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Comment by jhallenworld | Hacker News Reader

I would like to see a graphical terminal emulator. When I mean by this is that the terminal emulator works the same as usual- it should display normal output, support ANSI escape sequences and have scroll-back. But it also should be able to display graphics. If your UNIX command line program happens to output a graph, it shows up on the terminal. The graph is embedded inline with the text and you can scroll back to it.

Interactive programs should also possible- think of a schematic editor or a figure editor running right on your terminal emulator.

The point of all this is to retain the context of whatever you're doing without having to switch windows. That and to advance the state of the art of console tools- certainly they have not changed in decades.

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On the topic of ways to improve the terminal, I'd like to see output separated from input.

Put the prompt 1/4 of the way down the screen instead of at the bottom. Above the prompt, we have a backlog of the commands we input. As we press up, it scrolls through the backlog, as normal.

Below the prompt, we see the output of the command.

I'd also like to see tab completion (and maybe some form of hinting) on programs, not just file paths.

>On the topic of ways to improve the terminal, I'd like to see output separated from input.

>Put the prompt 1/4 of the way down the screen instead of at the bottom. Above the prompt, we have a backlog of the commands we input. As we press up, it scrolls through the backlog, as normal.

>Below the prompt, we see the output of the command.

That would be more fitting for a shell than for a terminal.

>I'd also like to see tab completion (and maybe some form of hinting) on programs, not just file paths.

bash already does this. zsh and at least one variant of ksh will do completion if you type the first letter of a command. I was surprised that tcsh doesn't.

Check out terminology [0]. The video is quite long but impressive.

There was a work by someone on github for building a new kind of terminal. It wasn't line-based, rather "context-based": the output of the command was written next to the input, but you could write commands in the same terminal next to each other. It was some amazing stuff, but I can't find it (I think the logo was an octopus or something like that, and the "backend" was emacs)

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

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