4 ms·

There's a lot of really good stuff in here about quick access to things. I feel sad that we're all still doing this stuff in teletype emulators, though. Why can

There's a lot of really good stuff in here about quick access to things. I feel sad that we're all still doing this stuff in teletype emulators, though. Why can't we have this and nice GUIs, too?

Koshkin 6y ago
It’s acquired taste.
coldtea 6y ago
I, on the other hand, feel sad that we don't have better terminals, but still rely on ancient teletype protocols, escape codes, and arcana. I'd very much like an advanced, still cli/terminal, interface option.
- 1996 6y ago
  https://jexer.sourceforge.io/screenshots/jexer_sixel_in_sixel.png https://jexer.sourceforge.io/screenshots/jexer_sixel_in_sixe...
  - hhas01 6y ago
    https://media.tenor.com/images/f64390f36df99bc8d1891833c658e861/tenor.gif https://media.tenor.com/images/f64390f36df99bc8d1891833c658e...
- madhadron 6y ago
  I think maybe we're asking for the same thing. I want to be able to write commands and small scripts smoothly but have nice integration with graphical tools. Oberon, Acme, and Smalltalk all are environments that try this to various degrees...
- mongol 6y ago
  I would probably agree, but what do you think a better terminal would be like, compared to the traditional ones?
  - hhas01 6y ago
    Doesn’t have the beautiful Display Postscript/LeX-esque typography that I want, and less said about Lots of Irritating Silly Parentheses the better, but even 1980s tech was doing it better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk I think there are lessons to be had from the likes of Smalltalk and Logo too. Highly expressive without insane levels of cryptic inconsistent punctuation rules and UX man-traps.
  - selfhoster11 6y ago
    My attempt at answering that question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25305383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25305383
- selfhoster11 6y ago
  I yearn for a truly modern, speedy and advanced terminal that grows beyond the mold and mindset of a text-only line-by-line Unix terminal. Terminals of 2020 and beyond need to have first-class support for audio, video, images, and peripheral interactivity/customization. Terminology and iTerm 2's ability to display pictures, and some terminals' support for Sixel is one of the directions I want to see progress in. - It should be possible to `cat` an image, or a video, or even previews of Word and Photoshop documents. Terminology, iTerm 2 and Sixel-compatible terminals have this to some extent, but it's not standardised and doesn't have a broad support base. - Programs should be able to raise notifications without relying on third-party/OS-provided utils that have a drastically different API and availability across platforms. - Rich read-only visualisations of progress should be possible to call up with a few lines of code. I want to see a `dd`, `mv` or `cp` with a graphical progress bar at the bottom of my window. If my OS supports it, I want this to integrate with the UI like the progress widget on my taskbar. - We should be able to render a piece of output in 3D, if we so desire. I don't want Crysis, but I do want a Matlab logo that I can rotate by dragging my mouse and graphs that zoom when I Ctrl+scroll at them. - Support for file pickers and rich selection/filtering of file/directory lists. Not for sandboxing, but for convenience. - A command line builder (like one of the classic Apple OSes had, cannot find a reference now, or something like the one in Fish but more advanced). Only valid combinations of parameters will be supported, mutually exclusive commands are impossible to select. Any arguments that are files will be possible to use with a file picker. Any argument that's a date will get a calendar widget. Any argument that's a boolean or an enum will get a checkbox or drop-down respectively. - Terminals should be able to intake gigabytes of input per second, up to the limit of the hardware, without choking up. - We should be seeing 60FPS and beyond as a normal feature. - We should finally get unlimited scrollback enabled by default. The terminal emulator should keep everything that I've seen before, and remember it for me. We have the space for it, either in RAM or persistent storage. If not, it should be adaptable and drop the scrollback buffer that is lower priority than other applications on the system if they need more resources. - Unicode should come as standard. Emoji should come as standard. - End termcap. We should be able to hash out ONE standard to rule them all. We've had 50 years to come up with ideas and opinions. Version it so that we can release a V2 in 2100. - While we are at it, end Bash and come up with a saner shell notation that doesn't overload single/double quotes, the ampersand, > amd <, or human-text spaces. We have several more decades of syntax design knowledge worked out, and a whole keyboard with >101 keys. We have two Alts, two Ctrls, and a whole function key row. Let's make use of them for non-printable character input and interaction with the terminal. - (Debatable) consider adding hypertext support. It's here to stay, and not just in the form of HTML. There's more that can be added, but really, I think terminals deserve better.
chubot 6y ago
I collected some experiments in that area here (and anyone should feel free to add more, including their own): https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Interactive-Shell https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Interactive-Shell Many of the articles have nice screenshots / animations to give you a feel for what it is. I plan to turn https://www.oilshell.org/ https://www.oilshell.org/ into a library and I hope people will build GUIs around it. There are some UI possibilities that are difficult or impossible unless you have hooks to the shell other than stdin/stdout. https://github.com/oilshell/oil/issues/738 https://github.com/oilshell/oil/issues/738
- madhadron 6y ago
  So I recently started a job where I'm on Windows, and I've found myself surprisingly enamored of PowerShell. So many of the things that the shell got wrong are done right. The authors wanted to use <, >, etc. as their real meanings, but apparently the early users rebelled at the idea that > was no longer redirect to file. But things that would be nightmares in unix shells, such as going in and adding a new element as the last child of only one of four elements in an XML document (based on its attribute value) are a few lines of code. I still have decades of muscle memory in bash, but I find myself reaching for PS more and more. The problem is that you really need an interface for loading software components into your system at runtime, which .NET provides, but aside from .NET or COM I am unaware of any other equivalent system. Java's OSGi is the closest, and ugh...
  - chubot 6y ago
    I haven't used PowerShell much, but I skimmed a 500+ page book on it, and I've heard a lot of mixed feedback on it. Some people love it and some people hate it. Some more responses here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24873410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24873410 I guess what I'll say is that I hope the Oil ecosystem will grow the things that people like about it, that aren't tied to Windows. Windows and Unix are fundamentally different and it means they need fundamentally different shells, since a shell is by definition a language closely tied to the OS. You can run powershell on Unix, and bash on Windows, but even on the same OS they are somewhat disjoint tools!
SebastianKra 6y ago
You don't have to use the terminal for fast workflows. - Many programs offer intuitive quick-action- or quick-search-fields. For example: double-shift in IntelliJ or CMD-Shift-O in many Mac apps like Fork, Things and IA-Writer. - System wide search tools like Alfred and Launchbar will allow you to quickly access Files and execute Workflows - _Every_ Menubar in MacOS is searchable. Just press a shortcut and type what you want to do. - ...and let's not forget that keyboard shortcuts exist. The great thing is that you get all the power of a keyboard workflow, without losing the accessibility of a GUI.

There's a lot of really good stuff in here about quick access to things. I feel sad that we're all still doing this stuff in teletype emulators, though. Why can't we have this and nice GUIs, too?

Koshkin 6y ago

It’s acquired taste.

coldtea 6y ago

I, on the other hand, feel sad that we don't have better terminals, but still rely on ancient teletype protocols, escape codes, and arcana. I'd very much like an advanced, still cli/terminal, interface option.

1996 6y ago
https://jexer.sourceforge.io/screenshots/jexer_sixel_in_sixel.png https://jexer.sourceforge.io/screenshots/jexer_sixel_in_sixe...
- hhas01 6y ago
  https://media.tenor.com/images/f64390f36df99bc8d1891833c658e861/tenor.gif https://media.tenor.com/images/f64390f36df99bc8d1891833c658e...
madhadron 6y ago
I think maybe we're asking for the same thing. I want to be able to write commands and small scripts smoothly but have nice integration with graphical tools. Oberon, Acme, and Smalltalk all are environments that try this to various degrees...
mongol 6y ago
I would probably agree, but what do you think a better terminal would be like, compared to the traditional ones?
- hhas01 6y ago
  Doesn’t have the beautiful Display Postscript/LeX-esque typography that I want, and less said about Lots of Irritating Silly Parentheses the better, but even 1980s tech was doing it better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk I think there are lessons to be had from the likes of Smalltalk and Logo too. Highly expressive without insane levels of cryptic inconsistent punctuation rules and UX man-traps.
- selfhoster11 6y ago
  My attempt at answering that question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25305383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25305383
selfhoster11 6y ago
I yearn for a truly modern, speedy and advanced terminal that grows beyond the mold and mindset of a text-only line-by-line Unix terminal. Terminals of 2020 and beyond need to have first-class support for audio, video, images, and peripheral interactivity/customization. Terminology and iTerm 2's ability to display pictures, and some terminals' support for Sixel is one of the directions I want to see progress in. - It should be possible to `cat` an image, or a video, or even previews of Word and Photoshop documents. Terminology, iTerm 2 and Sixel-compatible terminals have this to some extent, but it's not standardised and doesn't have a broad support base. - Programs should be able to raise notifications without relying on third-party/OS-provided utils that have a drastically different API and availability across platforms. - Rich read-only visualisations of progress should be possible to call up with a few lines of code. I want to see a `dd`, `mv` or `cp` with a graphical progress bar at the bottom of my window. If my OS supports it, I want this to integrate with the UI like the progress widget on my taskbar. - We should be able to render a piece of output in 3D, if we so desire. I don't want Crysis, but I do want a Matlab logo that I can rotate by dragging my mouse and graphs that zoom when I Ctrl+scroll at them. - Support for file pickers and rich selection/filtering of file/directory lists. Not for sandboxing, but for convenience. - A command line builder (like one of the classic Apple OSes had, cannot find a reference now, or something like the one in Fish but more advanced). Only valid combinations of parameters will be supported, mutually exclusive commands are impossible to select. Any arguments that are files will be possible to use with a file picker. Any argument that's a date will get a calendar widget. Any argument that's a boolean or an enum will get a checkbox or drop-down respectively. - Terminals should be able to intake gigabytes of input per second, up to the limit of the hardware, without choking up. - We should be seeing 60FPS and beyond as a normal feature. - We should finally get unlimited scrollback enabled by default. The terminal emulator should keep everything that I've seen before, and remember it for me. We have the space for it, either in RAM or persistent storage. If not, it should be adaptable and drop the scrollback buffer that is lower priority than other applications on the system if they need more resources. - Unicode should come as standard. Emoji should come as standard. - End termcap. We should be able to hash out ONE standard to rule them all. We've had 50 years to come up with ideas and opinions. Version it so that we can release a V2 in 2100. - While we are at it, end Bash and come up with a saner shell notation that doesn't overload single/double quotes, the ampersand, > amd <, or human-text spaces. We have several more decades of syntax design knowledge worked out, and a whole keyboard with >101 keys. We have two Alts, two Ctrls, and a whole function key row. Let's make use of them for non-printable character input and interaction with the terminal. - (Debatable) consider adding hypertext support. It's here to stay, and not just in the form of HTML. There's more that can be added, but really, I think terminals deserve better.

chubot 6y ago

I collected some experiments in that area here (and anyone should feel free to add more, including their own): https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Interactive-Shell https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Interactive-Shell Many of the articles have nice screenshots / animations to give you a feel for what it is. I plan to turn https://www.oilshell.org/ https://www.oilshell.org/ into a library and I hope people will build GUIs around it. There are some UI possibilities that are difficult or impossible unless you have hooks to the shell other than stdin/stdout. https://github.com/oilshell/oil/issues/738 https://github.com/oilshell/oil/issues/738

madhadron 6y ago
So I recently started a job where I'm on Windows, and I've found myself surprisingly enamored of PowerShell. So many of the things that the shell got wrong are done right. The authors wanted to use <, >, etc. as their real meanings, but apparently the early users rebelled at the idea that > was no longer redirect to file. But things that would be nightmares in unix shells, such as going in and adding a new element as the last child of only one of four elements in an XML document (based on its attribute value) are a few lines of code. I still have decades of muscle memory in bash, but I find myself reaching for PS more and more. The problem is that you really need an interface for loading software components into your system at runtime, which .NET provides, but aside from .NET or COM I am unaware of any other equivalent system. Java's OSGi is the closest, and ugh...
- chubot 6y ago
  I haven't used PowerShell much, but I skimmed a 500+ page book on it, and I've heard a lot of mixed feedback on it. Some people love it and some people hate it. Some more responses here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24873410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24873410 I guess what I'll say is that I hope the Oil ecosystem will grow the things that people like about it, that aren't tied to Windows. Windows and Unix are fundamentally different and it means they need fundamentally different shells, since a shell is by definition a language closely tied to the OS. You can run powershell on Unix, and bash on Windows, but even on the same OS they are somewhat disjoint tools!

SebastianKra 6y ago

You don't have to use the terminal for fast workflows. - Many programs offer intuitive quick-action- or quick-search-fields. For example: double-shift in IntelliJ or CMD-Shift-O in many Mac apps like Fork, Things and IA-Writer. - System wide search tools like Alfred and Launchbar will allow you to quickly access Files and execute Workflows - _Every_ Menubar in MacOS is searchable. Just press a shortcut and type what you want to do. - ...and let's not forget that keyboard shortcuts exist. The great thing is that you get all the power of a keyboard workflow, without losing the accessibility of a GUI.