this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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That is the Luddites argument against progressing anything. There are many problems with current terminal emulators that these newer ones are trying to fix and make the terminal experience better overall. Terminals as they currently work were designed the way they are to talk to dumb typewriters with a screen (that's right, not keyboards, digital typewriters). And they have barely changed at all since then.
Personally looking at these terminals they have a lot of niceties that I would love to use. But IMO these benefits are not worth the costs these particular terminals also have. One being closed source and requiring an account and the other being electron - no benefit is worth that. But to bury your head in the sand and claim they have no benefits at all is wrong.
Begin able to view images in the terminal would be amazing alone - just like you can cat a text file. I would hate to need to launch a GUI program every time I wanted to see what was inside a text file but that is exactly what I need to do for images or PDFs.
Being able to collapse the output of a command would be nice as well. The number of times I have had to scroll for days to get to the output of a previous command because I happen to run a noisy one but still want to check what something previously had done would save me quite a bit of annoyance. And being able to search just the last commands output would be great - like an after the fact, interactive grep with context. And being able to quickly copy the output of the last command would also be great.
Konsole can display images, as can kitty, alacritty, western, iterm2, etc. There's quite a few formats to do so dating back decades. This isn't new.
As for collapsing a command and it's output that's nice, but it's not exactly game changing.
Lastly, searching explicitly your last command for a term with context would be much better suited to the shell to solve as it'd be terminal independent. Wouldn't surprise me if under the hood it's a bash script that takes whatever input you pass to bash, execs it, pipes stdout to tee, which passes it to a text file storing output and the console's output too. Of course, you can always pipe it to fzf for a live grep with context if you have it set up right and remember to do so
I would agree just denying any advancements in favor of the "good ole way" is idiotic but nothing I've seen or that you've listed convinces me these are major advancements. Nor are these anything that couldn't be solved at the shells level or with supplementary applications. Nice to have, if it weren't electron or closed I would switch, but nothing groundbreaking
I doubt they're outright rejecting any idea of progress. They're likely just not convinced by what the fancy options offer
They can now? I know it was possible in some niche terminals but never knew it was as wide spread as that.
None of these features on their own are game changing I agree. But lots of small nice to haves can end up being game changing overall. Again - I don't think these terminals offer anywhere near enough to warrant their IMO massive downsides though. But I would love to see more innovation in the terminal emulator space.
I had a similar thought TBH. But the more I thought about it the more I came to see that in order to do this nicely - ie with inline scroll back or being able to collapse command output like these terminals do then you would basically need to implement a terminal emulator into the shell. Either way you are breaking down the wall between what a shell and a terminal emulator are doing. I would be interesting in exploring this from the shell side, though I cannot fault them from doing it from the emulator side either.
I think the key benefit here is integration rather than technical ability to do something. Making it easy and convenient to do goes a long way. There is a lot that can be made much nicer with things more tightly integrated together than trying to string up a bunch of disparate applications together - even if you can do it the integrated approach will give you a much more refined experience.
It sounds like an outright dismissal of new features to me.
TIL viu exists.