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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

I don't know that this really rises to the level of a "killer" app. Serious ssh users are, of course, already quite happy with their terminal emulators and use platforms that support them natively. I find it very hard to believe (though I'm willing to be surprised) a chrome extension is going to present me with the performance, platform integration, or keyboard navigability I get and demand from gnome-terminal. I'd probably be happy using it from friends machines, etc...

What this will do, however, is hopefully end for good the mess of "How do I expose a command line application to my windows-using friends such that they aren't confused and won't hate me.". And there's a whole lot of value to that.

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Why are we happy? We are not. Terminal emulation needs to die, but as you point out, there is no reasonable substitute yet. I have enjoyed toying with interesting experiments like the MPW shell, and I support every attempt to replace or kill the ridiculous anachronism that is termcap. It's like we're the SCA and unix is our ren fest.

I was talking to someone recently who likened it to a shifting pendulum. For a while, he told me, terminal control languages were sufficiently complex that you could send a program to run _on the terminal_, and then things shifted back to running things where you store them on the server.

Now there's HTML5 and javascript, the world's most complicated terminal control language.

I'm not sure that I disagree: the terminal implementation in modern unix is a terrible mess. But the terminal metaphor (a command line being fed by a keyboard and displaying to a scrolling window of text) is nearly perfect, and won't by dying any time soon. And ssh is fundamentally just a data pipe for that metaphor anyway.

The terminal metaphor isn't so great either; in fact I think it's miserable, compared to the workbook-type approach provided by something like Mathematica from 15 years ago (last time I worked somewhere that could afford it) I find it depressing that all command line interfaces aren't like that.

Also, in-band signalling, escape characters, magic select() timing loops to distinguish from "real" input, hackarounds for the fact that the original terminal was a separate computer and had local and remote modes and some keys never sent anything... is that metaphor REALLY still relevant?

I've never used Mathematica and can't find any good comprehensive explanations of the workbook paradigm. From the little I have found, it's basically a text editor interface where you can execute previously typed commands by hitting a shortcut and the output is appended below the command, while still retaining the ability to move all over the page, right?

Pretty much - with folding and other niceties. Have a look at http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/UsingANote... for a brief overview, and http://www.wolfram.com/technology/guide/SymbolicInterfaceCon... for more information about the interface possibilities.

Also check out http://www.wolfram.com/cdf/ for the more general attempt to make a dynamic document standard. I don't know how successful that's been.

So those controls in the last link can be displayed in the workbook as views on command output? I've been toying with a similar idea for a while now - wasn't aware that there were already implementations of it. I think we're going to witness/participate in a paradigm change in the near future.

Thanks for all the links.

Your second paragraph is confusing what I was trying to distinguish as "implementation" from "metaphor". Yes, I agree all that is a mess (though good luck trying to fix it -- won't ever happen). But it's a tolerable mess, because it enables the command line.

And your first point is just verifiably wrong. If there were truly better workflow metaphors for software development, you'd think at least some of the best hackers would have discovered it and moved to it at some point in the last four (!) decades. Instead, all of the most productive developers in our subculture (almost quite literally every single one of them) work at a command line. They haven't moved elsewhere, because it won't happen, because your thesis is simply incorrect: no better metaphors have been discovered.

Upvote for the MPW Shell reference.

> Why are we happy? We are not. Terminal emulation needs to die

Yes, but the proposed replacement for UNIX consoles is a Google web browser that requires you log into Google in order to use it?? I don't think so....

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