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Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

You're not arguing in good faith.

Casey threw something together in a matter of days that had 150% of the features of the Windows Terminal renderer, but none of the bug fixing that goes into shipping a production piece of software.

That screenshot you keep parading around is a small issue with a quick fix. It's not like Casey's approach is inherently unable to deal with punctuation!

You don't discard the entire content of a scientific journal paper because of a typo.

"Sorry Mr Darwin, I'm sure you believe that your theory is very interesting, but you see here on page 34? You wrote 'punctuted'. I think you meant 'punctuated'. Submission rejected!"

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In this case, the bug fixing is probably the lion's share of the work though - there's a huge amount of subtle edge cases involved in rendering text, and the Microsoft employees almost certainly know this. And the example that broke it isn't even something particularly obscure. We're literally talking about the output of the dir command, one of the first things someone is likely to do with a terminal window, not displaying correctly. He basically did the easy part of the work and lambasted some Microsoft employees as idiots because they thought it was more complex than that.

In Casey's defense (I'm ambivalent on this one), while the dir command itself isn't obscure, one could argue that using a no-op Unicode character as the digit group separator is an obscure case, at least for an American programmer. But I think your overall point still stands.

You've lost the original point: everyone was pretending this refterm was ready to replace the terminal app, criticizing microsoft for taking the slow but sure approach:

> The "complaining developer" produced a proof of concept in just two weekends that notably had more features[1] and was more correct than the Windows Terminal!

But now apparently pointing out that "MS was right not to want to take shortcut in unicode rendering" morphed into "criticizing in bad faith refterm for not being production ready"

Who's not arguing in good faith here?

> everyone was pretending this refterm was ready to replace the terminal app

Who said that? Refterm isn't a fully functional terminal, it is just a terminal renderer bundled with a toy terminal.

>refterm was ready to replace the terminal app

Considering Casey himself puts front and center the disclaimer that this is solely intended to be a reference and goes into as much detail in his videos I don't know where you got this from. I don't think anyone is under the illusion that this is could replace the actual terminal. It's just meant to show that there's a minimum level of performance to be expected for not a huge amount of effort (a couple weekend's worth) and there is no excuse for less.

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