4 ms·

OK, but you have to admit it does the job and few (none?) people complain about the limitations of VT100 terminal emulation. If we could start from scratch wha

by angdis 11y ago

OK, but you have to admit it does the job and few (none?) people complain about the limitations of VT100 terminal emulation. If we could start from scratch what would a contemporary TTY be like? Would it be better in terms of functionality, multi-platform capability? What would be the advantage?

skriticos2 11y ago
Uniformity and documentation. If you want to do something fancy with the terminal (ncurses like) and try go get into the topic, you'll find a dozen different standards that add bits and peaces with only very cryptic documentation and not much example code. It's quite frustrating.
philh 11y ago
I don't know if it's fair to describe this as a limitation of VT100 (and I haven't RTFA yet), but some things that AFAIK terminals don't get right yet: - Screen's scrollback buffer and my terminal's scrollback buffer don't know about each other. If I swap screen tabs frequently, my terminal scrollbar becomes useless. OTOH, if I use a tabbed terminal, I'm guessing it would use a different VT100 in each tab and that wouldn't work very well with screen. - I'd like to be able to drop a marker in my bash prompt, and easily scroll back to the top of the previous command. - For that matter, I'd like to be able to selectively hide the output of previous commands, and when I want to look at it again I'd like to be able to view it in less instead of just unfolding it in-place.
- mikekchar 11y ago
  Italics. And even worse (because it is more common), bold. Hey, let's throw in "I want to have something bold and italics and this colour". Possibly I'm rare, but I'm frustrated very frequently...
- jimktrains2 11y ago
  That isn't the terminal, though, that's the software using it. A VT100 could be made to do any of that.
- joosters 11y ago
  The scrollback buffer problem is annoying, but I just don't think there's a good solution to it. screen (and tmux) basically store their own scrollback. The advantage here is that you can then page through the line history on another terminal or even another computer. The downside is that that your terminal (xterm/iterm/whatever) has to decide what to show when you page up. It has no way to read screen's internal scrollback, so it can either show you old non-screen lines, or hide the scrollback entirely. Switching into/out of screen will just add to the confusion. (I think some terminals will hide the scrollback history when they spot the TTY in curses-style mode, and only bring it back when that process quits?) One other annoyance for me is the behaviour of scrollback with a command like 'less' or 'more'. If you are paging down through a file, then scroll back up, some terminals will show you earlier lines of the file you are viewing, while others show you 'pre-less' scrollback.
  - philh 11y ago
    There may not be a good solution currently, but I don't believe that no good solution is possible even in theory. Which makes me wonder if the VT100 paradigm is holding us back. Like, if a VT100 understood the concept of tabs natively, it seems like this wouldn't be a problem. Screen could just map its windows onto VT100 tabs, and the terminal would know what to do with that. I don't know if adding tabs to VT100 emulators would be remotely feasible, or a good idea if it was, but I expect there's something in this space that would be an improvement on what we have.
    - peteri 11y ago
      Eh. A real VT100 should understand tabs, you can set them with 'Esc H' oddly the DEC manuals don't say what the effect of resetting tabs would be (I'd guess it defaults to multiples of 8 characters).
      - yuubi 11y ago
        Not \x08 tabs, but tabs like recent firefox and chrome use (as if you had several terminal windows with separate ptys and screen contents, but all in one window-manager window).
- gnachman 11y ago
  Try the new iterm2 beta. It does the first two items in your list (tmux integration and shell integration)
panic 11y ago
If we could start from scratch what would a contemporary TTY be like? https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new-world https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new-world complains about the limitations of VT100 and has some ideas for (GUI) terminal improvement.
na85 11y ago
>If we could start from scratch what would a contemporary TTY be like? It'd be a monstrosity written in javascript with merely adequate performance on an i7 and no backwards compatibility.

by angdis 11y ago

skriticos2 11y ago

Uniformity and documentation. If you want to do something fancy with the terminal (ncurses like) and try go get into the topic, you'll find a dozen different standards that add bits and peaces with only very cryptic documentation and not much example code. It's quite frustrating.

philh 11y ago

I don't know if it's fair to describe this as a limitation of VT100 (and I haven't RTFA yet), but some things that AFAIK terminals don't get right yet: - Screen's scrollback buffer and my terminal's scrollback buffer don't know about each other. If I swap screen tabs frequently, my terminal scrollbar becomes useless. OTOH, if I use a tabbed terminal, I'm guessing it would use a different VT100 in each tab and that wouldn't work very well with screen. - I'd like to be able to drop a marker in my bash prompt, and easily scroll back to the top of the previous command. - For that matter, I'd like to be able to selectively hide the output of previous commands, and when I want to look at it again I'd like to be able to view it in less instead of just unfolding it in-place.

mikekchar 11y ago
Italics. And even worse (because it is more common), bold. Hey, let's throw in "I want to have something bold and italics and this colour". Possibly I'm rare, but I'm frustrated very frequently...
jimktrains2 11y ago
That isn't the terminal, though, that's the software using it. A VT100 could be made to do any of that.
joosters 11y ago
The scrollback buffer problem is annoying, but I just don't think there's a good solution to it. screen (and tmux) basically store their own scrollback. The advantage here is that you can then page through the line history on another terminal or even another computer. The downside is that that your terminal (xterm/iterm/whatever) has to decide what to show when you page up. It has no way to read screen's internal scrollback, so it can either show you old non-screen lines, or hide the scrollback entirely. Switching into/out of screen will just add to the confusion. (I think some terminals will hide the scrollback history when they spot the TTY in curses-style mode, and only bring it back when that process quits?) One other annoyance for me is the behaviour of scrollback with a command like 'less' or 'more'. If you are paging down through a file, then scroll back up, some terminals will show you earlier lines of the file you are viewing, while others show you 'pre-less' scrollback.
- philh 11y ago
  There may not be a good solution currently, but I don't believe that no good solution is possible even in theory. Which makes me wonder if the VT100 paradigm is holding us back. Like, if a VT100 understood the concept of tabs natively, it seems like this wouldn't be a problem. Screen could just map its windows onto VT100 tabs, and the terminal would know what to do with that. I don't know if adding tabs to VT100 emulators would be remotely feasible, or a good idea if it was, but I expect there's something in this space that would be an improvement on what we have.
  - peteri 11y ago
    Eh. A real VT100 should understand tabs, you can set them with 'Esc H' oddly the DEC manuals don't say what the effect of resetting tabs would be (I'd guess it defaults to multiples of 8 characters).
    - yuubi 11y ago
      Not \x08 tabs, but tabs like recent firefox and chrome use (as if you had several terminal windows with separate ptys and screen contents, but all in one window-manager window).
gnachman 11y ago
Try the new iterm2 beta. It does the first two items in your list (tmux integration and shell integration)

panic 11y ago

If we could start from scratch what would a contemporary TTY be like? https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new-world https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new-world complains about the limitations of VT100 and has some ideas for (GUI) terminal improvement.

na85 11y ago

>If we could start from scratch what would a contemporary TTY be like? It'd be a monstrosity written in javascript with merely adequate performance on an i7 and no backwards compatibility.