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See also

Posted May 18, 2011 15:51 UTC (Wed) by Tobu (subscriber, #24111)
In reply to: See also by njwhite
Parent article: Announcing TermKit

Structured command output would be pretty neat. For example making it foldable.

At the moment I can use less with an alternative screen that gets wiped when I close it, less on the terminal, and raw command output to the terminal. The last two can wipe the scrollback buffer, the last isn't too convenient to navigate (search isn't standard, though screen and some terminal emulators provide it), the first lets the output disappear (though less can be used to save it somewhere), and the first two require extra typing. Picking one before running a command increases cognitive load a bit.

Fixing this would require some integration between shell and terminal. At the very least one escape that says "begin prompt" and one that says "end prompt"; maybe some deeper integration to prevent binary garbage from messing with terminal state as well.

to post comments

See also

Posted May 18, 2011 16:12 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (6 responses)

Well if your 'terminal' actually a application for submitting commands and returning their output instead of just providing basic 'vt100' or 'xterm' style terminal then you wouldn't need any special 'begin prompt' or 'end prompt' type commands.

It would be:

1. take this command and argument list from user,
2. execute it,
3. return output from command to same window.

Just get rid of the whole 'xterm is a serial terminal emulator plus plus' type approach and have the terminal manage commands directly.

You'd be able still use bash and traditional command line tools, but it would be 'in the back end' of the 'terminal'.

See also

Posted May 18, 2011 16:55 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

What you describe is similar to M-x shell in Emacs, which I normally use instead of a terminal. I keep an ordinary terminal handy for running top(1) and other things that need to make the cursor jump around.

See also

Posted May 18, 2011 16:57 UTC (Wed) by Tobu (subscriber, #24111) [Link]

That would work better long term. We'd need an upgrade path for top, less, and curses applications. Maybe detect magic sequences and detach those to a new tab with full xterm emulation.

See also

Posted May 18, 2011 18:51 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (2 responses)

That sounds great until I need a loop?

Not that I think there's anything wrong with trying new stuff, but the shell has a ton of useful stuff (redirection, globbing, variables, loops, etc.) that pretty much require it be a programming language. And it's not a great language, but no-one's made the teeniest bit of progress in displacing Bourne-style shells in decades. Partly because it does an excellent job of scaling up from simple executable+arguments commands to full-fledged scripts -- you can always reach for just as much as you need at any given moment.

Maybe someone should try adding terminal emulation to Bash. That'd be interesting...

See also

Posted May 18, 2011 18:57 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

> That sounds great until I need a loop?

You should be able to pass the arguments to create a loop to a bash shell.

I don't think it would be a good idea to replace the shell with a 'smart terminal', but it would be cool to be able to take more control over the environment.

The biggest problem is that the shell is intensely complicated. Keeping backwards compatibility would be very difficult.

if I was smarter I could create a proof of concept or whatever.

See also

Posted May 19, 2011 14:15 UTC (Thu) by bjartur (guest, #67801) [Link]

See Tclsh.

See also: hotwire

Posted May 23, 2011 5:09 UTC (Mon) by nevyn (guest, #33129) [Link]

This is mostly what "hotwire" (yum install hotwire) did ... and worked pretty well for what it did (some of the best TAB completion in a GUI I've still ever used), but like a lot of the other attempts it was so successful you haven't heard of it :).

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