3 ms·

I've never understood the appeal of integrated terminals or viewers in text editors, file managers or IDEs. They will never be as good as dedicated terminals/vi

I've never understood the appeal of integrated terminals or viewers in text editors, file managers or IDEs. They will never be as good as dedicated terminals/viewers. Is Alt/Cmd-Tab so hard?

NietTim 8y ago
I run a dev server trough grunt for a project, now I can open that terminal window in the same project I'm working on and close it when I'm done with the project. It will never replace my "main terminal" but makes my life a little bit easier.
dmortin 8y ago
You have probably never experienced the efficiency when you can access terminal contents as plain text. E.g. it is searchable with the same commands as your text buffers, very easy to copy large chunks of output from it, etc.
- mherrmann 8y ago
  What large chunks do you need to copy? The only thing I really copy often are file paths.
  - dmortin 8y ago
    Output from scripts, for example. Not necessarily large. E.g. I run various scripts, and then I need the output of some them later. Then I don't have to rerun the script and redirect to a file, or scroll back trying to find it. I just search for some string in it, and then it is right there and I can copy or even edit the output right in place in the terminal buffer if I don't want something from it and copy that. It's quite useful and convenient.
    - mherrmann 8y ago
      Your reply to my question is basically "the output of scripts". I get that. But what _kind_ of scripts?
      - welly 8y ago
        Surely the OP could be referring to any number of kinds of scripts. What does it matter what kinds of scripts? Bash scripts? Logs files? The output of scripts is surely enough.
      - thom 8y ago
        You're executing a big import job that fails on a few items, so you want to go back and parse out the IDs of those items, transform them into an SQL command and look up the data in the database to poke about at what's wrong. This is trivially few operations in Emacs when you're running your shell and SQL client side-by-side and have brilliant regex and text manipulation tools in the middle. Sure, you could do this just on the command line if you'd logged to a file and could do the sed or awk bit in the middle to pipe a command to psql etc, but why bother? Doing it inside your editor is so much more forgiving.
- black_knight 8y ago
  Editable plain text terminals are wonderful. Especially for running interactive programming sessions (like ghci, or python). Unfortunately, some programs treat the teminal emulator as a screen with fixed positions to put coloured characters in. And this breaks down when your terminal is a text buffer.
black_knight 8y ago
KDE had the solution to this, long time ago: KParts allows you to embed the dedicated terminal (Konsole) into any other KDE program. That said, I agred that alt-tabbing isn’t hard, and a tiling window manager makes it even easier (less window administration).
- mherrmann 8y ago
  That makes a lot of sense I think. You get a terminal, but don't have to reinvent the wheel.
- thom 8y ago
  I must admit I don't use KDE these days, for no really good reason, but back in the day I used to love booting up Konqueror, opening my company's web-based timesheet system in one tab, a KSpread spreadsheet in another, a KWord doc in yet another. And then being able to edit remote files transparenly in Kate etc. It was a very nice integrated system, basically everything you'd hope for in a well architected piece of C++ software.
thom 8y ago
I use terminals almost exclusively inside Emacs, and it is strictly better than any terminal emulator on my system. I get really easy navigation on both command and output history, search (including regexes on command output), autocomplete, complex text manipulation (including cutting rectangles etc), integration with the clipboard (I can paste anything from my editor's history into a command). I can create complicated multi step commands in a buffer and send them, individually or one at a time, to the shell to be executed with simple key combinations. I can insert command output into a buffer at my cursor. But more importantly, Emacs is fullscreen and it's what I'm looking at anyway. I don't _want_ to switch away from it. My muscle memory is mostly trained on moving between Emacs buffers, and even with readline bindings, very few window managers and terminal emulators come close to supporting everything I want from a shell buffer. I also exclusively do SQL in Emacs, and dataframes and plots in R, and tailing log files, and no end of other stuff, and if there's ever anything, no matter how little, that bothers me about interacting with these things, I can write code to make it behave exactly how I want it to. The only thing I _don't_ do with terminals inside Emacs is SSH into a screen on a server that's already running Emacs, but even then, little jobs are generally easier with tramp, which makes it transparent when you're editing stuff and issuing commands remotely.
- mherrmann 8y ago
  That does sound like a very cool work flow.
- celeritascelery 8y ago
  Once I realized terminal emulators are more defined by their limitations then their features, I started running all my shells in emacs. Never looked back.
Fnoord 8y ago
> Is Alt/Cmd-Tab so hard? Its annoying with a bunch of programs open. I prefer to have a keybind to get the terminal with dropdown, akin to Guake [1]. This is possible with iTerm2 as well. Also, Expose-like or tiling window feature of a desktop comes in handy. For that, I can recommend Amethyst. [1] http://guake-project.org/ http://guake-project.org/

I've never understood the appeal of integrated terminals or viewers in text editors, file managers or IDEs. They will never be as good as dedicated terminals/viewers. Is Alt/Cmd-Tab so hard?

NietTim 8y ago

I run a dev server trough grunt for a project, now I can open that terminal window in the same project I'm working on and close it when I'm done with the project. It will never replace my "main terminal" but makes my life a little bit easier.

dmortin 8y ago

You have probably never experienced the efficiency when you can access terminal contents as plain text. E.g. it is searchable with the same commands as your text buffers, very easy to copy large chunks of output from it, etc.

mherrmann 8y ago
What large chunks do you need to copy? The only thing I really copy often are file paths.
- dmortin 8y ago
  Output from scripts, for example. Not necessarily large. E.g. I run various scripts, and then I need the output of some them later. Then I don't have to rerun the script and redirect to a file, or scroll back trying to find it. I just search for some string in it, and then it is right there and I can copy or even edit the output right in place in the terminal buffer if I don't want something from it and copy that. It's quite useful and convenient.
  - mherrmann 8y ago
    Your reply to my question is basically "the output of scripts". I get that. But what _kind_ of scripts?
    - welly 8y ago
      Surely the OP could be referring to any number of kinds of scripts. What does it matter what kinds of scripts? Bash scripts? Logs files? The output of scripts is surely enough.
    - thom 8y ago
      You're executing a big import job that fails on a few items, so you want to go back and parse out the IDs of those items, transform them into an SQL command and look up the data in the database to poke about at what's wrong. This is trivially few operations in Emacs when you're running your shell and SQL client side-by-side and have brilliant regex and text manipulation tools in the middle. Sure, you could do this just on the command line if you'd logged to a file and could do the sed or awk bit in the middle to pipe a command to psql etc, but why bother? Doing it inside your editor is so much more forgiving.
black_knight 8y ago
Editable plain text terminals are wonderful. Especially for running interactive programming sessions (like ghci, or python). Unfortunately, some programs treat the teminal emulator as a screen with fixed positions to put coloured characters in. And this breaks down when your terminal is a text buffer.

black_knight 8y ago

KDE had the solution to this, long time ago: KParts allows you to embed the dedicated terminal (Konsole) into any other KDE program. That said, I agred that alt-tabbing isn’t hard, and a tiling window manager makes it even easier (less window administration).

mherrmann 8y ago
That makes a lot of sense I think. You get a terminal, but don't have to reinvent the wheel.
thom 8y ago
I must admit I don't use KDE these days, for no really good reason, but back in the day I used to love booting up Konqueror, opening my company's web-based timesheet system in one tab, a KSpread spreadsheet in another, a KWord doc in yet another. And then being able to edit remote files transparenly in Kate etc. It was a very nice integrated system, basically everything you'd hope for in a well architected piece of C++ software.

thom 8y ago

I use terminals almost exclusively inside Emacs, and it is strictly better than any terminal emulator on my system. I get really easy navigation on both command and output history, search (including regexes on command output), autocomplete, complex text manipulation (including cutting rectangles etc), integration with the clipboard (I can paste anything from my editor's history into a command). I can create complicated multi step commands in a buffer and send them, individually or one at a time, to the shell to be executed with simple key combinations. I can insert command output into a buffer at my cursor. But more importantly, Emacs is fullscreen and it's what I'm looking at anyway. I don't _want_ to switch away from it. My muscle memory is mostly trained on moving between Emacs buffers, and even with readline bindings, very few window managers and terminal emulators come close to supporting everything I want from a shell buffer. I also exclusively do SQL in Emacs, and dataframes and plots in R, and tailing log files, and no end of other stuff, and if there's ever anything, no matter how little, that bothers me about interacting with these things, I can write code to make it behave exactly how I want it to. The only thing I _don't_ do with terminals inside Emacs is SSH into a screen on a server that's already running Emacs, but even then, little jobs are generally easier with tramp, which makes it transparent when you're editing stuff and issuing commands remotely.

mherrmann 8y ago
That does sound like a very cool work flow.
celeritascelery 8y ago
Once I realized terminal emulators are more defined by their limitations then their features, I started running all my shells in emacs. Never looked back.

Fnoord 8y ago

> Is Alt/Cmd-Tab so hard? Its annoying with a bunch of programs open. I prefer to have a keybind to get the terminal with dropdown, akin to Guake [1]. This is possible with iTerm2 as well. Also, Expose-like or tiling window feature of a desktop comes in handy. For that, I can recommend Amethyst. [1] http://guake-project.org/ http://guake-project.org/