terminal emulation keeps playing a central role in "computing" not withstanding it being an ugly prehistoric crocodile. Do you ever envision creating something modern, without the warts and with a design that incorporates half a century of lessons-learned? Something that fills this need but in a more elegant package? I'm asking because you're one of the few people that seems well-positioned to make a clean-slate replacement
I personally avoid using the terminal as much as possible b/c the whole things feels very archaic/fragile/baroque - but the central idea seems great and I'd love a modern take on it
> Do you ever envision creating something modern, without the warts and with a design that incorporates half a century of lessons-learned?
Turns out that the warts are the incorporation of the lessons learned. For this reason, just before Wayland fulfills its destiny and becomes an immaculate replacement for X11, a new generation of developers will determine Wayland's codebase is too complex to comprehend and must be rewritten from scratch.
the number of gotchas involved in bash scripting indicates to me it's very hard to make robust solutions using the terminal. Trying to understand how things like colors work in the terminal makes the whole thing look very duct-taped together
problem is not the terminal, it is the Unix philosophy for CLI programs. Non-structured text piping and bash scripting being major pain points for me personally.
There is no reason why programs input/output can't be schema'ed, consumed and piped in a type-safe manner. And why there can't be a better standard than bash for simple scripts.
But it is really hard to pull this kind of thing off unless you redesign most of the common tools by scratch and do so through a committee and somehow push it down people's throat through strict platform control.
You can rewrite all of the cli utils to fit your preferences. There’s no hard standard for piping (some utility pipe binary) and bash is not a requirement either (a shell is just a program).
No need to push it to people. Do it for yourself and create your community around it.
Also no need to do it from scratch. It’s just the interface part that needs to be rewriten.
I personally avoid using the terminal as much as possible b/c the whole things feels very archaic/fragile/baroque - but the central idea seems great and I'd love a modern take on it