51–60 of 174 posts
My biggest gripe with it is that it quickly ends up becoming an actual production workload, and it is not simple to “deploy” and “run” it in an ops way.
Lots of local/project specific stuff like hardcoded machine paths from developers or implicit environments.
Yes, I know it can be done right, but it makes it sooooooooo easy to do it wrong.
I think I can’t not see it as some scratchpad for ad-hoc stuff.
My personal opinion-psuedoterminals should be enhanced to provide some mechanism for sending out-of-band data, like the existing TIOCPKT but on steroids. Maybe something like… if both ends support it, they can exchange JSON-RPC messages over this out-of-band channel, with it being possible to discover if the other side supports this or not. Possibly this is just a new TIOC* ioctl Why? Well one reason is escape sequen…
I think the modern unix'y thing to do here is always send all messages intended for the user to stderr (regardless of whether they are actually errors), and always respond with machine-friendly JSON on stdout by default. AFAIK there's no downsides to this.. you can still have color on stderr, you can still draw sixel pictures or whatever. Meanwhile pipes and redirection still work as expected. No need for content/fea…
There are problems with using JSON for this; other formats would be better. JSON needs escaping, cannot effectively transfer binary data (other than encoding as hex or base64), cannot use character sets other than Unicode, etc. People think JSON is good, but it isn't.
Also, you might want to use less or other programs for the text output, which might be the primary output that you might also want to pipe to other programs, redirect to a file (or printer), etc. This text might be separate from the status messages (which would be sent to stderr; these status messages are not necessarily errors, although they might be). If you use --help deliberately then the help message is the primary message, not a status message.
(In a new operating system design it could be improved, but even then, JSON is not the format for this; a binary format would be better (possibly DER, or SDSER, which is a variant of DER that supports streaming, in a (in my opinion) better way than CER and BER does).)
(Another possibility might be to add another file descriptor for structured data, and then use an environment variable to indicate its presence. However, this just adds to the messiness of it a little bit, and requires a bit more work to use it with the standard command shells.)
I dread reading these articles written by people who perceive the command-line interface / terminal / shell to be this archaic system, and propose "modernizing" it by cramming whatever UI/UX they're most familiar with. The last thing a command-line terminal needs is a Jupyter Notebook-like UI. It doesn't need to render HTML; it doesn't need rerun and undo/redo; and it definitely doesn't need structured RPC. Many of t…
> Great, now you just need to build and maintain shims for every tool in existence, force your users to use your own custom tools that support these features, and ensure that everything interoperates smoothly. Yes, this is the work. https://becca.ooo/blog/vertical-integration/
I dread reading these articles written by people who perceive the command-line interface / terminal / shell to be this archaic system, and propose "modernizing" it by cramming whatever UI/UX they're most familiar with. The last thing a command-line terminal needs is a Jupyter Notebook-like UI. It doesn't need to render HTML; it doesn't need rerun and undo/redo; and it definitely doesn't need structured RPC. Many of t…
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…
> Acme: Got a link to what you meant? This is pretty hard to search for. > - Emacs One thing in common with emacs, jupyter, vscode.. these are all capable platforms but not solutions, and if you want to replace your terminal emulator by building on top of them it's doable but doesn't feel very portable. I'd challenge people that are making cool stuff to show it, and then ship it. Not a pile of config + a constellatio…
It's part of plan9:
I had thought of a idea in a operating system design, which has many similarities to this but also many significant differences. The rest of the operating system would also be designed to support this, and the REPL would also be integrated with editors (like they show) and with a zoned spreadsheet. There would also be transactions (not the same as described there, but there is a similarity), and also capabilities (us…
The terminal of the future is called a web browser.
Yes, this was my first thought too. I haven't used a hardware text terminal since the 80s so maybe I don't get where the TFA is coming from? It starts out by stating "This post is part 6 of a multi-part series called 'the computer of the next 200 years'". Given that context, why is the focus on the evolution of 1980s VT100-type protocols? I'm at home and there are over a half dozen different devices within 25 ft whic…
The terminal never left.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the modern unix'y thing to do here is always send all messages intended for the user to stderr (regardless of whether they are actually errors), and always respond with machine-friendly JSON on stdout by default. AFAIK there's no downsides to this.. you can still have color on stderr, you can still draw sixel pictures or whatever. Meanwhile pipes and redirection still work as expected. No need for content/fea…
There are many downsides. There are problems with using JSON for this; other formats would be better. JSON needs escaping, cannot effectively transfer binary data (other than encoding as hex or base64), cannot use character sets other than Unicode, etc. People think JSON is good, but it isn't. Also, you might want to use less or other programs for the text output, which might be the primary output that you might also…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the modern unix'y thing to do here is always send all messages intended for the user to stderr (regardless of whether they are actually errors), and always respond with machine-friendly JSON on stdout by default. AFAIK there's no downsides to this.. you can still have color on stderr, you can still draw sixel pictures or whatever. Meanwhile pipes and redirection still work as expected. No need for content/fea…
There are many downsides. There are problems with using JSON for this; other formats would be better. JSON needs escaping, cannot effectively transfer binary data (other than encoding as hex or base64), cannot use character sets other than Unicode, etc. People think JSON is good, but it isn't. Also, you might want to use less or other programs for the text output, which might be the primary output that you might also…
Answering --help with JSON is a good example, how bad is it really if the response is JSON? Well, using less works fine still and you can still grep if you want simple substring search. Wanting a section is probably more common, so maybe you'd "grep" for a subcommand with `jq .subcommand` or an option with `jq .subcommand.option`, and maybe get yourself a fancier, JSON-friendly version of less that handles escaped quotes and newlines. Tables and tab-or-space delimited output overflow char limits, force the command-generator to figure out character wrapping, and so on. Now you need a library to generate CLI help properly, but if you're going to have a library why not just spit JSON and decouple completely from display details to let the consumer handle it.
Structured output by default just makes sense for practically everything except `cat`. And while your markdown files or csv files might have quoted strings, looking at the raw files isn't something people really want from shells or editors.. they want something "rendered" in one way or another, for example with syntax highlighting.
Basically in 2025 neither humans nor machines benefit much from unstructured raw output. Almost any CLI that does this needs to be paired with a parser (like https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc) and/or a renderer (like https://github.com/charmbracelet/glow). If no such pairing is available then it pushes many people to separately reinvent parsers badly. JSON's not perfect but (non-minified) it's human-readable enough to address the basic issues here without jumping all the way towards binary or (shudder) HTML