I was excited to learn about two new terminal emulator app which seemed to have a lot of cool new features, warp and wave. Then I looked closer and found that both are a no go for me.
Warp is closed source and you need to create an account to use your terminal. Jebus Christus, no, thanks, but no.
Wave is an Electron app. While that’s better than not having a Linux version, I’ve seen how Electron apps behave. They are the ones which hog all memory and get killed by the OS first. So that’s a no from me too.
I guess I keep my Tilix for now.
TBH I am starting to come around to the idea of a tightly integrated shell and terminal emulator support. There are just things you cannot do with these being separate things. I am very tempted to explore the idea from the other end though - writing a shell that has a emulator built into it (like screen/tmux basically are). But I do think that this integration is needed for any per command features that is not just printing out a prompt.
It would be interesting to see what could be done with this type of integration but will likely break support for existing shells. Unless you maybe launch a shell for each command you run or something 🤔. Would like to seem more people experimenting with stuff like this and see what new things we could drive forward. We have been stuck with the current tty system since like the 80s to support devices that just dont exist anymore.
Philosophy aside, the practical issue with your terminal emulator having to support your shell is… that one does not use just one shell: what happens whenever you start a repl or an whatever program that has interactive sessions (say, for example, psql or parted)?
I can’t think of any, but I’m not the most creative person… what do you have in mind?
Having something that is like (say) tmux+fish could make sense, but only if it’s something that outweighs the lost flexibility of being able to combine <whatever shell you like> + <whatever terminal multiplexer you fancy>.