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Comment by Computer0 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know that I have ever understood a reason to leave the native terminal included with any given OS, particularly after the Windows modernization pass in recent years on the terminal.

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layout, multiplexing, tab-complete, history, using the same interface across multiple systems, ligatures...

There are lots of distributions that ship emulators that don't have modern features, and even among those that do, I still don't want to learn the individual quirks every time I hit a shell.

Gnome terminal, yakuake, ptyxis, cosmic, konsole, xfce4-terminal, qterminal, etc all have slight variations between simple things like rendering and more important things like hotkeys. It's nice to have an alternative that I can install on any system such that I can get comfortable with just the one. If I can't install anything I'm often stuck poking around to find whatever the devs version of correct is, or else asking the owner of the machine "okay, how the hell do I do {x}?" if they're comfy with their cli, but chances are if I'm sitting there it's because they're not comfy with their cli.

I could cover a lot of it with a bashrc file, but I wouldn't want anyone fucking with mine, so I'm not touching anyone elses.

edit: distrObutions->distrIbutions

> tab-complete, history

Those would be handled by your shell, not your terminal, right?

> multiplexing

If you have a good window manager, then there is no reason to have a bespoke multiplexing implementation in your terminal. I can stack my terminals and _any other window I want_ with tabs and switch between them using the same hotkeys/interface that I use for my whole system, rather than each app implementing their own tabs.

Some people frequently or exclusively work on remote systems over ssh. Multiple windows is not an alternative to a multiplexer. They have some overlap in use cases. But it's not 1-1.

In that situation, the multiplexing wouldn't be handled in the terminal. You'd use something like tmux or screen. Seems irrelevant to the discussion about terminals.

Same. Need multiple terminals visible at once? New window. Need a few separate sessions? New tab(s).

All the bells and whistles people have shown me over the years... it never even gets close to making me think "oh yea, that's better than basic tab/window management and the terminal app that comes with my OS".

That requires a good window manager, which macOS does not have.

For the few times a month I need to have two windows/panes visible at the same time, I take five seconds positioning and sizing them then move on.

I need it all the time. large monitors are a lot more productive for any task that involves looking at more than one thing while doing it if you have tiling.

use tmux.

There are tons of good options for window management these days.

I’m currently trialing https://tangrid.app/ and it’s got some nice features.

tiling managers like Terminator are, to me, the most efficient. Something like Blender for hybrid customization might be a sweetspot. Blender allows for arbitrary layout and essentially tab control in any tile.

I've always found tabs to be pretty limiting, though I have a ton of them in Firefox and Konsole since that's what's - been - available. They're marginal improvement over multiple windows. Then Horizon[0] came on the scene a few weeks ago and I fell in love with that infinite canvas. Started tweaking it like crazy, but now I'm working on a full port that natively supports Xpra[1], so I can have all my apps on an infinite canvas with views grouped exactly as I prefer. And that's the future IMO.

[0] https://github.com/peters/horizon [1] https://github.com/Xpra-org/xpra/

In my case, it's always been because the native terminal emulator had issues actually emulating terminals when connected to remote systems, it was intended to be only a terminal-shaped wrapper around the host system's shell.

Splits. And tabs. But mostly splits. Nothing tmux and/or a decent window mangers wouldn't fix. But Macos.

iTerm2 has builtin native tmux integration

Game changer

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