Ask HN: Why are there so many companies trying to reinvent the terminal (badly)?

Also I hate how clunky the interfaces feel when you're trying to view something which happened prior. It might be there, might not, some command you ran might have cleared the terminal at some point, some overwrite over themselves to do things like progress bars, and god forbid if you resize the terminal at some point because this will reflow everything that was written to it earlier into garbage.

have a look at screen/tmux

For electron, because it is the only reasonable multi platform UI platform out there. I do not like that fact but it is true.

For why, because the terminal protocol is atrocious, mix data with control signalling, mix together multiple layers making it really hard to extend it, is stuck emulating an emulator of a physical device from the 70s, is bursting at the seams and is blocking dozens of possibilities in ergonomics that would make our industry kill less people.

Is it well done or can it make money ? I doubt it. Is there an obvious need with wide impact? Fuck yes.

Alacritty, Wezterm and Kitty say hi. Uber-fast native apps that also render all the modern Unicode symbols correctly (well OK, Kitty has some Python).

You are also over-exaggerating and coming across as the "get off my lawn" guy.

I am 42, I was there when terminals were as bland as non-salted spaghetti in boiling water with nothing else in. Nowadays I like the autocompletes (with context nonetheless -- a huge improvement; you can autocomplete GIT verbs for example), I like the fuzzy finders that I integrate with (a) looking for files, (b) looking in my command history, (c) looking in my OS process list and (d) looking through all modified / untracked GIT files in a repo, I like the colors, I like the icons for separate file types, and I like modern incarnations of coreutils whose output provides you visual aid that objectively reduces the amount of parsing that your eyes must do on the screen. Eye and mind fatigue are real and all visual aid [that's not overdone] helps a ton. There are even scientific studies on it.

Want me to go on?

Conservatism like yours is not productive. Like with everything in life, there's good and there's bad e.g. I won't ever use the terminals that are written in Electron and phone home -- that gets an immediate "NOPE!" from me -- but there are objectively useful terminals, terminal extensions and CLI tools out there.

That you judge all of them by a few hip repos that are making the rounds here on HN only says something non-flattering about your abilities to gauge innovation.

Be more open-minded. It helps in an objective manner and with objectively improving metrics to show for it afterwards. At least it did for me and 30+ colleagues.

First, there's only 2 apps. Second, none of the terminals you're talking about is in Electron, and neither is cross-platform ( partially as a result). Fig isn't really a terminal for that matter.

So you're just ranting for ranting's sake without even understanding the subject?

As for what the market is, maybe they're trying to emulate Docker's switch to developer tooling and make money off enterprises buying team licenses. It's not the worst business model I've heard of, and could work if they get traction. And funnily that's where we get to the other part of your rant - telemetry. Without that data they have significantly lower chances of making it. I don't particularly trust their promises they'll make it opt-in once they've gained enough traction and data, but i think it's unfair to suggest they're collecting errors and usage patterns to sell that data ( which IMHO doesn't make sense, and they would need to warn users that's the case, thank you GDPR).