6 ms·

Every software is a product, even if it is OSS and no money exchange is involved at all. There is a designer, and a final user. The idea of this product is that

by antirez 12y ago

Every software is a product, even if it is OSS and no money exchange is involved at all. There is a designer, and a final user. The idea of this product is that terminals don't need to scroll up into the past history, actually doing this well is one of the most critical aspects of a terminal as a good product for end users: retain history, do it reasonably when programs controlling the cursors are executed, don't get super slow if there is a lot of history already in memory, and so forth.

chriswarbo 12y ago
> actually [scrolling up] well is one of the most critical aspects of a terminal as a good product for end users You've clearly misunderstood the point st is trying to make. Not only is it not critical, it's a bad idea for a terminal to store and scroll history! Yes it's nice to have a history to scroll through, but other programs (screen, tmux, Emacs, etc.) are much better at doing that than terminal emulators are! For many people, like sysadmins, it's crucial that shells can be accessed over a network. Does that mean terminal emulators should build networking into their code? No, since SSH already does an excellent job. For many disabled people, it's crucial that shells can be speech-driven. Does that mean terminal emulators should build speech recognition into their code? No, since external systems (Sphinx, etc.) are already tackling this problem. Of course, from an "end user" perspective it would be nice to have "one application" which does all this. The beauty of the UNIX philosphy is that we can write such an application easily (untested, but you get the idea): #!/bin/sh if zenity --entry \ --title="New Terminal" \ --text="Enter the shell URL (blank for local shell)" \ then st -e "tmux -c ssh '$?'" else st -e "tmux" fi
- antirez 12y ago
  That's why I addressed it in the POV of a product. It's basically subjective. IMHO the "terminal product" should have history handling included.
  - chriswarbo 12y ago
    If you're thinking about a "terminal product" then why single out st's lack of history at all? That would be like claiming Excel lacks presentation capabilities. Whilst it's a true statement, presentation facilities are irrelevant to a spreadsheet; they're available in the PowerPoint component of the Microsoft Office suite, and they're designed to work together, so it's a complete non-issue.
fake-name 12y ago
You're entirely missing the point. Scrolling is already broken if you use any terminal multiplexer (such as `screen` or `tmux`). As such, having an additional, useless layer of scrollback on the client is both confusing and pointless, so they removed it.

by antirez 12y ago

chriswarbo 12y ago

> actually [scrolling up] well is one of the most critical aspects of a terminal as a good product for end users You've clearly misunderstood the point st is trying to make. Not only is it not critical, it's a bad idea for a terminal to store and scroll history! Yes it's nice to have a history to scroll through, but other programs (screen, tmux, Emacs, etc.) are much better at doing that than terminal emulators are! For many people, like sysadmins, it's crucial that shells can be accessed over a network. Does that mean terminal emulators should build networking into their code? No, since SSH already does an excellent job. For many disabled people, it's crucial that shells can be speech-driven. Does that mean terminal emulators should build speech recognition into their code? No, since external systems (Sphinx, etc.) are already tackling this problem. Of course, from an "end user" perspective it would be nice to have "one application" which does all this. The beauty of the UNIX philosphy is that we can write such an application easily (untested, but you get the idea): #!/bin/sh if zenity --entry \ --title="New Terminal" \ --text="Enter the shell URL (blank for local shell)" \ then st -e "tmux -c ssh '$?'" else st -e "tmux" fi

antirez 12y ago
That's why I addressed it in the POV of a product. It's basically subjective. IMHO the "terminal product" should have history handling included.
- chriswarbo 12y ago
  If you're thinking about a "terminal product" then why single out st's lack of history at all? That would be like claiming Excel lacks presentation capabilities. Whilst it's a true statement, presentation facilities are irrelevant to a spreadsheet; they're available in the PowerPoint component of the Microsoft Office suite, and they're designed to work together, so it's a complete non-issue.

fake-name 12y ago

You're entirely missing the point. Scrolling is already broken if you use any terminal multiplexer (such as `screen` or `tmux`). As such, having an additional, useless layer of scrollback on the client is both confusing and pointless, so they removed it.