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Re "stage 2: persistent sessions", iTerm2 already does this. The PTYs are owned by background processes independent of the GUI application. So iTerm2 can upgrade the application without interrupting the running terminal sessions.
Wait. Did Jyn just describe Emacs?
you could build an emacs frontend for this model! the thing i am trying to describe is “getting out of the box”. imagine a terminal session that is shared between emacs, iTerm, and a mobile phone ssh’d in over the network, that’s my vision.
The terminal of the future is called a web browser.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> terminal which can shows images, videos, and other media That is typically not the job of terminals, but of programs. fbi, omxplayer, etc exist.
But the terminal can provide capabilities that allow shell programs to do those things. See e.g. the Kitty graphics protocol: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol/
> fbi, omxplayer, etc exist.
Re "stage 2: persistent sessions", iTerm2 already does this. The PTYs are owned by background processes independent of the GUI application. So iTerm2 can upgrade the application without interrupting the running terminal sessions.
And GNU screen, and GNU Emacs and Vi and ...
https://github.com/Julien-cpsn/desktop-tui
It is incomplete but takes what is almost a side aspect of TWIN and runs with it.
https://github.com/cosmos72/twin
TWIN is nearly 20 now and does quite a lot. It even has a Wikipedia page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_(windowing_system)
It runs on lots more OSes than just Linux.
I read the whole thing and at first glance, it seems like a whole NIH list of wishes. We already have alternatives to the terminal, but the article have no mentions of them: - Emacs (inherited from lisp machines?). A VM which is powered by lisp. The latter make it easy to redefine function, and commands are just annotated functions. As for output, we have the buffer, which can be displayed in windows, which are arran…
Emacs also has Org-mode and org-babel, which can work a lot like a Jupyter notebook, and can even talk to jupyter kernels. I do a lot in Emacs, especially now that I'm comfortable with GPTel. I open a poorly aligned, pixelated PDF scan of a 100+ year old Latin textbook in Emacs, mark a start page, end page, and Emacs lisp code shells out to qpdf to create a new smaller pdf from my page range to /tmp, and then adds th…
and all it took was a deep understanding of software development, experience with lisp and a bunch of your own time coding and debugging! what a piece of software!
Re "stage 2: persistent sessions", iTerm2 already does this. The PTYs are owned by background processes independent of the GUI application. So iTerm2 can upgrade the application without interrupting the running terminal sessions.
this is really cool omg! i didn't know that, i'll do some research. one of the strange things to me about the terminal landscape is how little knowledge sharing there is compared to other domains i'm familiar with. iTerm has a bunch of things no one else has; kitty influenced wezterm but otherwise no one else seems to have valued reflection; there's a whole bunch of extensions to ANSI escapes but most of them are non…
This is why I wrote this:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/24/tiling_multiplexers_s...
Trying to bring a bunch of related tools together in one place and compare and contrast them.
the terminal of the future is here and it's https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty
Any article about this topic that does not at least mention https://arcan-fe.com/about/ feels incomplete. (Also, Arcan is already available.)
whoa this looks fascinating, i've never heard of it before! thank you for the link :)
It is very hard to explain Arcan but I tried:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/25/lashcat9_linux_ui/
I talked to Bjorn Stahl quite a bit before writing it, but he is so smart he seems to me to find it hard to talk down to mere mortals. There's a pretty good interview with him on Lobsters:
https://lobste.rs/s/w3zkxx/lobsters_interview_with_bjorn_sta...
You really should talk to him. Together you two could do amazing things. But IMHO let Jupyter go. There's a lot more to life than Python. :-)