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I'm not sure what your stance is. If it's "individual programs should use line terminators as convention and if the shell can help improve UX in the face of pr

by jolmg 8y ago

I'm not sure what your stance is. If it's "individual programs should use line terminators as convention and if the shell can help improve UX in the face of programs that break convention then it should", then I agree with you. What I meant by how zsh shouldn't be doing this is that if programs and people working on the command line followed the convention of terminating newlines, then the shell wouldn't need to do that. If it's "individual programs should use line separators and the shell should add the terminating newline", then I disagree. I don't think shells and terminals are so fundamental that this behavior should depend on them. It also does nothing to address the example of `cmd foo | cmd bar` that I gave because that's 1 job.

eridius 8y ago
It's, as I said, that programs should use line terminators, but we cannot mandate that all programs do use line terminators, so it's still the responsibility of the shell to deal with this. Specifically, it's a reaction to > First of all, that's a hack zsh really shouldn't have to do. In an ideal world, zsh wouldn't need a hack, but it would still need to send a signal to the terminal emulator to say "please ensure the cursor is at the beginning of a line; if it's not, mark this somehow so the user understands". Slightly less ideally, a simple way to say "am I at the beginning of a line?" (this is less ideal only in that now the terminal can't be smart about copying program output). But either way, it's still the responsibility of the shell to ensure its prompt ends up starting at column 0 without overwriting the previous program's output. Because no matter what conventions you establish, there will be programs that exit without printing a line terminator (even the best-behaved of programs can still do this if they use unbuffered output and you send a signal to kill the process in the middle of a line).

by jolmg 8y ago

eridius 8y ago

It's, as I said, that programs should use line terminators, but we cannot mandate that all programs do use line terminators, so it's still the responsibility of the shell to deal with this. Specifically, it's a reaction to > First of all, that's a hack zsh really shouldn't have to do. In an ideal world, zsh wouldn't need a hack, but it would still need to send a signal to the terminal emulator to say "please ensure the cursor is at the beginning of a line; if it's not, mark this somehow so the user understands". Slightly less ideally, a simple way to say "am I at the beginning of a line?" (this is less ideal only in that now the terminal can't be smart about copying program output). But either way, it's still the responsibility of the shell to ensure its prompt ends up starting at column 0 without overwriting the previous program's output. Because no matter what conventions you establish, there will be programs that exit without printing a line terminator (even the best-behaved of programs can still do this if they use unbuffered output and you send a signal to kill the process in the middle of a line).