At risk of being /that guy/, I find that emacs gives me a nice & consistent "one-stop-shop" for text-based apps instead of having to kludge together a bunch disparate terminal programs.
Just the combination of tmux and nvim with shared ctrl-hjkl between both nvim and tmux panes is so buttersmooth and no other setup has given me such an seamless interoperability between an editor and an OS. What this means: you can switch between tmux panes or nvim panes or from tmux to nvim and back always with the same shortcut. This is the most underrated killer feature.
> is so buttersmooth and no other setup has given me such an seamless interoperability between an editor and an OS . . . This is the most underrated killer feature.
You've just described what it feels like to be an emacs user. It's all just text[0].
No, you need that plugin/script but installation and usage is rock-solid, I am using this now for years. FWIW, I also never use nvim's built-in terminal because this setup with tmux is so fast and feels super natural.
Hint: you have to redefine more of tmux' binds, the defaults are just not usable.
Hint2: most creation and resizing of panes and windows binds should be mapped without the tmux prefix, you can do this with "bind -n" in the .tmux.conf.
Hint3: read the tmux manual, it's really good and on one (long) page.
I posted in another comment more about my view on i3. However, compared to tmux it also lacks the capability to be used via ssh. At the end of the day there are not really comparable but yeah, I prefer to work with tmux+nvim on a *nix environment through ssh, all wrapped in a typical window manager such as Windows which handles stuff like hidpi, meta window management, device management etc. The good thing is that I am not stuck with Windows. You can give me any meta/desktop OS/window management such as any Linux wm or macos as long as I have tmux and nvim, my productivity will stay the same.
FWIW, while automatic tiling with i3 is super impressive, it's overrated. In the beginning you believe that this really boosts your productivity but you get quickly annoyed. If tmux is set-up right, so not just this seamless navigation but also creating and resizing of panes in a similar fashion with intuitive binds you wouldn't want any automatic tiling anymore. With my binds I am able to open and resize dozen of panes faster than I ever could with i3. And as a bonus tmux' config is just simple some remapping but never a rabbit hole to get basic things working.
That is why I prefer the static tiling approach compared to the
common dynamic tiling window managers. The important difference
is that a static window manager never reorders or resizes
windows unless you tell it to, and this leads to the same
flexibility but without being forced into a predetermined
layout.
I like it a lot but it's rare, the only one I've used is
stumpwm.
The disadvantage of that is that i3 is not aware of a window's
contents. A terminal multiplexer however knows what the current
working directory in each terminal pane is, and if you open a
new split it can be automatically set to the same path. This
makes the whole process a little bit smoother.
I think author (and other folks who have this vim+tmux+other tools type of workflow) would really like Emacs, especially Org mode. I have a very similar set of tools for a pure-Emacs workflow to this:
- org-roam
- org-noter
- persp mode with persistent sessions
- vterm + eshell
- various plugins for org bibtex / latex
All of this in Doom Emacs gives me the same functionality.
I do admit that it took a large amount of time for me to cultivate this over several years, as it does for most workflows. It's very hard to jump ship, even when the grass may be objectively greener, because one has to actually be productive today instead of postponing until one's fonts are just right and keybindings are perfect!
Tried so many times to get into emacs (3 or 4 times) and once into org mode. It unfortunately never made click despite my love for any kind of terminal app and also competition in this space. Just emacs lisp would be the reason to switch from vimscript but again I just couldn't get warm with emacs.
Also I think that the paradigm of modal editing is key to editing, not because I am used it, it just makes sense to have the myriad of functions of an editor easily reachable without too many modifiers. Coding isn't about just writing code but a lot about thinking, editing, staring at code, thinking, editing, jumping, f, /, yy's, dd's, ct, etc. I use modifiers heavily, way more than the typical ctrl/alt, but again to have an extra dedicated mode is crucial, so I can't imagine how any non-modal editor, eg emacs, can excel re UX like vim or nvim do. There must be reason that even the emacs community itself promotes spacemacs, which follows that paradigm, so much. But for some spacemacs is a layer too much adding unnecessary complexity. Besides, vim is also so popular because it's fast, load time, editing, anything.
Whatever, put me into any text field without modal binds and I am pretty much handicapped but maybe I might just missed emacs' hidden qualities. Trying emacs feels going one step back (when coming from modal editing).
Edit: Don't get me wrong, this shouldn't qualify as offense but every time I read some random emacs praise on the net, I never know if I should give emacs another try or if it's just a vocal minority who never experienced proper modal editing and I just should move on.
I would give it another shot. I was a Vim zealot that converted over with Spacemacs, but I ditched Spacemacs once I knew the names of the packages I used the most. The package `evil` is enough to satisfy your modal editing needs (perhaps you already knew about it). Anything that doesn't fit your workflow can be changed to fit into that same modal editing paradigm. It just takes time but it's worth it in my humble opinion.
Just remember: Emacs' main strength comes from how malleable and extensible it can be. Give it time; don't jump ship after a few bumps. Patch it up with some Elisp and keep sailing.
Emacs is malleable, but it shows that it comes from a pre-CUA era. IMO, they should just drop the existing UI preset into a "legacy UX" package that old-timers can keep, and come up with a new preset that will be familiar to users of post-Win95 machines.
IntelliJ does this right. You are dropped into a brand-new, complicated editor, but the basics like the arrow keys, Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V, ctrl+arrow key movements, menus and lots of other bits are already familiar to you. You may remap the editor in any way you want, but you are likely to override a few presets and get on with your day, than rewire the entire thing.
That's really gonna come down to your workflow and use cases. For me, the Lisp is a bit more welcoming than VimScript for me. It's much easier to test out a small snippet of something in-buffer which might grow into something else.
But, putting Lisp aside, going through the growing pains was worth it for me because of org-mode. I'm certain Vim might have something similar but the proper `org` package is definitely on my list of benefits. I have an org-file that tracks my time and generates invoices with a click of a button. Another one documents all the API calls in another project with interactive areas, thanks to org-babel. I think being able to craft documents like this is invaluable but again, it's gonna come down to how you do work and what makes you happy/efficient.
> It's much easier to test out a small snippet of something in-buffer which might grow into something else.
Ok, here you got me and I'm about to try it another time. But then again I remember the slow loading times, the weaker ecosystem (is the lsp implementation as good and fast as coc-vim?) but whatever, maybe I should give it a try with evil mode. But there are so many other cool things waiting to be learned...
I can't reply to your deepest comment in this thread, but I'm following up on that:
* Try spacemacs. Though I'm a Doom user, spacemacs is much more approachable out of the box. You can just uncomment things and have it work well.
* Use Emacs 27.1 or later because it has faster JSON parsing -> crucial for good LSP performance
A few ways to get started are learning how to search for things within Emacs:
* C-h f: find documentation for any function by name
* C-k k: find the documentation for any keystroke function
* If you want to see what commands are going on: install command-log-mode. it will give you a buffer to see what commands you run with every keystroke
* I don't remember if spacemacs has it or not, but the following two packages are crucial when you want to learn more: which-key (to show the keys available when you press something like C-x) and helpful mode [0]. I'm pretty sure spacemacs has these by default, but if not they're golden!
Org-mode is amazing. If you're on iOS I highly recommend beorg https://beorgapp.com/. In my opinion it's the best app for org on the go (including android).
To "kludge together a bunch of disparate terminal programs" is not conceptually different than "kludge together a bunch of disparate elisp functions". Some of us live inside the command line, some of us live inside emacs, most of us live inside a web browser.
I was referring to the consistency of the user interface and other behaviours. For example, themes and key bindings can be made consistent across emacs modes. They share the same config.
Thanks! I love Julia - if you want to check out a cool Julia project I am working on with my friend [Ole Kröger](https://opensourc.es/about/) have a look at [Javis.jl](https://github.com/Wikunia/Javis.jl). It is an animation package similar to manim by 3blue1brown. :)
Having a terminal-based workflow is a lifesaver in the era of work from home. When using a terminal based workflow I cannot tell the difference between working locally and working on a machine I have SSH'ed into located at my office (10ms round trip ping).
Even when I VPN into work, ssh into a box at work, then ssh to a jumpbox in AWS, and then ssh from the jumpbox to an EC2 server the experience is still flawless.
I was thinking about this today - that is: a terminal (“minimal”) setup may well have prepared those of us who practice it - for remote work (great news if a pandemic strikes!)
I wondered though, if there’s no way to objectively “score” the advantage of, say, terminal-minimalism vs. GUI-maximalism, what might some discussions of t-min vs GUI-max be? What, if anything, does t-min really cut us out of while we’re preparing for the rare case of “Ok, imagine you’re stuck on a spacecraft with only a character terminal and a 300baud modem - what will you do then with your Windows RDP-available machine back on earth?” Am genuinely interested to hear people’s ideas of the calculus here.
Pros of t-min:
- overall greater speed using a computer, you become what people call a "power user".
- some sysadmin knowledge. Adopting a terminal based workflow requires to tinker with your system (systemd, sh scripts, building certain repo for a tool you want etc.).
Pros of GUI-max:
- You don't have to spend hours learning and configuring things.
- Certain tools are just better when they are built out in a GUI for you. I think here in particular of C/C++ debuggers, it's hard to get a nice experience in the terminal.
As for objectively "scoring" it's hard to assign real values.
You could eventually measure speed. I have worked in production support solving a lot of benign problems on a day to day basis. This is when I adopted my terminal based workflow. It was way faster than my other teammates using desktop apps.
> You don't have to spend hours learning and configuring things
After spending hours, sometimes days, trying to learn GUI stand-ins and trying to configure them (turns out you usually can't unless the GUI designer though it was a good idea), I usually give up and go back to being productive instead by using the CLI.
Hey everyone! I am the author of the article! If you have any questions, feel free to ping me and I will try to respond in a timely fashion! I intend to always keep this article up to date so feel free to bookmark it for a future reference.
Further, it makes my heart so so happy to see so many people being either inspired, interested, or curious about my workflow! I think the best workflow is the one that works for you. If my article played some part in that, then I am jubilant. Have a wonderful day!
I think I used your article on knowledge management when I set up my Browser/Kindle > Zotero > Vim (Markdown) > Pandoc > PDF workflow. Thank you!
After a year of not doing research I'm just getting it all back together and I've swapped Zotero for Jurism a fork that has support for multiple languages that I greatly appreciate.
That is amazing to hear zwayhowder and am happy to hear that made a difference for you! I need to overhaul that article you referenced at some point as I have a different system in place. It still accomplishes the same goals, but is just a bit neater. :) I will have to check out Jurism too.
I was one or two years on Arch with i3 and all was great except when an app (eg a browser or Inkscape) opens a dialogue/modal/popup or whatever and this got stretched over the entire pane, yuck. AFAIK this could be configured somehow but I found configuration not as mature and rock-solid as with tmux or nvim but good though. It was rather a rabbit-hole.
While I prefer the paradigm of tiling wms I eventually stuck with Windows (and WSL2) with its built-in window management but yeah.
That's odd, I've been using i3 for years now and modals always open as a floating window. Even GIMP (and its many windows) works fine. I don't remember tweaking anything in particular to make it work.
Nice to hear and need to try it again. I stopped using it 2017. Another gripe I had with i3 was that setting up proper hidpi support was a mess, maybe this improved as well. I know that the latest Ubuntu got here quite well, allowing also 25% steps etc.
Yeah hidpi on Linux is pretty underwhelming and it seems that nobody really cares. I think Windows needed years to match macOS and is now on the same level. Still Windows notebooks barely have more then 200dpi unless there are from the premium segment. Whatever, at least the software side is great now. But on Linux, Ubuntu just had until last year hidpi only in 100% steps paired with dozens of glitches here and there. Sad since especially a terminal looks just terrific in 300dpi (UHD on 13" or 8k on 32").
I think you're probably right, but my experience (Sway on Arch) has been nothing other than pretty excellent.
It supports fractional scaling and different scales for different attached screens.. You have to tell the system you want it (`swaymsg 'output <x> scale 1.5'`) but it works.
Just checked out Sway's intro video, this looks promising! Would you mind to elaborate if Sway is ready for being a daily driver + how is multi-monitor support (all monitors same dpi and also with different dpi levels).
Tiled windows managers have issues though. Last time I tried i3wm for example, there was no default support for sleep, energy saving and hardware keyboard shortcuts and you had to take care of all of that instead of the usual GNOME/KDE to do it for you. The best option is to install tiled windows managers plugins within GNOME or KDE on Linux.
i3 is one of those things that supports everything, you just have to configure it. If you want i3 with sane defaults and a pretty style out of the box, you should try i3-regolith[1]
I use dwm, you get keybinding support inside the config file and then you can use scripts or commands to manage everything else.
Dwm isn't for everybody, you modify the c source and compile to get the changes you want. The best part is that the source is small enough to understand for when you want to do something to it.
I found i3 to be the easiest WM for setting arbitrary keyboard shortcuts. The .config file makes it really convenient, and you can just set the key to run an arbitrary shell command.
For those who enjoy experimenting with window managers, might I suggest PaperWM for your next experiment?
Instead of fitting all your windows within your monitor's boundaries, PaperWM sets all windows to take full height and gives you an infinite horizontal axis to arrange them on. I'm thoroughly enjoying it and vastly prefer it to tiling and floating windows
Very nice! I've tried to switch over to a terminal-based workflow but Qt Creator, VS Code, and Firefox for Atlassian products have been the main holdouts for me. I can't see myself moving away from Qt Creator, but I would kill for an ncurses app for editing Confluence pages and reviewing pull requests without 1200ms between every. single. click.
At the very least this article has given me the itch to dust off the old dotfiles and start fiddling with zsh again!
VS Code is very good at connecting to remote servers/wsls/etc being just a dumb client. I still use VS Code next to all my terminal apps because some stuff is unmatched in VS Code, eg Pythons Interactive Console paired with a Jupyter server (1000x better than any notebook).
The downside is that due to Atlassian limitation and phasing out of wiki markup it's not possible to retrieve articles from Confluence. This script is not suitable for collaborative editing of the same page.
Here's a computer scientist with an impressive amount of hand-tailored tools for living without X11 (scroll down to the "Framebuffer" / "I no longer use X11" section):
I tried very hard when I first installed Linux to get into a terminal-based workflow, mainly by creating an elaborate vim config. In the end I couldn't do it. I spent a lot of my time at my computer writing LaTeX documents, and for this the ctrl-click capability of a GUI editor is indispensable. That is, the editor brings up the source and compiled file simultaneously, and by ctrl-clicking somewhere in either, I am brought immediately to the corresponding place in the other display. I don't really use any conveniences of the editor (e.g. autocomplete) except this.
Whereas, in vim, trying to do random-access edits like this with just a keyboard is sort of a nightmare.
I'm sure there's a way to rig ctrl-click up in vim, but to me the appeal of vim is the (purported) speed boost from your hands not leaving the keyboard, so that really defeats the point.
If anyone has ideas in this regard, I'd be happy to hear them!
I use terminal exclusively and my vim config is basically 10 lines. Looking at peoples really complex init scripts is like looking at olympic athletes, cool for relaxation, maybe getting one or two things out of them, but if you're a removalist you really don't need glistening six packs.
There's a lot of really good stuff in here about quick access to things. I feel sad that we're all still doing this stuff in teletype emulators, though. Why can't we have this and nice GUIs, too?
I think maybe we're asking for the same thing. I want to be able to write commands and small scripts smoothly but have nice integration with graphical tools. Oberon, Acme, and Smalltalk all are environments that try this to various degrees...
Doesn’t have the beautiful Display Postscript/LeX-esque typography that I want, and less said about Lots of Irritating Silly Parentheses the better, but even 1980s tech was doing it better:
I think there are lessons to be had from the likes of Smalltalk and Logo too. Highly expressive without insane levels of cryptic inconsistent punctuation rules and UX man-traps.
I yearn for a truly modern, speedy and advanced terminal that grows beyond the mold and mindset of a text-only line-by-line Unix terminal.
Terminals of 2020 and beyond need to have first-class support for audio, video, images, and peripheral interactivity/customization. Terminology and iTerm 2's ability to display pictures, and some terminals' support for Sixel is one of the directions I want to see progress in.
- It should be possible to `cat` an image, or a video, or even previews of Word and Photoshop documents. Terminology, iTerm 2 and Sixel-compatible terminals have this to some extent, but it's not standardised and doesn't have a broad support base.
- Programs should be able to raise notifications without relying on third-party/OS-provided utils that have a drastically different API and availability across platforms.
- Rich read-only visualisations of progress should be possible to call up with a few lines of code. I want to see a `dd`, `mv` or `cp` with a graphical progress bar at the bottom of my window. If my OS supports it, I want this to integrate with the UI like the progress widget on my taskbar.
- We should be able to render a piece of output in 3D, if we so desire. I don't want Crysis, but I do want a Matlab logo that I can rotate by dragging my mouse and graphs that zoom when I Ctrl+scroll at them.
- Support for file pickers and rich selection/filtering of file/directory lists. Not for sandboxing, but for convenience.
- A command line builder (like one of the classic Apple OSes had, cannot find a reference now, or something like the one in Fish but more advanced). Only valid combinations of parameters will be supported, mutually exclusive commands are impossible to select. Any arguments that are files will be possible to use with a file picker. Any argument that's a date will get a calendar widget. Any argument that's a boolean or an enum will get a checkbox or drop-down respectively.
- Terminals should be able to intake gigabytes of input per second, up to the limit of the hardware, without choking up.
- We should be seeing 60FPS and beyond as a normal feature.
- We should finally get unlimited scrollback enabled by default. The terminal emulator should keep everything that I've seen before, and remember it for me. We have the space for it, either in RAM or persistent storage. If not, it should be adaptable and drop the scrollback buffer that is lower priority than other applications on the system if they need more resources.
- Unicode should come as standard. Emoji should come as standard.
- End termcap. We should be able to hash out ONE standard to rule them all. We've had 50 years to come up with ideas and opinions. Version it so that we can release a V2 in 2100.
- While we are at it, end Bash and come up with a saner shell notation that doesn't overload single/double quotes, the ampersand, > amd <, or human-text spaces. We have several more decades of syntax design knowledge worked out, and a whole keyboard with >101 keys. We have two Alts, two Ctrls, and a whole function key row. Let's make use of them for non-printable character input and interaction with the terminal.
- (Debatable) consider adding hypertext support. It's here to stay, and not just in the form of HTML.
There's more that can be added, but really, I think terminals deserve better.
Many of the articles have nice screenshots / animations to give you a feel for what it is.
I plan to turn https://www.oilshell.org/ into a library and I hope people will build GUIs around it. There are some UI possibilities that are difficult or impossible unless you have hooks to the shell other than stdin/stdout.
So I recently started a job where I'm on Windows, and I've found myself surprisingly enamored of PowerShell. So many of the things that the shell got wrong are done right. The authors wanted to use <, >, etc. as their real meanings, but apparently the early users rebelled at the idea that > was no longer redirect to file. But things that would be nightmares in unix shells, such as going in and adding a new element as the last child of only one of four elements in an XML document (based on its attribute value) are a few lines of code. I still have decades of muscle memory in bash, but I find myself reaching for PS more and more.
The problem is that you really need an interface for loading software components into your system at runtime, which .NET provides, but aside from .NET or COM I am unaware of any other equivalent system. Java's OSGi is the closest, and ugh...
I guess what I'll say is that I hope the Oil ecosystem will grow the things that people like about it, that aren't tied to Windows. Windows and Unix are fundamentally different and it means they need fundamentally different shells, since a shell is by definition a language closely tied to the OS.
You can run powershell on Unix, and bash on Windows, but even on the same OS they are somewhat disjoint tools!
You don't have to use the terminal for fast workflows.
- Many programs offer intuitive quick-action- or quick-search-fields. For example: double-shift in IntelliJ or CMD-Shift-O in many Mac apps like Fork, Things and IA-Writer.
- System wide search tools like Alfred and Launchbar will allow you to quickly access Files and execute Workflows
- _Every_ Menubar in MacOS is searchable. Just press a shortcut and type what you want to do.
- ...and let's not forget that keyboard shortcuts exist.
The great thing is that you get all the power of a keyboard workflow, without losing the accessibility of a GUI.
data analytics, stats, machine learning, computational science, computational engineering, the list goes on
plotting/viz using matplotlib, altair, Mike Bostock's D3.js, graphviz, pgf/tikz, inkscape, the list goes on
I can't think of much outside a small subset of pure-math, and a small subset of TCS, where visualization is not part and parcel of daily research activity. (ignoring non-STEM disciplines like english, communication, social/political/economic sciences, etc).
You seem to be using a rather specific meaning of the word "research".
If, for example, I pause coding and spent a few hours comparing and reading about various libraries to aid in a certain task, wouldn't this task be best described as "research" as well?
Why can’t we have modern text-driven interfaces* that are both parsimonious and elegant? The mighty Knuth gave us TeX 40 years ago, and our hardware has long since passed the point where doing the job right demands a significant number of cycles (even with the clattery mess that is Unicode standard), so there really isn’t any excuse for such awful regressive primitivism now.
Because I don’t care that OP’s workflow works well for OP; I care about workflows that work better. For everyone.
/cynical idealist
--
* Traditionally “text-driven interface” means keyboard-driven, but if you aren’t paying attention to the rise of spoken words then you’re missing the next great opportunity to open up computing to all 8Bn of your fellow humans.
I'm not sure I see any advantages of having a window with multiple panes and tabs instead of a separate window for what would be in each pane or tab? I can easily alt-tab between windows on a workspace (and ctrl-alt-arrow between workspaces) and I can cut and paste between windows. I only need to use a mouse when I am forced by necessity to interact with the cartoons in a browser window or to play the red 10 on a black jack.
Can anyone elaborate on the advantages to using a single mother application to house all my command-line interactions instead of separate application windows for each?
I want to find a good way to preview pdf files in a terminal environment. Basically, browse through them to find the right one. Showing first page would be sufficient. Have not found the right solution yet.
Whoa the terminal based browser mentioned (ranger) looks awesome! I’ve been looking for something similar since I SSH so much more because of the WFH situation. I love how it has the image preview too!
Author of the article here! For me, I prefer it for two reasons:
1. Distractionless editing - not fiddling with formatting or things like that is quite nice. Especially since I work with markdown and LaTeX, it is easy to convert over to a word file once I get the draft of the version done thanks to pandoc. From there, then I can really worry about the formatting - if I need to as pandoc is great!
2. I like the speed and lightness of a text editor for writing. Don't have to wait for boot, can easily grep and replace, and jump to where I need to go.
I actually wrote my entire thesis in VSCode with LaTeX workshop! I have friends who swear by Sublime - I can see why! It's really powerful. Traditional GUI editors are great for when I was working on my thesis but I opted for a lighter solution as I do a lot on my laptop at once. The fewer CPU intensive programs for my workflow, the better.
Can you give some examples of what you're able to do or what exactly you mean by composing in this context? I've used tmux a bit but just to split windows and restore sessions...
I yearn for a truly modern, speedy and advanced terminal that grows beyond the mold and mindset of a text-only line-by-line Unix terminal.
Terminals of 2020 and beyond need to have first-class support for audio, video, images, and peripheral interactivity/customization. Terminology and iTerm 2's ability to display pictures, and some terminals' support for Sixel is one of the directions I want to see progress in.
- It should be possible to `cat` an image, or a video, or even previews of Word and Photoshop documents. Terminology, iTerm 2 and Sixel-compatible terminals have this to some extent, but it's not standardised and doesn't have a broad support base.
- Programs should be able to raise notifications without relying on third-party/OS-provided utils that have a drastically different API and availability across platforms.
- Rich read-only visualisations of progress should be possible to call up with a few lines of code. I want to see a `dd`, `mv` or `cp` with a graphical progress bar at the bottom of my window. If my OS supports it, I want this to integrate with the UI like the progress widget on my taskbar.
- We should be able to render a piece of output in 3D, if we so desire. I don't want Crysis, but I do want a Matlab logo that I can rotate by dragging my mouse and graphs that zoom when I Ctrl+scroll at them.
- Support for file pickers and rich selection/filtering of file/directory lists. Not for sandboxing, but for convenience.
- A command line builder (like one of the classic Apple OSes had, cannot find a reference now, or something like the one in Fish but more advanced). Only valid combinations of parameters will be supported, mutually exclusive commands are impossible to select. Any arguments that are files will be possible to use with a file picker. Any argument that's a date will get a calendar widget. Any argument that's a boolean or an enum will get a checkbox or drop-down respectively.
- Terminals should be able to intake gigabytes of input per second, up to the limit of the hardware, without choking up.
- We should be seeing 60FPS and beyond as a normal feature.
- We should finally get unlimited scrollback enabled by default. The terminal emulator should keep everything that I've seen before, and remember it for me. We have the space for it, either in RAM or persistent storage. If not, it should be adaptable and drop the scrollback buffer that is lower priority than other applications on the system if they need more resources.
- Unicode should come as standard. Emoji should come as standard.
- End termcap. We should be able to hash out ONE standard to rule them all. We've had 50 years to come up with ideas and opinions. Version it so that we can release a V2 in 2100.
- While we are at it, end Bash and come up with a saner shell notation that doesn't overload single/double quotes, the ampersand, > amd <, or human-text spaces. We have several more decades of syntax design knowledge worked out, and a whole keyboard with >101 keys. We have two Alts, two Ctrls, and a whole function key row. Let's make use of them for non-printable character input and interaction with the terminal.
- (Debatable) consider adding hypertext support. It's here to stay, and not just in the form of HTML.
There's more that can be added, but really, I think terminals deserve better.
Tmux is great for persistence. It’s also basically required for working remotely. Allows you to, across sessions, to reconnect to the same flow. I have it set up to have multiple views of the same set of windows, so I can scroll through them independently.
Tmux allows you to set up several windows and programs in a session (or multiple tmux sessions at once, like virtual desktops), detach from tmux, disconnect SSH, and when you SSH back in a week later, just "tmux attach" to get back to where you were. Also works if your connection drops in the middle of something.
Also, +1 for Julia.