Comment by devnullbrain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by devnullbrain | Hacker News Reader

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> Sessions, tabs, windows, tiling . All done in GUIs and done better.

Sorry but no, really no.

Windows:

- Has two ways of swapping between windows, taking up 2/3 of my modifier keys for use with Tab

- Loves to offset windows by one pixel and resize my taskbar

- Irrevocably moves things around if I disconnect a monitor

- Flashes taskbar icons constantly, like a particularly badly behaved terminal bell

and Mac:

- Leaves zombie processes in the cmd-tab list

- Is philosophically incompatible with any kind of fullscreen workflow.

Both have:

- Slow animations for basic windowing

- Only a few tiling options

- Minimal configurability...

- ...which doesn't matter anyway, because if someone at HQ gets bored, you're getting a UI interface redesign that's incompatible with your current workflow

- An approach to tab dragging that induces seizuring windows, because things are just too slow and fickle

- The ability for anything to steal my focus, mid-typing

But what's most damning of all is that both have a wealth of popular tools written and used by people trying to wrangle them into something useable.

There is nothing I could do to make them as fast to use as my tmux based workflow, simply because they do not work quickly enough for the keypresses I'm entering and don't even appear to be deterministic.

Use different apps. Don't have to stick with the default OS window primitives. omfg. I use loop for macos.

So for some reason a terminal app where you can't even draw a proper line vertically across the screen... somehow the people who make apps for terminal are geniuses in making windowing UIs, more genius then people who want to work in pixels. I don't understand why.

And these complete geniuses are like, NO! I don't want to work with pixels. I want to use ascii characters to draw stuff that ONLY looks sort of like boxes, because that's the smarter thing to do!

And don't get me started on config files. What's better, a menu where I'm presented with all my options? Or a freaking config file where none of the options are presented and I have to look it up in a man page and then if I make a typo often it doesn't tell me there's a problem.

And likely you aren't even using that terminal app in a proper terminal. You're emulating a terminal underneath a GUI which is a huge performance penalty. Modern OS's present to you an advanced interface, but you're too elite to use it, so you EMULATE a primitive interface underneath the advanced interface.

Bro use linux and uninstall gnome or KDE. Throw that mouse into the trash. That's the common sense future of UI according to you?

a freaking config file where none of the options are presented and I have to look it up in a man page

oh the irony. because that is what wezterm and kitty make me go through. i'll have a report soon.

EDIT: here is the report: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44762241

that wezterm config file is a monster. all that, just to have tmux like functionality. well, at least it is possible. that's a massive step forward.

>What's better, a menu where I'm presented with all my options?

You get neither

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