Hacker News Reader

Comment by beachstartup | Hacker News Reader

> Yet proposing a better, widely useful and backwards compatible alternative is extremely hard.

we keep inventing new stuff, but always end up just using it to emulate and display terminals in new and interesting ways.

even my new, shiny 4G LTE + iOS + touchscreen mobile device is used to run a terminal emulator over ssh half the time. i've even use its web browser to run a web RDP session .. to display a terminal console.

i think there's just something soothing about a screen full of text. it's a very efficient way of displaying information.

View on HN

Only certain types of information. It's not a great way to display, for example, a comparison between two similarly-edited movie trailers. Or a map of Bremen. Or the annotations on your 2016 second quarter financial sum-up spreadsheet.

The big problem with the entire Unix philosophy is that it assumes all important data is text, when in the real world very little of it is. If you're one of the few people who can get away with text-based everything, it's great. If you're the vast majority of the population, it's a terrible idea.

this is HN, so i was talking only about systems admin and nuts-and-bolts development, but i would also argue that in all of your examples, having a terminal in addition to the other display formats would help convey more information as well as offer a better command interface. a good example would be autocad which has the drawing window but also a powerful terminal (i believe it was lisp-based) that you used in parallel.

> it assumes

True, UNIX was designed, in part, to make the processing of textual data as easy as possible. It was never intended to be running inside a photo camera or a drawing pad.

On the other hand, from the very beginning UNIX was just as capable of processing binary data as well as controlling various devices, such as typesetters and graphical displays as any other reasonably powerful OS of the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com