TRtrapnii·Oct 9, 2023
> It would be nice if someone worked on actually improving the terminal experience.
Contour. Oh, sorry, I mean: To be honest? There are plenty of young terminals that work on that, it's not just Contour, but also WezTerm, foot, Ghostty, Warp, and Terminal.click (even though I am strongly against their architecture). Also Charm and Fig should earn an honorable mention.
> Selecting, copying and pasting text is still pretty awful
Use the vi-like normal mode in Contour and that should(tm) fix almost all of the above problems. At least I have almost never touched a mouse again on Contour since I've implemented modal input in Contour. Well, I use the mouse, casually for scrolling and procrastinating by randomly clicking around. :)
> (why is the cursor an entire block rather than a I bar?).
this is configurable in recent terminals
> Editing mult
Read the rest
iline inputs is awful.
this should be implemented by your shell or readline, in case you want to improve here. your TE has nothing to do with this except that it provides the tools to realize that on the screen :)
> Navigating history is so-so (even with McFly etc.).
This is the job of the shell/readline.
> Anything more complicated than left/right/up/down fails half the time and dumps control characters instead.
I really cannot related that claim to anything I am experiencing in my own life. Sadly.
> Why are terminals always stuck in the 70s? Can I get a modern terminal?
To be fair, they are not named "emulator" for fun and giggles. But I agree, not every VT sequence or semantic should be blindingly implemented. Especially the Unicode case on Terminals were always a fight against the historian terminal emulator developers. I asked myself why a lot on that matter. My theory? Because it potentially requires those existing terminals to fully re-write their core code base in order to be fully (as full as it gets) Unicode aware.
Have a look here for a baby-step forward: https://github.com/contour-terminal/terminal-unicode-core
This is implemented by 4 terminals (Ghostty, WezTerm, foot, Contour). One bite at a time I guess. Let's just stay positive, we can't break the world! (Terminal.Click? You listening?) But we should certainly break here and there when it makes sense and also not blindingly implement the 70s again. The GUI has also good moments and can live next to the TUI ;)