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

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

#71

Post by jen20 »

jrh206 wrote: post #62
Brian_K_White wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's your choice to read that question as either curiosity or complaint. I don't see anything in the question that exactly says "get this crap off my screen" "these companies should not be allowed to exist". I see a critical opinion but that is entirely allowed. Your critical opinion like the one you just wrote is presumably allowed. But I do see an observance of phenomenon, and I find any phenomenon interesting. Thi…

The OP is very negative in tone[1], although curious. I think the person you’re responding to provided a solid answer to OP’s question, whilst imbuing their answer with a reasonable response to OP’s tone. [1] "(badly)", "always some startup with no good will", "Electron" (arguably), "filled it full of always-online trackers"

It’s not negative to state the facts - all of those things are true.

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

#72

Post by jen20 »

junon wrote: post #67
Kelteseth wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For electron, because it is the only reasonable multi platform UI platform out there. I do not like that fact but it is true. Why do people constantly repeat this? Did we all forget about Qt? Did Qt do such a good job of driving people away from it?

> Did Qt do such a good job of driving people away from it? Yes, they did, with their hostile licensing changes and the fact that you cannot customize it as much as you can Electron apps.

Lack of customisation should be seen as a good thing. As a user I want apps built to fit into my platform, not for the app to be consistent across disparate platforms. I understand why marketing does not like this, though.

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

#73

Post by [deleted] »

di4na wrote: post #51
Kelteseth wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For electron, because it is the only reasonable multi platform UI platform out there. I do not like that fact but it is true. Why do people constantly repeat this? Did we all forget about Qt? Did Qt do such a good job of driving people away from it?

Yes. Because the experience of building something with QT that looks good and work cross platform is like pulling your own teeth.

[deleted]

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

#74

Post by anonymoushn »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #70
Kelteseth wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For electron, because it is the only reasonable multi platform UI platform out there. I do not like that fact but it is true. Why do people constantly repeat this? Did we all forget about Qt? Did Qt do such a good job of driving people away from it?

QT talent pool and ecosystem is a rounding error compared to what we have with the web ecosystem. If you want to make something with medias, graphs, a few custom widgets, a reactive layout and deep routing, it will take 10 to 30 times longer with QT. I myself prefer the snapiness of QT apps, but budget and time to market will win.

What does "deep routing" mean?

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

#75

Post by m0llusk »

One thing is that terminals are a kind of magic. While the rest of the graphical interface gets bogged down with drawer pull animations and blinking buttons it can be possible to run a whole series of commands with reasonable responsiveness. Systems are drowning in response choking complexity. Did an app just start a download in the background? There is probably an app that will tell you, but even a bad terminal can probably tell you faster. It is a one size fits all immediate gratification head above the churning waves maneuver in an accessible package.

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

#76

Post by jen20 »

trevormcneal wrote: post #38

Same 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…

> event sourcing is just ESB, microservices is basically SOA...

Event sourcing is a persistence model, an ESB is about distribution.

Microservices are an implementation of the 4+1 architectural view model where at least three of the views are identical.

You’re not wrong about spyware though.

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

#77

Post by Brian_K_White »

schwartzworld wrote: post #42
pikaynu wrote: post #18

The 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…

> The inflow of new engineers which are not so familiar with traditional tools like a basic terminal and a text editor. I think many people start learning to use these tools at the same time they learn to program, I know I did. You expect junior devs to be terminal wizards? > Even a simple web page requires to install 100MBs of dependencies. No it doesn't? Some tooling requires lots of dependencies, but it's still ve…

They aren't literally claiming a physical requirement, they are describing todays most common workflow.

If I said you need to install 100's of mb of gcc to produce a binary, would you say "no you don't? you can write bytes directly from the shell right into a file" It would be a technical fact, and yet kind of stupid to pretend not to understand that today, in all practical senses, one produces a binary with a compiler suite of one sort or another.

Today, it's a growing trend that software is developed using huge ides and stacks of frameworks. And a new developer is started right off at the highest most abstract (most automatic and magic, sold as most "productive" or "practical") layers possible, which requires the fattest of ides and the tallest of stacks.

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

#78

Post by jrh206 »

jen20 wrote: post #71
jrh206 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP is very negative in tone[1], although curious. I think the person you’re responding to provided a solid answer to OP’s question, whilst imbuing their answer with a reasonable response to OP’s tone. [1] "(badly)", "always some startup with no good will", "Electron" (arguably), "filled it full of always-online trackers"

It’s not negative to state the facts - all of those things are true.

The point is that you can choose which facts to present. In any case, “(badly)” is clearly an opinion and not a fact.

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

#79

Post by jen20 »

aardshark wrote: post #28
franze wrote: post #14

made me think about my NEED of what I have regarding terminals. I think I am using about 2% of the potential of what the terminal is offering me. So my need for a new terminal app would be one which - undisruptive - trains me to unlock more and more power of the terminal. first idea, a panel on the right hand side which explains what I just did, highlights pot improvements (how I could have chained the last 5 tasks)…

I agree. I always feel like my use of shell scripting and unix tools to perform basic tasks is so much less than it could be. I enjoy the ideas of portability and speed that comes from these tools, but often I just want to get the task done and end up writing something in Python. Things that always get me: - Meaningful whitespace in bash. - Differences between Mac BSD-derived utilities and POSIX utilities. (Perils of…

> Mac BSD-derived utilities and POSIX utilities.

BSD-derived utilities in macOS are POSIX-compliant. The gulf is between GNU and POSIX.

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

#80

Post by tjpnz »

this_is_eline wrote: post #31

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 :)

These companies are not even trying to re-imagine the shell, just the terminal you use to interact with it.
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