lots of terminals these days support imgcat and i rely on it heavily: https://iterm2.com/documentation-images.html
Personally, I'd prefer Tektronix and ReGIS support.
The terminal of the future
131–140 of 174 posts
Re: The terminal of the future
#132A terminal will be useful for about twenty more years, not 200. At that point AI agents will take care of low level monkey wrenching for us. It’s like talking about designing a slide rule for the next 200 years.
Calculators replaced slide rules because they are predictable and reliable tools. LLM agents will never be that simply by the nature of how they work.
I am sure we'll have something better in 200 years.
Re: The terminal of the future
#133A terminal will be useful for about twenty more years, not 200. At that point AI agents will take care of low level monkey wrenching for us. It’s like talking about designing a slide rule for the next 200 years.
Got some news for you, there will be unix and cobol still running in 20 years from now. No amount of AI will be able to convince bank executives the risk conversion is worth it.
And a lot of that COBOL will still be managed with ISPF over 3270 terminal connections.
Re: The terminal of the future
#134I really wish something like Mathematica is available in open source. It is a notebook environment based on a Lisp-like language. Its flexibility is beyond imagination. Programs can emit anything from simple numbers/vectors/matrices to medias (image, sound, video, either loaded or generated) to interactive programs, all of which can be embedded into the notebook. You can also manipulate every input and output code bl…
Have you tried mathics?
Re: The terminal of the future
#135Why does the successor to the terminal need to be text oriented at all? Maybe it is an API. Maybe the kernel implements this API and it can be called locally or remotely. Maybe someone invents an OAuth translation layer to UIDs. The API allows syscalls or process invocation. Output is returned in response payload (ofc we have a stream shape too). Maybe in the future your “terminal” is an app that wraps this API, auth…
> Heresy warning. Maybe the inputs and outputs don’t look anything like CLI or stdio text. Maybe we move on from 1000-different DSLs (each CLI’s unique input parameters and output formats) and make inputs and outputs object shaped. Maybe we make the available set of objects, methods and schemas discoverable in the terminal API. Entirely agree. Stdio text (which is really just stdio bytes) deeply limits how composable…
Another question is if such pipelines should act on objects, or more structured text streams. Many programs can output json, is this a pragmatic way forward to extend and improve further?
Re: The terminal of the future
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This 1970s vintage text editor is also a futuristic language learning platform, it blows my mind. 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!
Many HN readers grok software development, would likely get a kick out of learning Emacs Lisp, and have time to invest in coding and debugging. Emacs is not as clumsy or random as modern user-hostile software -- it's an elegant tool for a more civilized age, and as such is not for everyone.
> Many HN readers grok software development, would likely get a kick out of learning Emacs Lisp, and have time to invest in coding and debugging.
but why would they? what problems are they solving by being able to paste text into your web browsers address bar? or load a pdf into an LLM? or some other incredibly specific-to-you ability youve added?
if simply adding a lisp interpreter to a program is enough to impress people, why not add it to something other than 1970s terminal text editor? surely an LLM plus lisp can do more of these inane tricks than a 70s text editor plus lisp?
Re: The terminal of the future
#137Yeah, sorry, but if the user friendly alternative to the VT100 emulators is anything like Jupyter, then I'll happily keep using alacritty, konsole and xterm, thanks.
Re: The terminal of the future
#138Any 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 :)
To add to lproven's point.
An article called "A Spreadsheet and a Debugger walk into a Shell" [0] by Bjorn (letoram) is a good showcase of an alternative to cells in a Jupyter notebook (Excel like cells!). Another alternative a bit more similar to Jupyter that also runs on Arcan is Pipeworld.
[0] https://arcan-fe.com/2024/09/16/a-spreadsheet-and-a-debugger... [1] https://arcan-fe.com/2021/04/12/introducing-pipeworld/
PS: I hang out at Arcan's Discord Server, you are welcome to join https://discord.com/invite/sdNzrgXMn7
Re: The terminal of the future
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many HN readers grok software development, would likely get a kick out of learning Emacs Lisp, and have time to invest in coding and debugging. Emacs is not as clumsy or random as modern user-hostile software -- it's an elegant tool for a more civilized age, and as such is not for everyone.
> Many HN readers grok software development, would likely get a kick out of learning Emacs Lisp, and have time to invest in coding and debugging. but why would they? what problems are they solving by being able to paste text into your web browsers address bar? or load a pdf into an LLM? or some other incredibly specific-to-you ability youve added? if simply adding a lisp interpreter to a program is enough to impress…
> what problems are they solving
programmatic text manipulation
Re: The terminal of the future
#140I really wish something like Mathematica is available in open source. It is a notebook environment based on a Lisp-like language. Its flexibility is beyond imagination. Programs can emit anything from simple numbers/vectors/matrices to medias (image, sound, video, either loaded or generated) to interactive programs, all of which can be embedded into the notebook. You can also manipulate every input and output code bl…
I think what makes Mathematica so great product is that it is not open source (development is strongly guided by one man) and that it costs (can afford to hire many hundreds of people to build the professional design).