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TermKit - a graphical terminal replacement

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Re: TermKit - a graphical terminal replacement

#181

Post by karmaVS »

blackRust wrote: post #10
rrrazdan wrote: post #6

Many times you need to look beneath the veneer of abstractions that is the modern GUI, to work with speed and flexibility. However you don't want to strip away all the abstractions. That would yield the system very unwieldy. (example: Programming in C vs Programming in Assembly) The Unix command prompt is just the right amount of abstraction for me, and for many other users. What the project proposes is certainly nov…

Exactly, I think if you are a hacker you will stick with the shell the way it is, because knowing how stuff works with "zero" abstractions is power. Reminds me of this: http://i.imgur.com/jqIcv.jpg Also I mean as a hacker, not as an entrepreneur.

A shell is far from ‘zero’ abstractions.

Re: TermKit - a graphical terminal replacement

#182

Post by arnoooooo »

I tried to start a discussion on reddit with a very basic version of this idea, which was met with a lot of criticism.

In the end, I'm thinking it would be enough to have espace characters : for embedded graphics, and for some kind of terminal hyperlink. An exemple is file names in grep listings, which I would like to be able to click to get the filename pasted on my next command line.

Re: TermKit - a graphical terminal replacement

#183

Post by ZoFreX »

unconed wrote: post #176
ZoFreX wrote: post #53

It's a pity that this is so difficult to try. The blog post has so much detail and effort put into it, but all that shine and polish disappears when you try to install it. Specifically Step 1 of the instructions[1] has a link titled "install node and npm" [2] which has the line 'git clone git://github.com/ry/node.git', which is incorrect. The correct URL (as far as I can tell) would be 'git://github.com/joyent/node.g…

I don't mind, the project is in too rough a shape to interest anyone but hackers. Please come back in a month.

I get that it's not meant to be release quality yet, it's just a shame that your blog post was so comprehensive and detailed and fell down on that last point. Certainly spending half an hour installing software only to find out I need to upgrade my OS X wasn't fun :(

Re: TermKit - a graphical terminal replacement

#184

Post by tga »

unconed wrote: post #145
moe wrote: post #78

I love this! It has fundamental conceptional flaws. But hell, finally someone is rethinking the terminal, please continue working on this! Here's the direction I would propose: It must be 100% backwards compatible. This is not optional, anything else is a non-starter. Likewise trying to re-invent the entire unix userspace toolchain is a terrible idea. So why not do it the UNIX-way and how terminals have always done i…

I hear what you're saying, but respectfully I disagree. To me, it's like suggesting that the iPhone would be better if you added a physical slide out keyboard to make it more old-school; sure, you could do that, and would probably score popularity points with unconvinced customers. But you would compromise tons of secondary aspects of the device to do so. If TermKit would have a "traditional" mode of operation, and l…

You could put the "new" mode of operation directly against the "traditional" one only if you were proposing an actually new paradigm (like the point-and-click interface). And even then you would still want to allow a way to fall back to what's tried and true.

As TK is essentially an _improved terminal_, I don't see a reason to totally break off from the current power of the traditional CLI, especially if alienating current power users in the process.

The biggest limitation are the existing applications. Initially the new features could be opt-in, and as the new idea picks up, you would then have more and more console applications support the new type of terminal.

Re: TermKit - a graphical terminal replacement

#185

Post by adw »

l3vitat3 wrote: post #137
wooster wrote: post #117

This comment thread, both here and on the blog post, is the best example of stop energy being directed at forward motion I've seen in a long, long time: http://www.userland.com/whatIsStopEnergy Kudos to unconed for doing something remarkable. I look forward to seeing where it goes from here.

that's just a marketing site talking about a marketing term probably invented by a marketing guy, I'm okay if this gets as widespread as apple devices (and btw I really love my macbook pro) but I find it totally useless for the people working day by day with terminals, time will have the last word

Even if it is - and reading the article, it's Dave Winer, who I doubt would think of himself as a marketer - then that doesn't make it wrong!

Marketing is a legit discipline with a bunch of charlatanry around it. So is programming. So is basically every field of human endeavour.

Re: TermKit - a graphical terminal replacement

#186

Post by JunkDNA »

I'd like to offer a slightly different perspective on this. As someone who is a hybrid hacker/biologist, I welcome something like TermKit. I have invested a good chunk of time learning unix commands and the shell because lots of scientific applications require it. Furthermore, as a data wrangler, the unix tools are a necessity for quickly processing and pumping files around. I require unix to efficiently do my job. I often think, "Gosh, what do all these other people do when they need to do X?" where "X" is some ugly task that I can hack some grep and sed commands together to accomplish. I don't think most programmers understand the sheer number of exceptionally well-educated, genuinely smart people who spend huge chunks of their day doing menial "copy/paste" in Excel (because it's the only real tool they can use) when they should be designing bridges, curing diseases, analyzing data, etc...

If you're a unix sysadmin or a full-time hacker, you can justify the cost in time and effort of learning and memorizing all this stuff. In fact, you'd be foolish not to. But there are a lot of people who don't spend all day in a terminal. Nevertheless, they frequently need the unix terminal to get something done. A tool like TermKit could be a huge boost for those people allowing them to bootstrap their knowledge without having to dive into the deep end all at once.

There are legions of people out there who are smart enough to learn some bits of unix if only the learning curve wasn't a sheer brick wall. If you need evidence that man pages and "-h" don't cut it, start typing common unix commands into google (xargs, tar, grep, etc...) and you'll almost always find one of the top suggestions is "command_name examples" or something like that. Why is that? My grandma isn't trying to use "xargs" I assure you. Someone with enough knowledge of the unix command prompt to know they need xargs reads a man page and they still don't know how the hell to use the command properly. That's a usability problem and there are modern ways to help with it (as is demonstrated by all the things IDE's do to help programmers all the time).

I'm really excited to see where this goes. There are all sorts of possibilities it opens up.

Re: TermKit - a graphical terminal replacement

#187

Post by TomLimoncelli »

OH MY GOD! THIS GUY WANTS ME TO CHANGE THE WAY I WORK!

I"VE BEEN WORKING THE SAME WAY FOR 20 YEARS

YOU CAN"T MAKE ME CHANGE!

CHANGE SCARES ME!

20 YEARS AGO MY TERMINAL DIDN"T HAVE LOWERCASE, COLOR, OR WINDOWS. WHY HE WANT ME TO CHANGE!!?!?

(Damn, I've never seen a group of people so change-adverse and closed minded about trying new things as the software developers that are in the business of making new stuff! Geeze! Download it and give it a try before you post a comment!)

Re: TermKit - a graphical terminal replacement

#188

Post by derleth »

unconed wrote: post #145
moe wrote: post #78

I love this! It has fundamental conceptional flaws. But hell, finally someone is rethinking the terminal, please continue working on this! Here's the direction I would propose: It must be 100% backwards compatible. This is not optional, anything else is a non-starter. Likewise trying to re-invent the entire unix userspace toolchain is a terrible idea. So why not do it the UNIX-way and how terminals have always done i…

I hear what you're saying, but respectfully I disagree. To me, it's like suggesting that the iPhone would be better if you added a physical slide out keyboard to make it more old-school; sure, you could do that, and would probably score popularity points with unconvinced customers. But you would compromise tons of secondary aspects of the device to do so. If TermKit would have a "traditional" mode of operation, and l…

> TermKit has failed in being a comprehensive tool.

As it should. Unix disdains comprehensive tools in favor of the pipeline and, generally, picking the right tool for the job.

Re: TermKit - a graphical terminal replacement

#189

Post by [deleted] »

l3vitat3 wrote: post #130
wladimir wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be surprised if Webkit was just as fast or even faster in rendering than your average Linux terminal emulator. About caring enough, yeah, that depends, maybe the world is ready for this now :) At least it isn't some overengineered XML grotesquery this time.

that webkit will render faster than a terminal emulator is just pure fantasy, is like saying that a smart phone with all the fancy apps will eventually use less power than a solar powered calculator. you ppl are addicted to osx overdesign. no graphical user interface will beat a keyboard in the right hands, like it or not. pure fantasy, hipster hackers

[deleted]

Re: TermKit - a graphical terminal replacement

#190

Post by colomon »

9999 wrote: post #108
colomon wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thing is, it's not about the tools being sacred. My problem with this is that he's not just solving problems I don't have -- he's solving them in a way that would make my problems worse! For instance, I very rarely want more informations about the files from an "ls" command; and if I did, I'd probably use Finder instead. On the other hand, not having enough terminal real estate to display the entire directory at once…

"if I did, I'd probably use Finder instead." The thing that strikes me as very, very cool about this project is that you might not need the Finder at all any more.

See, here's the thing: I like Finder. It's not perfect, but sometimes it is very handy. Even if TermKit ends up implementing the complete functionality of Finder, I'm not sure why I'd particularly like to have that functionality in my terminal window. And if it's only implementing the one Finder view I virtually never use? Forget about it.

You know what would rock my world? A "lsf" command that emulated "ls" as much as possible, but launched a Finder window appropriately sized to display the results.

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