I was excited to learn about two new terminal emulator app which seemed to have a lot of cool new features, warp and wave. Then I looked closer and found that both are a no go for me.
Warp is closed source and you need to create an account to use your terminal. Jebus Christus, no, thanks, but no.
Wave is an Electron app. While that’s better than not having a Linux version, I’ve seen how Electron apps behave. They are the ones which hog all memory and get killed by the OS first. So that’s a no from me too.
I guess I keep my Tilix for now.
Konsole can display images, as can kitty alacritty, western, iterm2, etc. There’s quite a few formats to do so dating back decades. This isn’t new.
As for collapsing a command and it’s input that’s nice, but it’s not exactly game changing.
Lastly, searching explicitly your last command for a term with context would be much better suited to the shell to solve as it’d be terminal independent. Wouldn’t suprise me if under the hood it’s a bash script that takes whatever input you pass to bash, execs it, pipes stdout to tee, which passes it to a text file storing output and the console’s outup too. Of course, you can always pipe it to fzf for a live grep with context if you have it set up right and remember to do so
I would agree just denying any advancements in favor of the “good ole way” is idiotic but nothing I’ve seen or that you’ve listed convinces me these are major advancements. Nor are these anything that couldn’t be solved at the shells level or with supplementary applications. Nice to have, if it weren’t electron or closed I would switch, but nothing groundbreaking
I doubt they’re outright rejecting any idea of progress. They’re likely just not convinced by what the fancy options offer
Exactly. I don’t mind progress. But terminal emulators that does things you become dependant on, is not great in my opinion. Because what happens the day you only have a TTY to get things done? If you rely on all the fancy stuff, you would feel lost.
So yeah, I am not convinced that I need my terminal emulator to be fancy. But some people clearly are, looking at the rest of the comments on the post.
They can now? I know it was possible in some niche terminals but never knew it was as wide spread as that.
None of these features on their own are game changing I agree. But lots of small nice to haves can end up being game changing overall. Again - I don’t think these terminals offer anywhere near enough to warrant their IMO massive downsides though. But I would love to see more innovation in the terminal emulator space.
I had a similar thought TBH. But the more I thought about it the more I came to see that in order to do this nicely - ie with inline scroll back or being able to collapse command output like these terminals do then you would basically need to implement a terminal emulator into the shell. Either way you are breaking down the wall between what a shell and a terminal emulator are doing. I would be interesting in exploring this from the shell side, though I cannot fault them from doing it from the emulator side either.
I think the key benefit here is integration rather than technical ability to do something. Making it easy and convenient to do goes a long way. There is a lot that can be made much nicer with things more tightly integrated together than trying to string up a bunch of disparate applications together - even if you can do it the integrated approach will give you a much more refined experience.
It sounds like an outright dismissal of new features to me.
You do make some good points on it being terminalside, you’ve partially changed my mind there. I see the value now.
Also, you would be correct anything that allowed collapsing commands would be trivial to implement some sort of action per command and it’s output. Along with collapsing being easiest to do terminalside.
What I would love to see is a terminal that builds it’s own shell from scratch too rejecting the ancient ideas we have with bash. I still love bash but I’m curious what could come of it.
Seriously though thanks for the good conversation and thought excersize
Thinking about it some more I am not sure that we would have to go that far. Well not in the longer term - short term we might for experimenting with ideas. I think one of the bigger problems ATM is the terminal does not understand what a shell is or its component parts. Terminals just display characters and move the cursor around the screen and send keyboard and now mouse input back to the command they run. They are also aware of alternative buffers and raw input mode and know about echoing characters back the the screen.
If we extended the terminals to also understand some shell concepts like the prompt, commands being typed and output from the commands and gave the shell some markers it could send along with these (like we do with color information ATM) the terminal would be able to use these to change how it displays each part and would open up a lot of new an interesting features. Could even add things like tooltip support or actions on clicking some bits of the text.
I am starting to see these terminals as experimenting on what we features could be enabled if we were not stuck on the current VT100 protocals. Though if we ever get wider adoption and generalisation of these ideas backed back into the protocals will be another question to consider.
TIL viu exists.