5 ms·
"It's got a bunch of really thoughtful little features (showing what processes are attached to the current pty, option-clicking to move the cursor rapidly, full
by rsync 9y ago
"It's got a bunch of really thoughtful little features (showing what processes are attached to the current pty, option-clicking to move the cursor rapidly, full mouse support for apps like vim, good linewrap detection, and recently support for rich-text copy/paste which is useful for showing coloured terminal output, etc. etc.), and it remains really fast and snappy despite these features."
On the one hand, I have to agree that Terminal.app is quite good and very impressive. I don't bother with a third party terminal application and I do everything in the terminal.
However, one of the very valuable things about working in the terminal is the safety and immunity that it provides. No matter what bizarro virus attachment you send me, I can text edit it in a terminal without risk. There's nothing you can paste to me in irc that will infect or crash my computer.
Or at least, that's how it should be.
But the trickier we get with the terminal - the more things it does "out of band" and the more it "understands" the content of the text that it is rendering, the more of this safety we give up.
Frankly, it bothers me greatly that the terminal would have any idea whatsoever what text editor I am running or that I am running a text editor at all. It bothers me even more to think that I could copy or paste text and get results that were anything other than those characters ...
Make terminals fancy at your peril ...
- comex 9y ago> Frankly, it bothers me greatly that the terminal would have any idea whatsoever what text editor I am running or that I am running a text editor at all. I'm not sure what you mean by this. Terminal.app doesn't know that you're running a text editor. It does know that you're running a process called 'vim', which is kind of magic, but not too much (ps has always been able to show what processes are attached to a given tty, for example). If you're referring to the parent comment's "full mouse support for apps like vim", they just mean it supports "mouse reporting" control sequences, which date back to xterm. If anything, Terminal.app is late to support this (only in the latest release, whereas alternatives like iTerm have supported it for ages). > It bothers me even more to think that I could copy or paste text and get results that were anything other than those characters ... Well, the terminal has to interpret escape sequences for colors and such in order to display them, so why shouldn't it also preserve that metadata when copying and pasting? Like any other rich text copy+paste, it will only be kept if you paste into a rich text field; discarded if you paste into a plaintext field. That said, there are a few 'odd' things Terminal.app supports: e.g. printf '\e[2t' to minimize the window. (This also comes from xterm.)