The very first video there is about setting opacity and picking a theme and a background. I don't care about those things. I want only a dark background color palette, which every modern terminal emulator has.
The rest is all about how smart the terminal is and lets you do things without your shell having to be involved. But... now I have to know _two_ major things: the shell and the terminal. Ugh. Why can't I just have a better shell to do all of that?
How does this stuff work over ssh/mosh? Answer: it doesn't:
> Can’t Shells Do All This Stuff Too?
> Maybe. You could extend the TTY protocol or add new escape codes to mimic some of these features. But as Terminal Click evolves this argument gets sillier. [...]
But if you don't want to add escapes then now you have to define new protocols to make this work across the network. Or give up on the network. Or continue to insist on the terminal interpreting what it sees and being a layer completely detached from the shell, though now it can't see the PATH on the remote end and other such problems.
Don't you see that a plain old terminal emulator + tmux + shell is just an awesome stack?
Now maybe we should never need remote shells. In a zero-touch world it really has to be the case that there are very few places to ssh/mosh over to, though even then we'd need this terminal to be so smart as to understand that this shell is a Windows PowerShell and now whoops we're in a WSL2 bash shell (which is a lot like ssh'ing over to a Linux box).
I just don't have high hopes that these things can make my life easier.
Thanks for the feedback! You definitely grok the (currently annoying) consequences of what I'm doing. I believe this is the gist of your point:
> Don't you see that a plain old terminal emulator + tmux + shell is just an awesome stack?
I think it's only awesome to those of us brought up on RTFM culture. If you read the commentary [0] from HN's little cousin they center the battle around this very subject, which is what I personally care for the most. So much so that I'm willing to smash the stack (heh) and persuade others it's worth reinventing even if we ultimately fail. We will preserve what we can; I'm not going at it blindly.
You'll never meaningfully convince newer generations to leverage man pages for discovering new commands/functions: "Oh oops add a 3 to read about that one. Why? Let me explain man sections to you." Ditto for environment updates: "Try putenv, which should not be confused with setenv! No no, run env first to dump what you have!"
I ALWAYS get blank stares from (imo competent) GenZ devs who were initially curious. They were willing to read and learn and discover but not like this. They tip toe away from me and switch back to IDEs. My examples were contrived but the general observation propagates across the entirety of workflows within classic terminals.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I laughed. You're probably right. And just as one might never convince newer generations to RTFM, one will have a similarly difficult time convincing older generations to do the newfangled thing.
Although I should say that I work with colleagues in newer and older generations, and I find that the younger ones do end up learning how to RTFM.
The rest is all about how smart the terminal is and lets you do things without your shell having to be involved. But... now I have to know _two_ major things: the shell and the terminal. Ugh. Why can't I just have a better shell to do all of that?
How does this stuff work over ssh/mosh? Answer: it doesn't:
> Can’t Shells Do All This Stuff Too?
> Maybe. You could extend the TTY protocol or add new escape codes to mimic some of these features. But as Terminal Click evolves this argument gets sillier. [...]
But if you don't want to add escapes then now you have to define new protocols to make this work across the network. Or give up on the network. Or continue to insist on the terminal interpreting what it sees and being a layer completely detached from the shell, though now it can't see the PATH on the remote end and other such problems.
Don't you see that a plain old terminal emulator + tmux + shell is just an awesome stack?
Now maybe we should never need remote shells. In a zero-touch world it really has to be the case that there are very few places to ssh/mosh over to, though even then we'd need this terminal to be so smart as to understand that this shell is a Windows PowerShell and now whoops we're in a WSL2 bash shell (which is a lot like ssh'ing over to a Linux box).
I just don't have high hopes that these things can make my life easier.