3 ms·

> I disagree - the strength is that they're standardised. The weakness is that those standards are ancient. Which standards do you have a problem with? Handlin

> I disagree - the strength is that they're standardised. The weakness is that those standards are ancient. Which standards do you have a problem with? Handling terminal escape codes is pretty easy; dozens of terminal emulators do it great. Are you saying it should be easier to build a TUI? It's already very easy: just use a library like Textualize or Bubbletea or rview (there are also dozens of these). I'm not saying every TUI app performs great, but maybe you remember an article that made it to the HN front page about how centering in web apps is impossible? Or how web apps can't both confine text to a reasonable center column of text and take full advantage of all the screen space when a browser window is fully maximized on a wide monitor? TUIs don't have a monopoly on layout weirdness is all I'm saying here. > Are we really doing "there's starving children in africa"? Feel free to correct me here, but it sounds like your point is that we should move the baseline from what was prevalent in the 70s to what was prevalent ~2006. I'd love to hear some examples of what you think that would enable beyond what we currently have, because thinking about it, I'm not coming up with too many that wouldn't really irritate me. Maybe tab completion could query external services because we have pretty fast networks and CDNs now, but I don't always have internet, and I'm not thrilled by the idea of my ISP knowing whenever I try to tab complete a Docker image or whatever. Maybe we could cache it, but I'm not wild about every tool I use keeping its own cache or history database. Maybe we could have big beautiful TUIs, in fact we already do, but I prefer to have a lot of splits in my terminal and therefore like it when things work fine at 80 columns. So I can't think of significant improvements, but on the other hand I can easily envision this being a bigger barrier to expanding computer/internet use to more humans. Or to be maybe too frank about it, I'm completely fine with you being annoyed by yet another Unicode or layout bug if 1,000 more people--let's just say in rural Washington--get the chance to be charmed by Linux.

maccard 2y ago
> Handling terminal escape codes is pretty easy; dozens of terminal emulators do it great And yet some of the most common ones fail - here’s a thread about VSCode from this morning. https://x.com/thdxr/status/1833727037074227603?s=46 https://x.com/thdxr/status/1833727037074227603?s=46 > just use a library like Textualize or Bubbletea or rview (there are also dozens of these) I’m more of a user of these TUI apps, so I don’t have control over what framework they use. > Feel free to correct me here, but it sounds like your point is that we should move the baseline from what was prevalent in the 70s to what was prevalent ~2006. We should move the baseline to represent how computers are used today. That might be 2004 or 2008, I don’t really care. One really perfect example of crazy behaviour that is still widespread is “tools that dump binary data to terminal emulators that are parsed as escape codes and cause the emulator to hang” - there are dozens of these foot guns, and removing these surprise behaviours would be far more likely to help those 1000 people in rural Washington than letting them run a terminal on a device that is possibly from before they were born. > I'd love to hear some examples of what you think that would enable beyond what we currently have I think the fact that we serialize everything to text to allow interoperability between tools is insane in this day and age. We spend so much computing time on this. Powershell has it right. The fact that in my hands I have a device that is many orders of magnitude faster than the device I first wrote code on (and this phone is probably an order of magnitude weaker than my primary workstation) and we’re still waiting for basic operations on files because of APIs and programs that were designed in the 80s when we needed to page text files > I'm completely fine with you being annoyed by yet another Unicode or layout bug if 1,000 more people--let's just say in rural Washington--get the chance to be charmed by Linux. One of the earliest memories I have of programming is having a computer say hello to me, and printing ascii art. I’d guess GenZ is far more familiar with Unicode than with ascii art, and there are millions of people out there with non-ascii characters in their names - shouldn’t they be able to have the same access that we do, or are we saying g that only poor Americans are entitled to have that magic?
- camgunz 2y ago
  > And yet some of the most common ones fail - here’s a thread about VSCode from this morning. Well, not being an X user I can't see anything past "the vscode terminal is so poorly implemented it cannot deal with the ansi i am throwing at it", but as a Vim user you won't catch me defending VSCode. I will say if you're looking for perfect classes of applications you won't find any, i.e. if your standard for implementing things is that no implementation of a thing can have a bug, you'll never implement anything. >> just use a library like Textualize or Bubbletea or rview (there are also dozens of these) > I’m more of a user of these TUI apps, so I don’t have control over what framework they use. I'm just trying to get at the outlines of your argument. If this wasn't what you meant, OK then. > One really perfect example of crazy behaviour that is still widespread is “tools that dump binary data to terminal emulators that are parsed as escape codes and cause the emulator to hang” This shouldn't do anything that running `reset` can't fix. If it does, that emulator has a bug. But further, that's not really a standard or anything to do with ancient computing. I can easily send you to a page that locks up your computer with bonkers JavaScript (it's called realclearpolitics lol). Terminal escape codes don't have a monopoly on locking up your apps. > removing these surprise behaviours would be far more likely to help those 1000 people in rural Washington than letting them run a terminal on a device that is possibly from before they were born My premise is that these people don't have computers. Also using a terminal on a device from before I was born sounds awesome (you can imagine what my YouTube recs look like haha) > I think the fact that we serialize everything to text to allow interoperability between tools is insane in this day and age. I think about this all the time, but primarily like in the realm of like JSON vs. msgpack. There's something very cool about being able to interpret a data stream just by looking at it (more or less). But it's also wildly inefficient, 99.999999999% of the time only computers are ever looking at it, and in the CLI case the general lack of structure or standard leads to annoying extra work and pretty evil bugs. > One of the earliest memories I have of programming is having a computer say hello to me, and printing ascii art. I’d guess GenZ is far more familiar with Unicode than with ascii art, and there are millions of people out there with non-ascii characters in their names - shouldn’t they be able to have the same access that we do, or are we saying g that only poor Americans are entitled to have that magic? There's no way I can dig it up now, but I remember reading some article about everything you'd have to go through to assuredly (more or less) print Unicode characters to a screen in C, like you're dealing with wchar_t, defining special things on Windows, making sure you have a supporting font, blah blah. In fairness though, this is pretty easy in modern languages like Python or Go, plus I don't know how common it is for terminals to not render Unicode (if you're using a non-Unicode-aware terminal these days I'd be amazed, I mean how will npm display emojis??). I don't know if Unicode is a good example for us to work with though. It is more computationally taxing so it works for your end, but it also extends computing to way more people so it works for my end too. A win-win doesn't really exercise the tension you and I are getting at.

maccard 2y ago

> Handling terminal escape codes is pretty easy; dozens of terminal emulators do it great And yet some of the most common ones fail - here’s a thread about VSCode from this morning. https://x.com/thdxr/status/1833727037074227603?s=46 https://x.com/thdxr/status/1833727037074227603?s=46 > just use a library like Textualize or Bubbletea or rview (there are also dozens of these) I’m more of a user of these TUI apps, so I don’t have control over what framework they use. > Feel free to correct me here, but it sounds like your point is that we should move the baseline from what was prevalent in the 70s to what was prevalent ~2006. We should move the baseline to represent how computers are used today. That might be 2004 or 2008, I don’t really care. One really perfect example of crazy behaviour that is still widespread is “tools that dump binary data to terminal emulators that are parsed as escape codes and cause the emulator to hang” - there are dozens of these foot guns, and removing these surprise behaviours would be far more likely to help those 1000 people in rural Washington than letting them run a terminal on a device that is possibly from before they were born. > I'd love to hear some examples of what you think that would enable beyond what we currently have I think the fact that we serialize everything to text to allow interoperability between tools is insane in this day and age. We spend so much computing time on this. Powershell has it right. The fact that in my hands I have a device that is many orders of magnitude faster than the device I first wrote code on (and this phone is probably an order of magnitude weaker than my primary workstation) and we’re still waiting for basic operations on files because of APIs and programs that were designed in the 80s when we needed to page text files > I'm completely fine with you being annoyed by yet another Unicode or layout bug if 1,000 more people--let's just say in rural Washington--get the chance to be charmed by Linux. One of the earliest memories I have of programming is having a computer say hello to me, and printing ascii art. I’d guess GenZ is far more familiar with Unicode than with ascii art, and there are millions of people out there with non-ascii characters in their names - shouldn’t they be able to have the same access that we do, or are we saying g that only poor Americans are entitled to have that magic?

camgunz 2y ago
> And yet some of the most common ones fail - here’s a thread about VSCode from this morning. Well, not being an X user I can't see anything past "the vscode terminal is so poorly implemented it cannot deal with the ansi i am throwing at it", but as a Vim user you won't catch me defending VSCode. I will say if you're looking for perfect classes of applications you won't find any, i.e. if your standard for implementing things is that no implementation of a thing can have a bug, you'll never implement anything. >> just use a library like Textualize or Bubbletea or rview (there are also dozens of these) > I’m more of a user of these TUI apps, so I don’t have control over what framework they use. I'm just trying to get at the outlines of your argument. If this wasn't what you meant, OK then. > One really perfect example of crazy behaviour that is still widespread is “tools that dump binary data to terminal emulators that are parsed as escape codes and cause the emulator to hang” This shouldn't do anything that running `reset` can't fix. If it does, that emulator has a bug. But further, that's not really a standard or anything to do with ancient computing. I can easily send you to a page that locks up your computer with bonkers JavaScript (it's called realclearpolitics lol). Terminal escape codes don't have a monopoly on locking up your apps. > removing these surprise behaviours would be far more likely to help those 1000 people in rural Washington than letting them run a terminal on a device that is possibly from before they were born My premise is that these people don't have computers. Also using a terminal on a device from before I was born sounds awesome (you can imagine what my YouTube recs look like haha) > I think the fact that we serialize everything to text to allow interoperability between tools is insane in this day and age. I think about this all the time, but primarily like in the realm of like JSON vs. msgpack. There's something very cool about being able to interpret a data stream just by looking at it (more or less). But it's also wildly inefficient, 99.999999999% of the time only computers are ever looking at it, and in the CLI case the general lack of structure or standard leads to annoying extra work and pretty evil bugs. > One of the earliest memories I have of programming is having a computer say hello to me, and printing ascii art. I’d guess GenZ is far more familiar with Unicode than with ascii art, and there are millions of people out there with non-ascii characters in their names - shouldn’t they be able to have the same access that we do, or are we saying g that only poor Americans are entitled to have that magic? There's no way I can dig it up now, but I remember reading some article about everything you'd have to go through to assuredly (more or less) print Unicode characters to a screen in C, like you're dealing with wchar_t, defining special things on Windows, making sure you have a supporting font, blah blah. In fairness though, this is pretty easy in modern languages like Python or Go, plus I don't know how common it is for terminals to not render Unicode (if you're using a non-Unicode-aware terminal these days I'd be amazed, I mean how will npm display emojis??). I don't know if Unicode is a good example for us to work with though. It is more computationally taxing so it works for your end, but it also extends computing to way more people so it works for my end too. A win-win doesn't really exercise the tension you and I are getting at.