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TermKit - a graphical terminal replacement

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Re: TermKit - a graphical terminal replacement

#131

Post by burgerbrain »

Tangaroa wrote: post #127
burgerbrain wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'm amazed at the amount of hatred directed towards this - as if the terminal could in NO WAY be improved?!" Improve it all you want, I'm totally into that. The problem is that once your "terminal" ceases to be a terminal emulator then you lose so much it's pretty unrecoverable. Most of the things that you suggest are very much technically possible for a shell (perhaps zsh with some extensions) running in xterm. You…

A terminal emulator running on an object-oriented system like Termkit could run vt100-friendly filters to convert everything to text before it is sent down the line to the user. Users who did not know they were connecting to such a system might not notice the difference.

Although I am not entirely sure what you are attempting to communicate, what I will say is this:

If you do not provide direct user access to a pseudo terminal through a terminal emulator, then you will undoubtedly lose functionality. You need both the pseudo-terminal and the terminal emulator. If you do provide direct user access to the pty through a terminal emulator, then what the hell is the rest of the crap there for?

Re: TermKit - a graphical terminal replacement

#133

Post by l3vitat3 »

maratd wrote: post #65
unconed wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm having a blast and interpreting all the flak as a sign I must be doing something right...

Bingo. If you haven't pissed anyone off, it's because you're not doing anything important. There are people who invested DECADES of their life into a vanilla terminal ... and here you are, fucking with THAT.

the only thing that pisses me off is the guy posting how many years he was administering UNIX systems and how this monster was an "obvious" step in the field, web designers are quite arrogant

Re: TermKit - a graphical terminal replacement

#134

Post by scott_s »

uniclaude wrote: post #104
unconed wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And on another note... it's been hilarious how people have been questioning my professional credentials just because I want to make something more usable. I've implemented over a dozen RFCs, can match regexps with the best of them and do know which end of a pipe does what ;).

It's just my point of view, I don't really like the stance seem to take here. You built something great, made it open source, which is even more great, and you're here to answer people, which is amazing. Now, please don't act like "I implemented x RFCs, I can do y like the best...", it's simply useless here. One reason is that people already know you can code well, and they can even read your source if they want to k…

He brought up his own credentials because he is amused that others have questioned them. I find that reasonable and not "bragging."

Re: TermKit - a graphical terminal replacement

#135

Post by scott_s »

ZoFreX wrote: post #53

It's a pity that this is so difficult to try. The blog post has so much detail and effort put into it, but all that shine and polish disappears when you try to install it. Specifically Step 1 of the instructions[1] has a link titled "install node and npm" [2] which has the line 'git clone git://github.com/ry/node.git', which is incorrect. The correct URL (as far as I can tell) would be 'git://github.com/joyent/node.g…

It is a pity, but it's completely understandable since this is one man's year-old hobby project.

Re: TermKit - a graphical terminal replacement

#136

Post by stcredzero »

sanderjd wrote: post #109
stcredzero wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doctors and different drugs/treatments, Contractors and brands of power tools. From what I've seen, smart Doctors and Contractors eventually get to discussing empirical data and costs. Far too often, I've seen programmers just make up crap and state it emphatically.

Very good point. Do doctors and contractors have more sources of empirical data (or more widely known sources), or are they simply more willing to look for them? Does anyone here know of a good general resource for empirical data regarding the tools we are constantly debating?

Do doctors and contractors have more sources of empirical data (or more widely known sources), or are they simply more willing to look for them?

I think the culture would be a vital part of an ecosystem of empirical observation. For the sciences generally, the culture predated the sources and gave rise to them. For medicine, I think a culture of empiricism was imported from other scientific fields. For contractors, they are very motivated to note what works, what breaks, and what enables them to make more money.

Re: TermKit - a graphical terminal replacement

#137

Post by l3vitat3 »

wooster wrote: post #117

This comment thread, both here and on the blog post, is the best example of stop energy being directed at forward motion I've seen in a long, long time: http://www.userland.com/whatIsStopEnergy Kudos to unconed for doing something remarkable. I look forward to seeing where it goes from here.

that's just a marketing site talking about a marketing term probably invented by a marketing guy, I'm okay if this gets as widespread as apple devices (and btw I really love my macbook pro) but I find it totally useless for the people working day by day with terminals, time will have the last word

Re: TermKit - a graphical terminal replacement

#138

Post by l3vitat3 »

bernardwilson wrote: post #43

I had a similar idea about 10 years ago, but never got around to implementing it. I'm amazed at the amount of hatred directed towards this - as if the terminal could in NO WAY be improved?!. But clearly it can. For example - wouldn't it be nice to have a terminal status bar with your CWD / git branch / etc in, without cluttering up space before $? Yep, you can use screen, and that destroys your ability to use the scr…

man, if you had to operate daily hundreds of files you will forget quickly about drag'n'dropping, scrollbars and all that annoyances. about the popup is useless on a keyboard controlled interface as the number of keystrokes needed are the same. the problem you have, is that you think that your terminal application is badly-glued into your graphic system, when in fact your graphic system is badly-glued on terminal applications

Re: TermKit - a graphical terminal replacement

#139

Post by l3vitat3 »

Tycho wrote: post #96

I find Unix usability standards generally pretty insane. Funny he should post this, as on the train today I was thinking of making a program I'd call 'SmartTerm' or something which would basically be a more usable, graphically augmented terminal for beginners (or people who just can't stand interfaces which depend on memorization and patience). Some things I find nuts about the current terminal is OS X (at least the…

- you can edit your bash prompt and clean it completely if that satisfies you, - I have no problems to remember exactly where I am the most of the time and if I forget I can type pwd - graphical autocompletion is useless in keyboard controlled interfaces as it hides part of the screen and takes the same number of keystrokes to reach a result - we call it man and if you are late for your date, -h - you are in front of a tool, not a teacher, rtfm - no comment

Re: TermKit - a graphical terminal replacement

#140

Post by tlrobinson »

This has a lot of great ideas, and I like the idea of an enhanced terminal in general, but I think it goes too far. Having to reimplement a large number of commands to support this concept of separate view and data streams is complex.

A few ideas I'd like to see integrated into an existing shell/terminal in a backwards compatible way:

* Syntax highlighting/tokenization of the command as you type. Show the different parts of the command you're typing: the executable, the arguments, the pipes, the IO redirects, shell constructs like loops and conditionals, quoted strings.

* Maybe command-specific syntax awareness like highlighting the flags and file arguments differently, regular expressions for sed/grep, awk syntax, etc. This would require descriptors for each command, similar to how autocomplete works?

* Enhanced output formatting, like the clickable paths, displayable images, etc. But rather than modifying/rewriting the program, have a way to describe how to display the output of certain commands. The shell should be able to figure out what the final command in a pipeline is, right?

* Detect and display binary file formats based on the content rather than the filename so support existing commands.

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