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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • This is 90s thinking. Why must terminal emulators only be text and only do things that a physical terminal could?

    I keep trying to imagine what abandoning TTY interfaces in Linux would look like and I can’t comprehend the rework that would be required. It’s so fundamentally different.

    For example, how would the SSH protocol work? How would that be compatible? Would we have to abandon SSH or always X forward?

    There is definitely a pressure to extend beyond standard TTY. Tmux captures mouse action and has a window management system. fish shell has autocomplete. But both of these still use the same medium of text.

    I may simply lack imagination.



  • I think the issue fundamentally is that this isn’t what terminal emulators are. The terminal emulator initializes a TTY session and enters a shell environment (sh, zsh, fish, etc). The medium is text and cannot be anything else.

    Begin able to view images in the terminal would be amazing alone - just like you can cat a text file. I would hate to need to launch a GUI program every time I wanted to see what was inside a text file but that is exactly what I need to do for images or PDFs.

    Would be convenient. There are things like neofetch’s backend capabilities that magically embeds images, but I don’t know how it works and it might not be scalable.

    Being able to collapse the output of a command would be nice as well.

    Skill issue. Pipe your output to something (like a file or the “less” command)