The Terminal of the Future
11 days ago
- #shell-integration
- #future-tech
- #terminal-design
- Terminals consist of four main parts: terminal emulator, pseudo-terminal (PTY), shell, and spawned programs.
- Jupyter Notebook offers features like high-fidelity image rendering and rerun capabilities, but lacks real-time interaction with shell commands.
- Warp and iTerm2 integrate shell and terminal for enhanced features like command navigation and output tracking.
- Long-lived processes require solutions for interaction, suspension, and disconnection, with tools like tmux, mosh, and alden/shpool offering various approaches.
- Dataflow tracking enables features like undo/redo and automatic rerun, similar to Pluto.jl's live cell updates.
- Incremental adoption is key to redesigning terminals, starting with transactional semantics and progressing to structured RPC and Jupyter-like frontends.
- Vertical integration in open source is challenging but possible through incremental improvements and composable parts.