11–20 of 159 posts
> Modifier keys like Ctrl and Alt complicate this situation. This is such an understatement. Alacritty required you to manually bind keys to control characters in the config and finding the control characters escape sequences were such a nightmare I gave up and switched to foot
The terminal is such a wonderful environment. It makes many tasks joyful. I think it stems from its simplicity and logic. You have a simple grid of characters. You type the name of a program, hit enter, and the computer executes it. The output of the program is written below your prompt. Below the output, you can execute the next program. You can chain output and input of programs, allowing all kinds of data flows. T…
Agreed. My only real problem is that font size and "UI" size (gutters/etc) being tied feels like an accessibility tax. Aside from that, they're wonderful. I wonder if we could eventually make a "new term" which shares the same foundation, but atop a rich rendered experience. A GUI written with simple primitives (that could also probably be rendered as TUI, frankly), but with slightly more slick (and expensive lol) re…
The terminal is such a wonderful environment. It makes many tasks joyful. I think it stems from its simplicity and logic. You have a simple grid of characters. You type the name of a program, hit enter, and the computer executes it. The output of the program is written below your prompt. Below the output, you can execute the next program. You can chain output and input of programs, allowing all kinds of data flows. T…
Agreed. My only real problem is that font size and "UI" size (gutters/etc) being tied feels like an accessibility tax. Aside from that, they're wonderful. I wonder if we could eventually make a "new term" which shares the same foundation, but atop a rich rendered experience. A GUI written with simple primitives (that could also probably be rendered as TUI, frankly), but with slightly more slick (and expensive lol) re…
[edit] I was thinking more in terms of being unconstrained by low-res displays, inability to display anything other than text, etc.
It would be good if there was more emphasis on graceful degradation in TUI libraries, such as falling back to ASCII art when terminal graphics are not supported.
> Some new TUI libraries, such as vaxis, are designed specifically to avoid using terminfo at all and exclusively use queries to determine feature capabilities.
I take this approach in euporie [1], having encountered the same issues with using terminfo as discussed. However, there were a few terminal features which I could not find a way to query - iTerm2 graphics support, for example.
There is more to shells and text interfaces than working within constraints set 50 years ago.
Are there any efforts to radically reimagine the entire "terminal" concept? Seems very limiting to advance further in the 21st century with those same 70's technical assumptions. [edit] I was thinking more in terms of being unconstrained by low-res displays, inability to display anything other than text, etc.
I could never really understand the enthusiasm. Why are we still dealing with over half a century of cruft? I get that this is a core piece of technology lots of stuff is built upon, and I'm not arguing to get rid of the classic terminal emulation altogether. But I wish there was an effort of building a new, modern, textual interface to computers with modern assumptions and integration bindings. We shouldn't need to…
A quick off-the-cuff remark based solely on the title: in 2024, I think the state of the terminal has never been better, in large part to Microsoft making a high quality terminal easily available to everyone on Windows [1] As an application author, I love being able to assume that all major platforms have a good terminal and that my favorite terminal rendering libraries should Just Work on all of them [1] https://git…
I really dislike that they re-used the TERM value from xterm instead of getting their own merged into terminfo. And then not documenting which sequences are actually supported and which aren't.
https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.src.html#tic-m...
Surely you can imagine that it takes years or more to get people to update though, so switching to a new entry right away could make for a bad user experience.