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I spent the day making a virtual terminal ... I think the terminal is an unnecessary layer. All program UI is limited by this 40+ year old technology that is th

by z3t4 9y ago

I spent the day making a virtual terminal ... I think the terminal is an unnecessary layer. All program UI is limited by this 40+ year old technology that is the terminal. Instead of making a new shell, make a shell + new user-interface.

Myrmornis 9y ago
That's an interesting comment. One downside is that I believe it would necessarily be tied to a particular choice of OS, whereas with the standard separation, our shells can be cross-platform but our terminal emulators are OS-specific.
chubot 9y ago
I agree, but the first step is to make a shell. I imagine it will be like Vi or Emacs -- it can write to a terminal, or have its own UI. I have been keeping a wiki page: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Interactive-Shell https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Interactive-Shell Although honestly I won't get to any of this in the near future.
jiggunjer 9y ago
A day? It would take me a month reading the kernel code just to know where to start and what to replace.
- z3t4 9y ago
  I half-hearted implemented the "vt100" ANSI Escape sequences in the most naive way possible into an existing GUI application. Did not touch any kernel code. I think the modern "terminal" is the Browser. With URL's instead of file paths. But I think it's maybe time for something new. In the 70's we got the terminal. 20 years later we got the browser. Now another 20 years have passed. What's the next step ? Terminal -> Browser -> ?? -> AI ?
executesorder66 9y ago
You might be interested in this: https://github.com/withoutboats/notty https://github.com/withoutboats/notty
- scandox 9y ago
  https://github.com/withoutboats/notty/issues/67 https://github.com/withoutboats/notty/issues/67 Dead project according to the author, though.
JdeBP 9y ago
Actually, far from all, most program UI is not so limited. Learn from history. In the 1980s the world improved on the terminal paradigms, with TUIs that included things like directly addressable output buffers and unified and standardized keyboard/mouse input event streams. In parallel, GUIs took hold, and there are nowadays a lot of GUI programs in the world. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16014573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16014573

by z3t4 9y ago

Myrmornis 9y ago

That's an interesting comment. One downside is that I believe it would necessarily be tied to a particular choice of OS, whereas with the standard separation, our shells can be cross-platform but our terminal emulators are OS-specific.

chubot 9y ago

I agree, but the first step is to make a shell. I imagine it will be like Vi or Emacs -- it can write to a terminal, or have its own UI. I have been keeping a wiki page: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Interactive-Shell https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Interactive-Shell Although honestly I won't get to any of this in the near future.

jiggunjer 9y ago

A day? It would take me a month reading the kernel code just to know where to start and what to replace.

z3t4 9y ago
I half-hearted implemented the "vt100" ANSI Escape sequences in the most naive way possible into an existing GUI application. Did not touch any kernel code. I think the modern "terminal" is the Browser. With URL's instead of file paths. But I think it's maybe time for something new. In the 70's we got the terminal. 20 years later we got the browser. Now another 20 years have passed. What's the next step ? Terminal -> Browser -> ?? -> AI ?

executesorder66 9y ago

You might be interested in this: https://github.com/withoutboats/notty https://github.com/withoutboats/notty

scandox 9y ago
https://github.com/withoutboats/notty/issues/67 https://github.com/withoutboats/notty/issues/67 Dead project according to the author, though.

JdeBP 9y ago

Actually, far from all, most program UI is not so limited. Learn from history. In the 1980s the world improved on the terminal paradigms, with TUIs that included things like directly addressable output buffers and unified and standardized keyboard/mouse input event streams. In parallel, GUIs took hold, and there are nowadays a lot of GUI programs in the world. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16014573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16014573