What has it been like witnessing terminal emulators make such a huge comeback with the advent of Claude Code et. all? I remember comments here in the early days of Ghostty along the lines of "Why is he working on a terminal emulator? We need people working on future problems, not the past!" Pretty funny considering I regularly hear people say they are in the terminal more than the browser now. Crazy times!
If you told me 3 years ago that terminal usage would _increase_ I would've laughed. Beyond that, I'm now having regular conversations with the frontier agentic coding companies (since they're far and away the largest terminal users at the moment) and if you had told me 2 years ago that that would be happening because of a terminal, I would've laughed even harder.
So, it's amazing. But overall, its amusing.
What’s old is new again is apparently just as true in tech as it is in fashion.
That's probably why it is so hyped up as it is right now.
Websites used to be below 100KiB - now they come with MEGABYTES of obfuscated JS.. wtf
Though obviously, it's not the individual developer to blame but the incentive system.
I laugh every time I see someone on HN asserting that the web "shouldn't" be used for anything beyond "documents and lightly interactive content", which is not uncomment. There's some real old-man-yelling-at-clouds energy there.
All of those people are now the vibe coders of the 20s, and it's going to end up in the same dumpster fire of 'Who knew it might be a good idea to cryptographically sign and control library packages in a public repository?'
* Note: I'm distinguishing things going sideways despite best intentions and careful planning from YOLO + 'Oops, how could that possibly have happened?' shit
The UI paradigm created by the emacs transient package [1] can improve the discoverability of CLI commands significantly. It's one of the components of magit, the famous git frontend, that makes it so awesome. It's discoverability is very close to that of GUIs and somehow even more pleasing to use than GUIs. I wonder if someone is trying this on terminals.
I've used a terminal as my main interface FOREVER, and I'm amazed that people are joining this healthy habit of interacting with the computer as CREATORS.