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.

  • nous@programming.devEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    What I would love to see is a terminal that builds it’s own shell from scratch too rejecting the ancient ideas we have with bash. I still love bash but I’m curious what could come of it.

    Thinking about it some more I am not sure that we would have to go that far. Well not in the longer term - short term we might for experimenting with ideas. I think one of the bigger problems ATM is the terminal does not understand what a shell is or its component parts. Terminals just display characters and move the cursor around the screen and send keyboard and now mouse input back to the command they run. They are also aware of alternative buffers and raw input mode and know about echoing characters back the the screen.

    If we extended the terminals to also understand some shell concepts like the prompt, commands being typed and output from the commands and gave the shell some markers it could send along with these (like we do with color information ATM) the terminal would be able to use these to change how it displays each part and would open up a lot of new an interesting features. Could even add things like tooltip support or actions on clicking some bits of the text.

    I am starting to see these terminals as experimenting on what we features could be enabled if we were not stuck on the current VT100 protocals. Though if we ever get wider adoption and generalisation of these ideas backed back into the protocals will be another question to consider.