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I love Nushell in Windows Terminal with Starship as an evolution and a leap of shell. Structured data, native format transformations, strong querying capabilities, expressive state information.
I was surprised that the linked article went an entirely different direction. It seems mainly driven by mouse interactions, but I think it has interesting suggestions or ideas even if you disregard mouse control or make it optional.
I don’t know, nothing struck me as new, the only difference is the presentation and the mouse (but I prefer keyboard). the example given for animated indicators already exists using ASCII escape codes. my zsh already has syntax highlighting on the prompt indicating mistyped commands, and suggest possible completions with a tui (with vim bindings). I could go on but anyway my point is everything they show is already possible with a tui, the only reason a clicky clicky solution doesn’t exist is because keyboard are freakin better and faster. They are right that we need a terminal evolution/revolution, but it’s not the mouse.
This is really weird. I love working in the terminal precisely because I can do everything without using the mouse. I thought that’s the point?
No hate though, I just don’t get it.
I think users are increasingly mouse-centric so the ability to is the mouse I think is a plus, as long as it’s all still just as accessible to a keyboard-centric workflow.
But I think making the shell more interactive and adding more affordances is broadly a good thing and is really the important part, regardless of whether the user can navigate more with the mouse. The shell doesn’t need to be a magic black box you speak the arcane language into and hope you got it right
Anything that helps better communicate to the user what you can do and how to do it would make the terminal way more accessible, which would be a boon for linux where you still sometimes come across things that don’t have a good graphical path to completion, or even just one that’s easy enough to find and follow.
Fish makes a lot of improvements (and it’s a lot more Unix compliant than it used to be, to my understanding, but that’s still its biggest downside) but I think more affordances and interactivity for the shell is awesome, even for users who appreciate the efficiency of a keyboard-centric workflow :)
No the point of terminals is not to make people that dislike mice happy. They simply were created before mice were common and haven’t been updated at all. This is an attempt to do that.
Haven’t been updated at all??? That’s very much not true. There’s so much going on in terminal world. There are many flavours of modern terminal emulators, multiplexers, shells. There’s a ton of sophisticated terminal oriented software like Neovim for example. Pretty much every single part of terminal environment has now feature-rich, performant and safer alternative implementations. The terminal and CLI world is thriving. Almost none of that massive cumulative effort is directed towards the mouse support. I really think it’s just not what people want.
Yeah there’s more stuff that runs in the shell. But pretty much all the things you mentioned would work on a VT100 from the 70s. This is about modernising the terminal itself.
Hell, Linux terminal emulators don’t even have a “clear screen & scroll-back” keyboard shortcut like Command-K on Mac. There’s no command output history, there are no auto-complete popups, editing commands is still extremely basic (no multiline input for example). The command prompt doesn’t even have the text editing capabilities of Notepad.
Seems like a really neat project! As more of a ui/ux person than a technical one I use the terminal plenty, but find it more intimidating than I think most linux folks do
I love seeing anything that makes it more user friendly and interactive!
