Comment by TheCondor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheCondor | Hacker News Reader

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We have 5k monitors, Gpus with 12GB of RAM, fast networks, etc. color in consoles, underline, bold and italics seem overdue.

What rubs me wrong is the collective halfassedness of it all. When less craps out ANSI codes, when the terminal tears and your cursor is offset because it got confused about control characters, dozens of different color configs rather than a system theme.

There was this time in the Linux dark ages, red hat Linux 2 era. The enlightenment window manager was considered part of protocol GNOME, there were a lot of really exotic or organic themes, skinning was the hotness. Windows couldn’t do it. Ux be damned, if you wanted your desktop to look like some sort of demonic rune set, you could do it. Rationality, ux, consistency, etc took over. Cli skinning never seems to grow that way. I keep hoping some hacker that doesn’t know better will write a new terminal emulator, replaces ANSI codes with some minimal html and invents console css and the community embraces it.

It is crazy, I agree. But you have to keep in mind how old this protocol is. Layers and layers of cruft which you can trace back to before the computing era. Here is Rich running on a Teletype Model 33, circa 1963. And it works (kinda).

https://twitter.com/willmcgugan/status/1476940291819069441

No question, it cuts deep and we would/should look at it end to end. A big part of it is all the tty/pty black magic that we’ve just built on top of.

It’s a gigantic task, but when I see new folks reimplementing “ls” as a “modern replacement” and I do find value with many of these tools (I love ripgrep and bat, among others) I hope/wish someone felt the itch to tackle this.

> Layers and layers of cruft which you can trace back to before the computing era.

Even those layers and layers don't _have to_ slow things down. Check the refterm "debacle" ([2] for the context, [0, 1] as Muratori's answer to it). It's just the way things are usually programmed doesn't care about performance and how fast things really can be. I sometimes wonder in we're not due for a massive round of optimization on a couple of the layers that we're used to using/depend on.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99dKzubvpKE

[2] https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362

https://hyper.is/

Someone has tried on macOS. It hasn't really seen mass uptake though.

Take a look at TermKit - https://github.com/unconed/TermKit

Long abandoned but I’d love something like this. Someone I know tried to revive it but Node has changed so much that they gave up.

I would donate to an effort to revive it.

Mozilla included such a terminal in the early seamonkey days. I can’t recall the name. You could “cat foo.jpg” and it would render inline. It was a neat novelty. I think graphics is where it goes too far.

Mainframes and minis modeled many apps as “screens.” Some blend of the streaming style text we have now, with screens, with a new and understood set of protocols that are similar to what we use everywhere else. I think some sort of table in console html would be about my limit, various “modern shells” already support tabular data with, like, their three magic built ins.

Kitty has extensions (kittens) for displaying graphics: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol/

Not something I use, I tend to just `xdg-open .` to view them in Nautilus/EOG.

I just started with kitty, and I think it's a very important development specifically because I don't have to use xdg-open. To clarify, the problem is that I typically use remote resources to run analysis - typically on via ssh/tmux. So to view the output png in the terminal and not break from that environment is very useful.

I was thinking the other day that we need an object based terminal, like the Lisp listener in Genera. Each item printed would have context, be clickable (or otherwise inspectable), and be able to output more than just text: images, diagrams, graphs, etc.

I have been learning Powershell and given its object based nature, a PowerTerm that extended PowerShell in this way seems like an obvious extension.

Of course, my next thought is, why do you not build it yourself? LOL

> We have 5k monitors, Gpus with 12GB of RAM, [...stalled progress...] What rubs me wrong is the collective halfassedness of it all.

Shallow 3D UIs might be an opportunity for spring cleaning? Playing with them years ago, my stack was full-screen browser glued to kernel evdev - the rest of the usual stack (wm, libinput, much of X, browser input events) was easier to replace than adapt.

I would add: make the line protocol coming in transmit key-up and key-down events -- not only full keypress events. Thus let modifiers be handled on the receiving end.

Or at least as one perhaps-modal option.

xterm-compatible terminals have been able to report modifier state for about 15 years.

i remember this era, i remember going to the oreilly oss conference in monterey and all the public terminals were running enlightenment with alpha blended terminals and all the crazy chrome of the time.

personally i hated it, it was laggy, slow and unstable... made a fast linux machine feel like a slow windows thing. i think i ran windowmaker at the time with a color scheme that reminded me of an old indy i used to have. it looked good and stayed out of my way...

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