What I love: speed. Responsiveness. The focus on text, which is what I read most unambiguously. Resizability and reflowing on a line-by-line basis. vim, slrn and mutt: they all understand that a "page" is just the viewable area, and is both important as a unit of scrolling and unimportant because it can change at any time.
Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?
31–40 of 204 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?
#32I would love to contribute to this group. How can I get involved?
Re: Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I wouldn't call CMD.exe monolithic, nor is it really a terminal emulator. It's just a command line interpreter that uses the same API as any other Windows console. I.e. bash.exe is a console application, and does not use CMD.exe.
Re: Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?
#34Here are my comments and concerns.
1. Minimal latency from keyboard to screen.
2. As others have mentioned here, awareness of line wrap, so that cut and paste work correctly at all times. Not just for raw output from a command. Editors too should communicate with the terminal to indicate that it is wrapping lines.
3. 24-bit color.
4. Apps (shells, editors) can query and set the window icon as well as the window title.
5. Integrated graphics display. So that I can just 'cat' a picture to display it in the terminal window, instead of using an external application.
Re: Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?
#35I 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…
> 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
With fish you can customize auto completion for individual commands with full color and tooltip support.
As a long time emacs user I want to believe that much of the required functionality for menus can be achieved via a text only format (either using standard escape codes or a markup language).
I completely agree that we need to be able to incorporate native UI elements in CLI programs.
Recently I stumbled upon Steve Jobs's presentation of Next computers and the initial UIkit. Jobs himself programmed without writing a single line of code, only using the built in interface builder. This was in the 80s, now the year is 2017 and we are still trying to remember the parameters for tar to extract files :)
I think the future should not rely on terminals where we extensively type and read. There should be drop-down menus for all applications, whether text based or GUI based. And these menus should be able to incorporate system-native dialogs e.g choose a file, choose a font etc.
And I'd want PostScript support to all terminals. Green on black mono fonts are cool but we have 4K displays now, come on! I want to be able to specify font, show images, draw charts etc. in a terminal window.
Frankly the future of terminals should look like Python Notebooks such as Jupyter. We need to be able to use cool fonts graphics UI elements and we need to be able to share our terminal "page" with others.
Re: Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?
#36I would love for someone to produce a modern dumb terminal - akin to the Hazeltine/VT100 systems of the past, but using modern components. It'd have multiple serial ports, and do nothing but act as a dumb terminal for a Unix system - but it'd use modern display tech, maybe something from the elite mechanicalkeyboards world, and so on. I'd buy one for my desktop in a heartbeat - I'm truly sick of all the bloat required just to fire up iTerm.app and so on.
Re: Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?
#37guiding principles is that a terminal is still part of the computing ecosystem and needs to be a well integrated companion to GUI and desktop apps running concurrently.
so here are some suggestions off the top of my head
* padding on the left of the terminal. mouse selection from the start of the line needlessly requires precision mousing. more often than essential when attempting to select some text with the mouse, one resizes the terminal or selects a window behind the terminal frame. probably best in the gui client but perhaps some escape modes where whitespace can be hinted as not copyable
* perhaps a modes to suggest arbitrary text should not be copied to the clipboard ? say lots of banner text with a supprt url among it. selectingthe whole block only selects the useful url. ignorable by the end user of course
* mouse double-click-to-select should grow the selection. terminal output often needs to be cutnpasted into other apps
* snapshot the offscreen buffer somehow ? less somefile.txt... exit... rm somefile.txt... oops gone for all time including scrollback
* sane modern defaults. Ctrl-S freezes terminal ?!? I know this a bash thing setopt -w checkwinsize. why is this not on by default ?
Re: Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?
#38Hate the fact that you can cannot revert the termtitle to it's previous value. A mechanisme like push/pop titles would be more convenient. Anchoring metadata to some text (like links in HTML) for terminal emulator to understand instead of regex.
I would suggest asking authors of libraries like python_prompt_toolkit who likely have ideas.
Re: Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?
#39I don't know if it's solvable at the terminal level only, but I would love a terminal that never gets messed up so that I never have to type reset or close the window and open it up again.
Re: Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?
#40I 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…
This. I would love to be able to type "[command] --[tab]" and have it list all the options, and/or common options, so when I'm learning 'tar' I don't have to start typing, realize I've forgotten the command, and then have to go use man or --help or go Google it.
Have you checked out ZSH? It can do this nicely.