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

Having a terminal that works the same in Windows, Mac and Linux.

# Browsing UI

I have autojump and I know all the cd shenanigans, but really I want my terminal to make it easier for me.

I want an url bar where I can see my file path and click on part of it like in a file browser (eg: nautilusà or put an ssh address in it.

I want a back and forward button.

I want an history.

I want bookmarks.

I want to be able to right click on a path and "open url in the browser", "unzip/untar file", "open in libre office/vlc". And I want to be able to ctrl + left-clik path and cd to it or xdg-open it.

This should be customizable. E.G: tilix let you enter regex that makes things clickable. Very useful to debug tracebacks.

# Split and tabs

Most good terminals (ex: tilix, cmder) have a good split screen, quake mode, and tab story. You can save profiles, restore them, auto run commands, etc.

It should have those, and it should be well integrated with the browsing UI.

Also changing the aspect a tab according to events. E.g: red if command return and error code. With a special icon if you are running as root, if you ssh on a remote computer.

# Graphical display

I want to be able to request the display of an media inside the terminal, like an embeded image or video.

# Take control

I get that we wanted the terminal to be separated from the shell. But this createe such an integration mismatch.

Code completion, helps, prompts... Everything is slow, hard to configure, incomplete, unsatisfying, and not cross plateform.

Just hijack the shell and do the right thing. People that don't like it can always use another terminal.

We don't lack configurability. We have freedom all the way with current solutions. Keyboard only people with no windows decoration have everything they need.

What we do lack, is a terminal for mouse lovers.

Careful with this though. Some project tried it and added a lot of graphical things that looked cool, but were totally useless in practice.

- A presentation-based UI, where every on-screen element is always linked to the data it represents: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6946

- A powerful autocomplete that knows about possible keywords and arguments, and can list them in a graphical fashion (e.g. a drop-down menu).

- An ability to use any previously displayed data as input to a new command just by clicking on it, with the UI highlighting only the things than can be used as valid input to the current command.

- Embedding of images and arbitrary UI widgets.

- Sensible names for commands and their arguments, i.e. "Delete File" instead of "rm", and ":Output Destination File /home/erikj/log" instead of "> /home/erikj/log". This makes a lot more sense with the enhanced autocompletion facility than the current 70s style cryptic Unix two-letter commands that were employed because of the hardware limitations. It would be easier to learn and less prone to errors.

There's no chance of mixing them up with the "test" command, note, which is what ajkjk was talking about (even though xe erroneously attributed this to the Bourne Again shell language), because the test command has no assignment operator. Whereas what it does have is a whole bunch of syntactic gotchas that bite people with depressing regularity.

* Miss quoting variables, and suddenly your unary operator turns into an expression that always evaluates true, because with 1 argument test merely tests whether the argument is non-blank, which a unary operator is of course.

* = is string comparison, and -eq is numeric comparison. Yes, you want the other one.

* ... but == is a non-standard bashism that does not work in scripts interpreted by /bin/sh (which is usually something like the Korn or Almquist shell) on many modern systems.

* ... and if you are using the Z, Korn, or Bourne Again shells, don't forget that you need to quote the operators.

* Beware the variable whose value has a minus sign as its first character. All comparisons for safety need to be of the form x"$var" = x"something" .