3 ms·

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 tex

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.

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.