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Why is the terminal input so weird?

warp.dev

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Re: Why is the terminal input so weird?

#51

Post by titaniumtown »

danny_warp wrote: post #16
smoldesu wrote: post #3

As much as I'd like to encourage the rethinking of input methods, any terminal with a "Pricing" page is an instant nope from me. My current terminal is Open Source and while it's not perfect, it's also Free. That matters more to me than mouse input or IDE autosuggestions. If you're going to treat Linux users as a second-class citizen and charge for corporate usage, who are you hoping your target audience will be? Fra…

The app is 100% free for any and all individuals. The business plan is to create collaborative and cloud-based features that businesses will be willing to pay for. Please check out our pricing page to learn more. Please note that our business model is not about collecting and monetizing any of your personal data. https://www.warp.dev/privacy

of so if it's 100% free, where's the source code?

Re: Why is the terminal input so weird?

#53

Post by nuancebydefault »

solarkraft wrote: post #48
maximus-decimus wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you prefer it to be? Audio recording of spoken words? Diagrams like Labview?

Code is really a tree of stuff. There are are somewhat more powerful editing paradigms for trees than bare text. The editor I'm imagining looks and works a lot like your typical code view, but has a better understanding of the semantics and makes things there are keyboard shortcuts for more visible. From the top of my head: First-class code folding and commenting and actions primarily on blocks rather than lines. e.g…

There is a big problem with graphical programming: it is very hard to diff graphs in a graphical way. How can you even give review comments on changes? How would an automatic merge work? Also, the benefit of graphic representation of an algorithm is that it gives an overview that is easier to understand. But the whole graph with the real details, is just harder to understand. But the details are necessary, they make simplistic software smarter and better.

Re: Why is the terminal input so weird?

#54

Post by brenns10 »

ploum wrote: post #5

People who do not understand things are poised to reinvent them badly. The post manage to analyse terminal input without having acknowledging readline. So yeah, they have no idea what they are talking about. https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/keyboard-shortcuts-ev...

I also disagree with this article's approach, but it seems pretty disingenuous to say that they don't understand terminal input because they didn't mention readline. After all, this is a blog post on the site for a terminal implementation. They'd have to be unbelievably ignorant to not be aware of the role of readline here.

They're not writing a technical deep dive, they're presenting their vision for a different approach. I think that vision is flawed but I'm not going to grade them on how deep they get into implementation details.

Re: Why is the terminal input so weird?

#55

Post by einherjae »

A lot of the complaints here can be solved by knowing that C-x e will drop you from bash into emacs to edit your current line, which then gives you any bells and whistles you’ve configured in emacs. Bonus is that this is generally available and doesn’t require a newfangled set of tools.

Re: Why is the terminal input so weird?

#56

Post by beej71 »

At the simplest level, this reminds me of input in C64 BASIC. You could hit RETURN anywhere on on any line and that line would get parsed as if you'd just types it in. You could cursor around, edit previously-entered lines, and so on. It was pretty neat.

Re: Why is the terminal input so weird?

#57

Post by alokedesai »

vimda wrote: post #49
alokedesai wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aloke from the Warp team here--you're totally right that some of these features (syntax highlighting) can be accomplished within the terminal using an editor. In a traditional terminal--you'd have to spend time configuring your shell to get this to work instead of getting these features by default. Some of these features are near-impossible given the current terminal-shell abstraction, however. For example, a traditi…

> it can't suggest a next command to run based on the output of the previous command thefuck ( https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck#how-it-works ) does exactly that...

We collaborated with thefuck to build our version of this :) TF is slightly different in that they actually _rerun_ your last command to get the output since they don't have access to command output

Re: Why is the terminal input so weird?

#58

Post by niemandhier »

einherjae wrote: post #55

A lot of the complaints here can be solved by knowing that C-x e will drop you from bash into emacs to edit your current line, which then gives you any bells and whistles you’ve configured in emacs. Bonus is that this is generally available and doesn’t require a newfangled set of tools.

15 years and I never heard of that! Cool featue.

Re: Why is the terminal input so weird?

#59

Post by derefr »

danny_warp wrote: post #16
smoldesu wrote: post #3

As much as I'd like to encourage the rethinking of input methods, any terminal with a "Pricing" page is an instant nope from me. My current terminal is Open Source and while it's not perfect, it's also Free. That matters more to me than mouse input or IDE autosuggestions. If you're going to treat Linux users as a second-class citizen and charge for corporate usage, who are you hoping your target audience will be? Fra…

The app is 100% free for any and all individuals. The business plan is to create collaborative and cloud-based features that businesses will be willing to pay for. Please check out our pricing page to learn more. Please note that our business model is not about collecting and monetizing any of your personal data. https://www.warp.dev/privacy

Could you separate that into "free for businesses if they only want the stuff individuals want; but you can pay for a corporate plan on top to enable extra stuff" — i.e. open-core model?

Maybe with a proprietary binary release that includes the corporate features, and an open-CI/CD binary release that doesn't, ala the Chrome/Chromium split?

Re: Why is the terminal input so weird?

#60

Post by zokier »

lordleft wrote: post #18

Guys, it doesn't matter if you can edit terminal input in vim. If there's a way to do it in an even more ergonomic / user-friendly way, that's not intrinsically a bad thing. This entire comment thread makes us sound like tech-grognards. Warp's pricing model is a whole other issue though.

The problem with the whole article revolves around this paragraph:

> In turn this means that anyone who has wanted to improve the terminal editing experience needs to do it at the shell level – and this is what some shells like fish try to do (as well how shell plugins like OhMyZsh work). They can only do so much though, and, crucially, they can’t make terminal input work overall in a less “weird” way.

They provide no justification on why that would be true, and indeed I believe almost all of their fancy features could be built in terminal also. Their explanation on terminal input is ridiculously naive, largely ignoring how control characters can be used to do a lot of things.

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