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Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?

#191

Post by JdeBP »

waqf wrote: post #122

Fix scrollback. Sometimes I run a command and it has 50,000 lines of output. Either I don't care about the output — in which case I should be able to click to fold it up and be able to see my history before that one command — or I do care about it, in which case I want every scroll, search and export operation that a full-fledged document editor would have. In either case, UI latency shouldn't suffer, scroll bars sho…

Crank up NeoVIM. Run :terminal . Use those commands and break out of terminal mode, possibly with a long running command still running, with the mouse or with Control+\ Control+N . Explore the searchability and the use of :set scrollback .

Is that approximately the sort of thing that you are looking for?

Re: Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?

#192

Post by jwilk »

signa11 wrote: post #175
jwilk wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find "nl" pretty useless, because it only numbers non-empty lines, which is never what I want. There's "cat -n" which numbers all lines. (-n is not POSIX, but it's available on at least on BSDs and Linux.)

> ... because it only numbers non-empty lines... oh, that's just a man page lookup away. use 'nl -ba' which numbers all the lines. default style is '-bt' which numbers only non-empty ones, as you have experienced...

Even with -ba (which I could never remember), nl does too much magic:

  $ printf 'foo\n\:\nbar\n' | cat -n
       1	foo
       2	\:
       3	bar
  
  $ printf 'foo\n\:\nbar\n' | nl -ba
       1	foo
  
         bar

Re: Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?

#193

Post by baq »

chainsaw10 wrote: post #157
terminal-survey wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i've got ~20 bashes open in various tmux configurations. the amount of times i lost command history is infuriating (e.g. due to reboot or whatever). zsh does (has an option to) commit commands to the history file immediately when you execute the command. Makes me hate bash even more when I have to use it occasionally on a server.

You can do something similar with bash. If you set PROMPT_COMMAND='history -a', it'll append to the history file right after the command completes (because the prompt command is run as the prompt is printed).

thanks, i'm sure you've just saved a couple hours for a future me :)

Re: Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?

#194

Post by baq »

jstimpfle wrote: post #149
baq wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if shells had some more types than a stream of bytes, it'd make sense for 'image' type data to be displayed as images. the pipes you mention are then simply type casts or conversion functions.

I don't know what you think is missing. "Displaying 'image' type data as images" totally works. Are you aware of magic bytes (which I mentioned above)?

never used them, but i'm thinking more in terms of powershell (pretty sure displaing images isn't something it does though). if images in particular work ok then that's one thing that i can scratch off my list of annoyances with ssh.

Re: Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?

#195

Post by afarrell »

khedoros1 wrote: post #168
EpicEng wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that make is a good example here. This is a tool you use constantly, so I imagine you'd know to pipe std err if you wanted its output. We seem to be talking about turning the terminal into a full blown editor (when we already have editors...) to satisfy a rather limited use case of 'oops, guess I have to run that again." But hey; your time to spend :)

> We seem to be talking about turning the terminal into a full blown editor (when we already have editors...) to satisfy a rather limited use case of 'oops, guess I have to run that again." That seems like an incredibly common use case to me. It's common for a command to have a lot more output than I originally expected, and when it happens, I usually want to examine that output in detail. It would be great to retroa…

FWIW, I also find myself wanting this.

Re: Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?

#196

Post by O_H_E »

bugshideout wrote: post #15

It would be nice if the terminal and/or shell exposed some metadata. For example which machine and folder it is currently at. This would allow one to have two terminals connected to two different machines ( via ssh for example ) and drag and drop files from one terminal to the other, even if there is no route between the two hosts It would also be nice if words or sentences in the terminal had metadata. So one could…

Terminology does allow you to click a file after ls

Re: Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?

#197

Post by jstimpfle »

baq wrote: post #194
jstimpfle wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what you think is missing. "Displaying 'image' type data as images" totally works. Are you aware of magic bytes (which I mentioned above)?

never used them, but i'm thinking more in terms of powershell (pretty sure displaing images isn't something it does though). if images in particular work ok then that's one thing that i can scratch off my list of annoyances with ssh.

If you want a few tips how to type less, feel free to write me an email describing your problem.

Re: Ask HN: What do you love/hate about terminals? Would you change them?

#198

Post by jstimpfle »

erikj wrote: post #123

My ideal modern terminal would be pretty much a reimplementation of Symbolics' Listener: https://youtu.be/o4-YnLpLgtk?t=1m46s - A presentation-based UI, where every on-screen element is always linked to the data it represents: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6946 - A powerful autocomplete that knows about possible keywords and arguments, and can list them in a graphical fashion (e.g. a drop-down menu). - An abil…

You are not going to get more than 10% of shell users to type ":Output Destination File /home/erikj/log" instead of just "> home/erikj/log". Learn it once, save typing a lot of characters, many times a day.

The idea that you should type so much more just to be "not cryptic" is as old as COBOL. Which, as most people would agree, was not a good idea.

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