3 ms·
"I'm amazed at the amount of hatred directed towards this - as if the terminal could in NO WAY be improved?!" Improve it all you want, I'm totally into that.
by burgerbrain 15y ago
"I'm amazed at the amount of hatred directed towards this - as if the terminal could in NO WAY be improved?!"
Improve it all you want, I'm totally into that. The problem is that once your "terminal" ceases to be a terminal emulator then you lose so much it's pretty unrecoverable.
Most of the things that you suggest are very much technically possible for a shell (perhaps zsh with some extensions) running in xterm. You'd be left with some sort of unholy combination of a rather modernized `mc` and an otherwise modern shell, but it'd be a very interesting product.
tl;dr: We're not opposed to improving the 'terminal'. I'm opposed to 1) mistaking "improving the terminal" with "improving the shell" and 2) losing the terminal.
- Tangaroa 15y agoA terminal emulator running on an object-oriented system like Termkit could run vt100-friendly filters to convert everything to text before it is sent down the line to the user. Users who did not know they were connecting to such a system might not notice the difference.
- burgerbrain 15y agoAlthough I am not entirely sure what you are attempting to communicate, what I will say is this: If you do not provide direct user access to a pseudo terminal through a terminal emulator, then you will undoubtedly lose functionality. You need both the pseudo-terminal and the terminal emulator. If you do provide direct user access to the pty through a terminal emulator, then what the hell is the rest of the crap there for?