I believe that this is partially because default shells (mostly bash) are not 'really' beginner friendly, and you usually need to spend some time configuring them to be comfortable working with them. That said, i use fish shell so what do I know :)
Ask HN: Why are there so many companies trying to reinvent the terminal (badly)?
31–40 of 138 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why are there so many companies trying to reinvent the terminal (badly)?
#32Today, people like to collect data in all possible variations. The data itself can be sold, but equally they show that they can do it. so at best they can secure an order for data storage.
Re: Ask HN: Why are there so many companies trying to reinvent the terminal (badly)?
#33Can we acknowledge that just because we don’t have a particular problem, doesn’t mean other people won’t? Will these companies be profitable? I have no idea. No one does. But I don’t understand this sentiment unless you’re being forced to use their product.
When you start investing you quickly realize how difficult it is to gauge a “good” idea. The only thing that matters is how the market responds and it seems like these solutions have a small, dedicated and quickly growing user base.
Re: Ask HN: Why are there so many companies trying to reinvent the terminal (badly)?
#34The inflow of new engineers which are not so familiar with traditional tools like a basic terminal and a text editor. That was all which was needed to write software. Most of the software stack was quite flat back then. Today, the way everyone starts is by installing a bunch of tools, frameworks and an IDE to navigate through those tools. Even a simple web page requires to install 100MBs of dependencies. Trying to le…
> An analogy would be, vim purists with 0 config vs people who have elaborate config
I find this pretty offensive. I have a vim config that automated my workflows, and integrated linters and build tools etc...and I am using Linux based systems for over 22 years now.
While I consent with the rest of your comment, I think that most people don't want to deal with shitty syntaxes that are less memorable than they should be. Computers and TTYs have moved far beyond 80 character screenlines these days.
Having a -s instead of "sync", for example, doesn't make sense from the UX perspective. Most of the reimplementations of common CLI tools of coreutils and others are mostly there because they were fed up with inconsistent parameters, options, and flags of those programs that have historically grown out of proportions.
On the other hand I can also understand why people use zsh, even when I don't like it because I'd consider myself a minimalist. Though I also have a lot of aliases for common tools I use, because I would go rogue when I would have to type all those parameters on a regular basis.
The issue most terminals try to solve is explainability and predictability, because they see terminals as a human interface, and not as a tool to write yourself one.
The clashes of those different philosophies are also found in shell implementations. I mean: off the top of your head, do you know all string manipulation syntaxes in bash? Probably not.
Re: Ask HN: Why are there so many companies trying to reinvent the terminal (badly)?
#35The inflow of new engineers which are not so familiar with traditional tools like a basic terminal and a text editor. That was all which was needed to write software. Most of the software stack was quite flat back then. Today, the way everyone starts is by installing a bunch of tools, frameworks and an IDE to navigate through those tools. Even a simple web page requires to install 100MBs of dependencies. Trying to le…
> Even a simple web page requires to install 100MBs of dependencies
I had problems with having to log in to a bunch of audio encoders last weekend to find out why they were engaged.
I looked at the webpage, a few calls with http/digest returning xml.
I strung together a quick perl script to take an ip/user/password, fire it off to the device, decode the output, fire off more queries, and dump out a , and then wrapped that in a bash script which generated the rest of the page for the N devices I wanted the status of. Took less than 60 minutes. Deployed it as a new apache virtual host with +ExecCGI.
3878 bytes plus OS provided packages for things like kernel etc, and now I can save time again and again by looking at the status page.
You can choose to make a simple webpage to perform a simple task and have it take 100s of MB, or you can choose not to.
Re: Ask HN: Why are there so many companies trying to reinvent the terminal (badly)?
#36I think the more pertinent question is why these startups are receiving funding. A firm funding dev tools must have a few people who'll understand why these products will struggle to find a good market fit.
Re: Ask HN: Why are there so many companies trying to reinvent the terminal (badly)?
#37I think the more pertinent question is why these startups are receiving funding. A firm funding dev tools must have a few people who'll understand why these products will struggle to find a good market fit.
I can see how this might work.
Geeky founders think they are so smart that others should work way they are working.
They forget that other geeky developers think the same way and don't care about using someone else tools/workflows because "they" themselves are smarter.
For founding people with money - they see hype of development and they don't know most of geeks will think that tool is crap. They might "there are 100k developers we can reach if each pay $10 we have lots of money" - they don't know geeks don't want to pay for anything because they can build their own tools and their own Dropbox.
I can totally see how there are people with blind spots why these products won't work.
Re: Ask HN: Why are there so many companies trying to reinvent the terminal (badly)?
#38Same with "MLOps" tools... same with every niche, bunch of useless tools just trying to grab some market.
But this is not a recent thing, every time the current thing gets flooded with crap ideas competing for some market share (ie longtail theory).
Sometimes the old ideas are just rebuilt, nocode is just RAD with different branding, event sourcing is just ESB, microservices is basically SOA...
What is scary that actually very little is being created, and a huge amount of crap just resuscitates from old tech, or is a skewed version of some working technology which tries to make it different so it doesn't look like a complete ripoff.
I love terminals, but honestly there isn't much to improve there IMHO is already good, I admire those who try and honest people who try to get a good idea into the market, I despise completely people trying to push any random hello world as a product which is basically a spyware full of trackers.
Re: Ask HN: Why are there so many companies trying to reinvent the terminal (badly)?
#39I am always curious to see new approaches to the classical terminals that i've been using for 20+ years now. So i don't mind this trend. What i've seen so far was mostly aesthetics and less "functional" stuff, which makes me wonder: Maybe there isn't that much to improve?
There's a lot that can be improved in the terminal experience, I think. Discoverability is a huge issue with CLI apps, for instance.
Discover the app that does a specific thing or discover the options inside the app? For the former I don't see how to help except studying what's available. For the latter we've been having man and info since at least the 80s.
Re: Ask HN: Why are there so many companies trying to reinvent the terminal (badly)?
#40Same with "MLOps" tools... same with every niche, bunch of useless tools just trying to grab some market. But this is not a recent thing, every time the current thing gets flooded with crap ideas competing for some market share (ie longtail theory). Sometimes the old ideas are just rebuilt, nocode is just RAD with different branding, event sourcing is just ESB, microservices is basically SOA... What is scary that act…
I don’t know, what about snowflake (for example). Before they launched you could argue it’s not needed; now, it’s got customers and is publicly traded. Hard to tell.