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Comment by xuhu | Hacker News Reader

In 1991 dos navigator had an integrated file manager and editor like no other console file manager has: you could alt-tab and copy/paste from editors into shell commands interactively.

In 2023 I still need two extra terminals for vim and for bash. And text selection is mouse-only.

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>> In 2023 I still need two extra terminals for vim and for bash. And text selection is mouse-only.

Terminal multiplexers like tmux, GNU screen, and others allow for keyboard-based text selection and copy / paste.

Many advanced editors like VS Code, Emacs, and other have built-in terminals and keyboard commands to select, copy, and paste text.

Still, DN experience beats everything what we have today. Of course there were lot less features and many limitatitons, but the overall experience was great.

Vim has split screen support and built-in virtual terminal supporting normal mode. For file manager can use fern written in pure vimscript. In 2023 you were just not aware of them.

Vim and Emacs have advanced navigation modes that can totally make up for lacking mouse support.

On the console, many use cases where you'd need copy&paste can be covered by autocompleters. For example branch names in version control. Someday I'll have to look into how to write my own...

Edit: with !, you can execute a shell command and watch its output without leaving Vim.

tmux does this too if you use buffers. Check out zellij. If using a multiplexer is not for you and you're all in a graphical environment, I believe you might find kitty worth a closer look.

> In 2023 I still need two extra terminals for vim and for bash.

wat

Doesn't Emacs fit that bill? In Emacs you can run terminal emulators and various shells and from all of them you can copy and paste into other buffers or from other buffers into them.

To add to this: I had lots of problems with Emacs terminal emulators until I switched to VTerm. Most things work like you’d expect in VTerm.

Yep, vterm is great. Only thing annoying me is, that I have to switch modes to copy anything. Wish it would work like `M-x shell` instead, where I can simply navigate upwards and when I move point back to the prompt, I can paste and continue with commands.

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