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Comment by madCow | Hacker News Reader

I couldn't agree more, I find this video extremely reductionist. Text shaping, full unicode support, accessibility, gpu acceleration, true color, tabs and profiles, etc are all advanced features that the windows terminal supports. Just a quick glance at the source makes it obvious that it isn't something so simple that it could be hacked together in a weekend like Blow claims, it seems very rude and misguided to dimiss the hard work that people put into terminal emulators.

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I understand where you are coming from, but do you understand why someone might look at “tabs are an advanced feature for a terminal” and laugh knowing that tabs in a chat-terminal in a 120fps physics enabled computer game is an absolutely minute and completely ignorable feature?

I think that’s the point being made here, that taken at face value it’s just ridicules that what is on the user-side minor improvements in usability over the status quo 20 years ago is still considered “an advanced feature”.

Completely agree here. Not a big fan of ppl shitting on tech they don't completely understand, but i guess thats half of tech content in general.

It's Blow's programming personality, generally. I don't think he could do what he's doing if he weren't at least a bit arrogant, but it's become cliche for him to learn his lessons in public, in these steps:

1. I could do this in a weekend.

2. Nobody is solving it correctly so I will.

3. Years pass.

4. Actually, there are interesting difficulties.

I don’t think that’s the case though. What he says he could do this in a weekend, he usually does (for instance, he was annoyed with Powerpoint so much that he made his own slideshow program in about two days of programming time). And when he said he’s gonna build a compiler for his language, he didn’t say it will be quick.

His point with the Windows terminal is that, its a non-problem that people in the 80s and 90s already figured out. And if he really wants to make a terminal with the bare amount of features that he just needs (without the flaws the old cmd program has), he may be able to do so in maybe about a week (he already has code to render TTF text, and he’s probably accustomed enough to the quirks of the Windows OS APIs)

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