Hacker News Reader

Comment by lstamour | Hacker News Reader

This has me wondering, why haven't terminal windows evolved functionally to better support history, scrollback buffers jumping or markers, selection with a mouse, auto-complete hints, etc. Instead we're limited to hacks like this or the screenshot at http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/3650/would-it-be-pos... ... and no, I don't think "use emacs" is an acceptable answer ;-)

Oh and instead of adding blank lines with "Enter", I often just type "clear" and hit return. Bingo, tons of whitespace now added.

View on HN

The iTerm2 nightly builds have everything you asked for. See here for info about marks in history: https://code.google.com/p/iterm2/wiki/MarksAndNotes

More info about the general idea of integrating the terminal with the shell, including command history: http://www.iterm2.com/shell_integration.html

I expect FinalTerm will do something along the lines of marks as well, and has introduced some cool ideas with history.

Of course, iTerm2 has has had autocomplete for years.

If you'd like a shinier <hr> in iTerm2, you could use this script:

#!/bin/bash # usage: hr image.png printf '\033]1337;File=inline=1;width='`tput cols`';height=8px;preserveAspectRatio=0:' base64 < $1 printf '\007'

I've often wondered if there is a terminal which supported the "jump to previous input" functionality described in the stackexchange question but I've never seen anything better than what is mentioned in the answers. I've heard Plan 9's Rio supported something like this but searching around, I can't see any mention of it.

I think terminology [1] is quite promising, although it doesn't yet do all of the above.

[1] http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/terminology

Huh. From there I discovered http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/

Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2559734

"What happened to TermKit?" on Reddit with a reply from the author: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/137kd9/18_month...

I'm thinking we'll need a terminal window that interfaces with bash but has overlays in HTML and other controls for scrollback, etc. Maybe a fork of an existing terminal.

I use clear too, far too often, but with tmux, when you scroll up, you don't get the tons of whitespace that you get with just the terminal :(

Reply on news.ycombinator.com