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And on another note... it's been hilarious how people have been questioning my professional credentials just because I want to make something more usable.

I've implemented over a dozen RFCs, can match regexps with the best of them and do know which end of a pipe does what ;).

I'm also a bit disappointed on how most people here react. I personally think your idea is great and pretty futuristic. I would certainly use a tool like this. Also it's open source so if a specific detail (such as the font) bugs them it can simply be changed.

I've had similar ideas (based on Python) but never got around to executing them. Keep up the good work and don't let the angry bearded UNIX dinosaurs get to you :)

I'm having a blast and interpreting all the flak as a sign I must be doing something right...

Absolutely! Don't lose that attitude. You won't win over everyone and the fact that anyone cares enough about something you made to share their opinion with you is awesome.

Bingo. If you haven't pissed anyone off, it's because you're not doing anything important. There are people who invested DECADES of their life into a vanilla terminal ... and here you are, fucking with THAT.

the only thing that pisses me off is the guy posting how many years he was administering UNIX systems and how this monster was an "obvious" step in the field, web designers are quite arrogant

I'm so impressed with that. If I was getting that much criticism (for something so obviously excellent!) I'd be shaking in my boots. :-(

Well, a few years ago I made this Line Rider video, and then 10,000 people on YouTube told me to get a life.

Who cares what people on the internet say, they're the ones wasting their time posting it.

Regarding your quote problem: the idea is that the highlighted token signifies "quoted string". I plan to add regexp tokens, user@host tokens, etc. each with appropriate autocomplete.

I thought the current minimalistic approach was ok, but it might be worth to add subtle quotes around the edges to reinforce the idea. That's why it's made out of HTML/CSS...

The token idea is genius. This could be applied to programming languages as well. Why settle with crazy delimiters like ',"; /xxx/ and manual escaping with \n \x \\\\\\ (making a \ in a regexp in a string :P). A subtle visual hint could be enough to distinguish different kinds of textual "object".

Sure, not everyone will like this, but for people that are visually oriented like me it will make things a lot of fun.

"quoted string" or 'quoted string'? Big difference. :)

The difference is in whether escaping is necessary. What happens when you no longer need to escape things? It no longer matters which quotes you use.

That sounds great, although I would like to have a nice fall-back for those odd programs that the terminal doesn't know the appropriate token for.

I agree. I haven't actually tried your terminal, but so far it looks very nice.

Considering that when the interface for the terminal was created it was all about being able to do everything and anything without breaking a sweat. Simple things like automatic source code highlighting, animated progress bars, being able to view (now common) files like pdf and jpeg that were not common back in the old days. Popup tab complete, I can't believe that that isn't standard on all terminals already (especially since tab complete is all about being lazy, a popup makes a lot of sense).

I'll download the source and poke around it later this evening (right now I need to work on my exam of implementing the go-back-n protocol).

Cheers and keep up the good work.

PS: RDF support would be great (since you have json). RDF is the standard for sharing data (often statistics) openly online, check out http://data.gov.uk/linked-data

It's not futuristic, it's retro. I've seen three or four of these be announced with great fanfare, and then dropped. No one cares enough, the backwards compatibility is never good enough, and it's almost certainly too slow.

I wouldn't be surprised if Webkit was just as fast or even faster in rendering than your average Linux terminal emulator.

About caring enough, yeah, that depends, maybe the world is ready for this now :) At least it isn't some overengineered XML grotesquery this time.

that webkit will render faster than a terminal emulator is just pure fantasy, is like saying that a smart phone with all the fancy apps will eventually use less power than a solar powered calculator. you ppl are addicted to osx overdesign. no graphical user interface will beat a keyboard in the right hands, like it or not. pure fantasy, hipster hackers

What was the last time you had any problems with the rendering speed of Webkit in reality? Have you tried the other link in HN, that boots Linux in your browser, with a terminal app, and it still manages to be fast even on my modest system?

Have you looked at some WebGL / Canvas based demos lately? There are now very efficient GPU offloaded rendering APIs that make rendering graphics a breeze, it is no longer a big-overhead thing. If you don't use fancy graphics you're underutilizing your GPU.

[also, TermKit is not just about fancy graphics, but also about user friendlyness/usefullness for some tasks that are not very well handled in terminals otherwise]

It is amusing how we hackers, who are supposed to embrace change, become as Luddite as anyone else when our sacred tools are questioned. Personally I see room for this and a whole lot more. I'd like to see an amalgam of this and the traditional terminal (easy way to pull up a traditional terminal if you need it). There is no need to "replace"; I think this makes a fine addition to a hackers workspace.

Thing is, it's not about the tools being sacred. My problem with this is that he's not just solving problems I don't have -- he's solving them in a way that would make my problems worse!

For instance, I very rarely want more informations about the files from an "ls" command; and if I did, I'd probably use Finder instead. On the other hand, not having enough terminal real estate to display the entire directory at once is a very frequent problem. From that perspective, adding icons is a step in the wrong direction.

Thinking about it, if I were playing with making a better terminal, one of my first lines of thought would be things that made it quick and easy to break information out into other windows, because scrolling back and forth in the terminal's buffer is a PITA.

Of course, this new terminal might be exactly what the author needs, and more power to him if it is. There's no need for us all to use the same tools. (Thanks heavens -- I want nothing to do with Emacs or vi!)

Regarding the too-small windows for ls output option I would love if his ls could display it's output full-screen temporarily rather than needing to make the terminal full-screen first and then running ls

"if I did, I'd probably use Finder instead."

The thing that strikes me as very, very cool about this project is that you might not need the Finder at all any more.

See, here's the thing: I like Finder. It's not perfect, but sometimes it is very handy. Even if TermKit ends up implementing the complete functionality of Finder, I'm not sure why I'd particularly like to have that functionality in my terminal window. And if it's only implementing the one Finder view I virtually never use? Forget about it.

You know what would rock my world? A "lsf" command that emulated "ls" as much as possible, but launched a Finder window appropriately sized to display the results.

I've always thought Raskin's ZUI held some promise as an alternative UI paradigm. I'm pretty much a quicksilver addict now and use that to kind of combine the command line and GUI desktop worlds a little bit more at least.

That's what I aim for termkit ls to be. The current ls is a toy meant to show off the potential.

As for why? Because it will be optimized for keyboard interaction and rapid context switching.

It is amusing how we hackers, who are supposed to embrace change, become as Luddite as anyone else when our sacred tools are questioned.

In my experience, programmers as a whole are actually more luddite and irrationally reactionary than the general populace.

Really? I see the same thing whenever you get a bunch of professionals together and start arguing about their tools.

Doctors and different drugs/treatments, Contractors and brands of power tools.

Programmers do seem to make the biggest deal about "all the fighting", everyone else seems to just accept that professionals are opinionated and arguing is how progress is made. But I'm on the inside with the programming stuff and on the outside looking in for the rest of these fields so maybe that's not true.

Doctors and different drugs/treatments, Contractors and brands of power tools.

From what I've seen, smart Doctors and Contractors eventually get to discussing empirical data and costs. Far too often, I've seen programmers just make up crap and state it emphatically.

Very good point. Do doctors and contractors have more sources of empirical data (or more widely known sources), or are they simply more willing to look for them? Does anyone here know of a good general resource for empirical data regarding the tools we are constantly debating?

Do doctors and contractors have more sources of empirical data (or more widely known sources), or are they simply more willing to look for them?

I think the culture would be a vital part of an ecosystem of empirical observation. For the sciences generally, the culture predated the sources and gave rise to them. For medicine, I think a culture of empiricism was imported from other scientific fields. For contractors, they are very motivated to note what works, what breaks, and what enables them to make more money.

Thanks for bringing up this great point.

I actually built in anonymous usage logging into TermKit using Google Analytics over SSL. It logs the types of commands you execute (no data). It's my plan to release this data back to the community regularly. I don't think anyone has done a large-scale survey of command-line unix usage before. Should be interesting.

Edit: and you can easily turn it off if you wish.

... like you just did.

Yeah, just look at the Rails/CoffeeScript thing recently.

Bloomberg found the same thing when they tried to redesign their terminals for traders - existing users were so invested in their knowledge of the "incantations" of the old interface that they were hugely resistant to a UI with a more modern learning curve and interaction.

It's very hard to make a product that essentially devalues things that your customers spent a lot of time learning. You're probably better off ignoring people who already happy with their shell experience, and going after people who have not yet invested in learning all that crap.

And yes, it's crap. And I say that not because I don't know it myself, but because in the end, much of it is not essential to the actual job we're trying to get done, it's the tools we use. And the tools are not the job.

The thing about changes involving a "more modern learning curve and interaction" is that it's replacing something that already worked and users knew how to use.

I'm quite bad for upgrading for upgrading's sake but I can understand why, of all people, traders at Bloomberg didn't want any kind of learning curve on their terminals.

Yes, it's clearly better but users don't always want to change to something that does what they already do in a more modern way.

That doesn't mean you have to stop innovating. It just means that your customers might not be the people who are already using what you want to replace.

I think that's absolutely right.

It's just my point of view, I don't really like the stance seem to take here.

You built something great, made it open source, which is even more great, and you're here to answer people, which is amazing. Now, please don't act like "I implemented x RFCs, I can do y like the best...", it's simply useless here. One reason is that people already know you can code well, and they can even read your source if they want to know better, there's no need to brag. Another reason is that HN is the place of some very good developers, and I believe humility is appreciated here, at least until you build some life changing software (and I won't debate about what is or is not life changing).

Anyways, thanks for building this and releasing the source code as open, it's cool.

He brought up his own credentials because he is amused that others have questioned them. I find that reasonable and not "bragging."

I love the idea. But as someone who also loves vim, to hear that your vision of a new terminal excludes a tool as powerful and expressive as vim makes me sad, because it means that apparently I won't be able to benefit from this new terminal. I'll watch with interest, however.

If I can make TermKit deliver on its promise, then I'm pretty sure on of you vim guys will take a VT100 JS emulator and make it work in TermKit.

Again, the architecture supports it.

The file I was trying to cat is group_add.sh. I understand if syntax highlighting isn't done for shell files, but I'm surprised that '.sh' doesn't trigger monospace fonts. That said, I'm glad to hear that in general monospace for code is the plan.

We can agree to disagree about Vim and shell scripting. I use those both, all day and every day. Tastes vary. That's fine.

I really wish you would reconsider the single quoting/WYSIWYG/visual divider business. It's extremely jarring to see awk (or sed, etc.) without those single quotes.

Doubting your credentials on the basis of this is silly, and will probably be the minority reaction in the long run. I would be surprised if you don't get offered a few jobs as the result of making TermKit.

While, I understand your dislike of Vim, Vi, Nano, Emacs, etc. (I can't work in them for extend periods of time either do to hand problems) They remain essential tools for many programmers and system administrators. Sometimes, you don't want to have the file pulled down and edited in a local edit and pushed back even if it is seamless. The benefits of inplace editing on remote machines is invaluable.

I think this is a cool idea. I think it needs to be cross platform. However, it must be fully backwards compatible with the full unix toolchain to be useful. If it isn't I can't use it, and a lot of other potential users will also be unable to use it.

I love the idea thanks for rethinking the terminal.

There is potential for TermKit to send files to your client's Vim, which opens a lot of possibilities. For example, it would be easy to have files from two different servers open. It would also reduce the number of places you need your configuration files.

TermKit's author may dislike Vim, but I suspect that he's helped its users in the long run.

vim (and other editors) have lockfiles, recovery files in case of session crashes, and assume directory locality (e.g., oops I opened the wrong file; :r filename).

> Sometimes, you don't want to have the file pulled down and edited in a local edit and pushed back even if it is seamless. The benefits of inplace editing on remote machines is invaluable.

The benefits of having your vim settings whenever you type 'vim' rather than whatever's on the server is invaluable, too. It's not an easy task to satisfy everyone, and I wouldn't expect TermKit too; nevertheless I'm excited to see how it develops.

If it's a server I plan on logging into more than once or twice, it's easy enough to pull down my git-managed dotfiles and have everything I come to expect.

> They remain essential tools for many programmers and system administrators.

So maybe TermKit isn't the app for them.

> However, it must be fully backwards compatible with the full unix toolchain to be useful.

"Must"? If this app does something useful for you, great. If not, that's fine too. Every app doesn't need to be used by every person.

edit: However, it must be fully backwards compatible with the full unix toolchain to be useful to me.

happy?

My local editor is vim in a terminal. :)

It seems like TermKit could handle curses applications fairly straightforwardly and without modifying those applications. Just set TERM=xterm, and when you see the xterm initialization string, either open a new tab or define a region in the existing tab, and emulate an xterm within that region. (If you use a region in the existing tab, it could have a control attached to it that splits that region out into a new tab.) That would allow existing programs like vim, htop, powertop, and mutt to work perfectly within your terminal.

Personally, I'd like to use this like an enhanced standard terminal. So, for instance, I'd like to have the standard ls output rather than something graphical, but I'd like the filenames in the ls output to act as links, so I can click to open or hover for a preview. And while I want the standard cat command, I'd also like to have the command that displays something inline in the terminal (with the above-mentioned control to move it to a new tab).

I agree with this.

Where I work, everybody has linux development machines, but use their machine of choice as their actual workstation. This either forces people to use vim/emacs through SSH, or set up some local file sharing so that they can use their bloated eclipse thing.

Personally, I've spent months each with a few of the popular editors around, and I fall back on vim just because my .vimrc has been tuned so much over the past few years that it's just painful to use anything else. I don't even care if the editors have more features.

Now, if I had a fancier terminal, where my mouse click picked the right vim split view instance, or highlighting text in a split view vim selected only text in that window, instead of the whole line of the terminal, I would use that. MacVim is pretty much the perfect tool for me, but it's local and not remote (and also not inside a terminal that I can split up with screen).

You might want to do

:help mouse

All of the things you mentioned are supported and work with most terminal emulators (tested with xterm, gnome-terminal, iterm2 on OSX)

> highlighting text in a split view vim selected only text in that window

Try to control-select in the terminal. Works with my Gnome term 2.

> vim/emacs through SSH

We work like that too, and I see only advantages to this set-up, the least being forcing everyone to learn find, grep, vim. These powerful tools increase productivity but have a high barrier of entry, so best is to have no other choice.

> I'd like to use this like an enhanced standard terminal

Same here. Just adding a tiny little bit of enhancement without changing anything in the standard behavior could be a bettter idea. Examples:

  - ls output is pure text but hoverable (parent's idea)
  - add a way to see thumbnails of pics in ls
  - drag and drop files in the pwd

In the article the author says "The interaction is strictly limited to a linear flow of keystrokes, always directed at only one process" and take it as a limitation. From my point of view, when doing geek work on big machines, I need to drive a "linear flow of keystroke" in the machine. It is the way to have a deterministic behavior. It is the way to be able to script my work. I feel empowered by the control I have on what the machine does. Everything else (ie Windows, Mac UI) feel like a console game to me, in the sense that I give away my full control on the machine in exchange of impressive graphics, ease of interaction and safety-for-kids.

Regarding liking vim, I have no issue with typing "edit foobar.txt" and having a local MacVim open up :)

Most of what TermKit is doing doesn't immediately appeal to me (as a longtime shell junkie of sorts), but one thing I would love to have in a terminal is tooltips, or popups of some sort. For example, say I get a 40 line stack trace, I'd like to just see one line (the exception, where it was thrown from) but have the option to learn more by clicking on a line in the terminal. Basically how exceptions are reported in the browser in Django or Rails, but in the terminal.

> - No scripting language... except the whole thing is built on Node.js... :) [...] Basically, for scripting, I think the command line is a shitty place for it, and we should just switch to using a real language in its own little console when needed.

I could see this being done well-- it's not hard to beat bash for syntax and functionality-- but I could also see it being done poorly or considered an ancillary feature.

Shell scripting sucks, but it's the only language I know that lets me write tiny little scripts in not minutes but seconds, inline, without breaking out of the flow. Just like dynamic versus static languages, the quantitative difference in writing speed is enough to make a qualitative difference in the types of programs that can be written; and the difference between a non-scriptable shell and a scriptable one is like the difference between a GUI and a good CLI.

A large part of that scriptability is just grep and sed and friends, which TermKit apparently does support, but sometimes bash's loop structures are also required...

Just my two cents.