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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)?

#81

Post by Brian_K_White »

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"

negative in tone? so what? I already acknowledged the critical opinion. that much is allowed.

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

#82

Post by t-3 »

pdimitar wrote: post #27
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…

> I personally don't like to use pimped up terminals because they are written in electron and are not portable. 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 b…

I'm baffled by the repeated insistence that alacritty and kitty are fast (never tried wexterm). There's noticeable lag spawning either on my reasonably new and fast laptop, which xterm just doesn't have.

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

#83

Post by altcognito »

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.

Also no good will is also an opinion.

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

#84

Post by pdimitar »

t-3 wrote: post #82
pdimitar wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I personally don't like to use pimped up terminals because they are written in electron and are not portable. 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 b…

I'm baffled by the repeated insistence that alacritty and kitty are fast (never tried wexterm). There's noticeable lag spawning either on my reasonably new and fast laptop, which xterm just doesn't have.

How often do you restart it though? Mine lives for days or even weeks sometimes, and is only restarted when it gets updated.

When saying "fast" I definitely meant it as "all the operations it does while alive" and not "how many times per minute I can restart it" (lol).

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

#85

Post by t-3 »

nnoitra wrote: post #48
nottorp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had reading/writing skills you'd waste less time watching talking heads on tiktok...

How many files have you lost by rm-ing? :D

None. Being explicit about the files I'm deleting tends to make me think about what I'm actually doing. Hacking in a windows-style garbage folder isn't exactly difficult either.

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

#87

Post by martibravo »

di4na wrote: post #25

For market no idea. 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 possi…

I’m 100% confident that a Multi-Platform Terminal can be built with C#, XAML and .NET 6. The dotNET ecosystem has multi-platform UI toolkits such as MAUI, Uno and Avalonia UI and Standard APIs to interact with all OS.

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

#88

Post by t-3 »

pdimitar wrote: post #84
t-3 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm baffled by the repeated insistence that alacritty and kitty are fast (never tried wexterm). There's noticeable lag spawning either on my reasonably new and fast laptop, which xterm just doesn't have.

How often do you restart it though? Mine lives for days or even weeks sometimes, and is only restarted when it gets updated. When saying "fast" I definitely meant it as "all the operations it does while alive" and not "how many times per minute I can restart it" (lol).

When I need a terminal, mod+enter spawn one and close it. I'll often do this to download a file, start yt-dlp, mpv etc. The session is all tmux so I never keep the window around when not in use.

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

#89

Post by junon »

jen20 wrote: post #72
junon wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Qt doesn't magically help you with this either.

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

#90

Post by abdulmuhaimin »

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.

I think you need to define what your definition of "fact" is, because it clearly deviates from how "fact" is normally used.

No, those are not facts

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