edit a line
Re: Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you confusing the terminal and the shell there?
Your question makes me realise I don't really know the difference and could confuse it myself. Can quickly you clear that up for me?
Well, the terminal is a piece of software that emulates a literal terminal - a hardware DEC VT100 for example. This was a device with a screen and a keyboard but no CPU that sat on your desk and was connected over a serial line to a shared computer like a VAX.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT100
I actually used these, a later model, in the mid-late '90's:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT220
The classic green text on black background look comes from these, tho' I always preferred amber.
A shell is the software that reads input from the keyboard, takes some action, which might be to run another program, and sends that output back to the screen. The terminal emulator you are using eg. xterm or PuTTY relays from your hardware keyboard on your PC to the shell, then renders what the shell sends back to it. The kernel's TTY drivers are the glue between them - TTY once meaning "teletype". In the old days between the VT on your desk and the VAX back in the machine room there would be LAT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Area_Transport
So it's a decoupled system, with the Unix philosophy of doing one thing well, and you are free to swap the terminal you use (xterm, rxvt, whatever) and the shell you prefer (csh, bash, zsh, etc) as you please, which you couldn't do if it were a monolithic program like CMD.EXE.
Re: Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?
#15It would be nice if the terminal and/or shell exposed some metadata. For example which machine and folder it is currently at.
This would allow one to have two terminals connected to two different machines ( via ssh for example ) and drag and drop files from one terminal to the other, even if there is no route between the two hosts
It would also be nice if words or sentences in the terminal had metadata. So one could type `ls`, see a lot files and click on obe of them to open it
Re: Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?
#16I think that the autocomplete story is abysmal. Modern IDEs can tell me exactly what can follow after a certain piece of text, and even the best tab completion in terminals is limited, ugly, and text-mode for no good reason.
Some protocol for a real dropdown rendered in the style of the OS, plus a standard data format that allows tool builders to specify options, their meanings and the kinds of allowed parameters in a structural way (much like doccomments in code), is direly needed.
If I type "git " I want to see "add" as an option, with docs in a tooltip as I navigate the options. When I "git add " I want to see a list of files that make sense to add, eg only files that can be staged right now.
I want this to be consistent across commands, I want any shell to be able to add support for this and I want any command line program to be able to add support for this.
Re: Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?
#17On the lines of "just working", it'd be cool to have a shell which if I could accidentally cat a binary file and not have the shell be completely in-operable or have to run this long archaic command to get it working again.
Maybe have something like "when I run the cat command, ignore all commands to the terminal until cat finishes".
Re: Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?
#18Here'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 term…
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?
#19I think that the autocomplete story is abysmal. Modern IDEs can tell me exactly what can follow after a certain piece of text, and even the best tab completion in terminals is limited, ugly, and text-mode for no good reason. Some protocol for a real dropdown rendered in the style of the OS, plus a standard data format that allows tool builders to specify options, their meanings and the kinds of allowed parameters in…
Text mode is handy because it works transparently over SSH.
Re: Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?
#20Finalterm was really a promising modern terminal and had a huge potential. It is a shame the project has been abandoned.