Terminals or at least "ttys" are not modern. They are a chimera merging disparate properties of VGA, HDLC, and good old teletypes. I know I'm in the minority and always have been, but to me they are an anchor holding us back in our tech lives. Your phone does not have a terminal. - ThreadSky

robpike.io • 44 days ago

Terminals or at least "ttys" are not modern. They are a chimera merging disparate properties of VGA, HDLC, and good old teletypes. I know I'm in the minority and always have been, but to me they are an anchor holding us back in our tech lives.

Your phone does not have a terminal.

Reposted from Julia Evans

what's involved in getting a "modern" terminal setup? jvns.ca/blog/2025/01...

Comments

sonsofliberty.vote•43 days ago

Don't ever perform any I.T. for government institutions then.

krubner.bsky.social•44 days ago

What can replace terminals?

agenericbody.bsky.social•43 days ago

Theoretical an API, but I don’t recommend it.

n0fpv.choomga.ng•43 days ago

profexistential.bsky.social•44 days ago

Until modern interfaces are as automatable as the command line, this won’t change. That said, between post-bash shells like Powershell and desktop automation like Shortcuts, there’s work being done. But we’re not there yet

serge.sountsov.name•44 days ago

I think you may be confusing terminal with a shell. Putty, xterm, ghostly vs Bash, powershell, zshell

profexistential.bsky.social•44 days ago

I don’t think so. Or rather, in the current world those things largely inseparable. The next will inevitably incorporate parts of the present. But I have no clear vision of what that’ll be. So things are fuzzy and indefinite

serge.sountsov.name•44 days ago

I think Rob was talking explicitly about ttys - aka terminals being a weird amalgamations of teletype, VGA etc., not about command line shells

subhav.bsky.social•44 days ago

There's really no reason that they need to be inseparable. It's totally possible to make a better GUI for command line shells than terminal emulators, but nobody's quite done it.

profexistential.bsky.social•44 days ago

Exactly

goodheart2025.bsky.social•43 days ago

🕊️

algeriaworblebot.bsky.social•43 days ago

My phone absolutely does have a terminal (emulator).
Termux. I use it a fair amount, mostly when I want to run terminal commands on a second machine on a separate network.

jackmott.bsky.social•43 days ago

but i hate my phone as a computing or creative device

redpete.bsky.social•43 days ago

What have terminals to do with HDLC (apart from physical connection) or VGA ffs

subhav.bsky.social•43 days ago

My understanding is that some of the features that we take for granted in terminal emulators come from VGA text mode, not just old video terminals.

(And of course, there are a bunch of more modern features like hyperlinks and mouse support that postdate that.)

b0rk.jvns.ca•44 days ago

I'm always curious about what a different future could look like, I feel like I don't have enough imagination to think about how that might look

profexistential.bsky.social•44 days ago

Me too. Text seems to have taken us as far as it can. So has mouse jockeying. Nothing else has the traction, at least not yet

drgoon.bsky.social•44 days ago

In an OS model, perhaps a well indexed hybridized database shared dynamically across multiple devices with message queues and a configurable graphical shell that supports object inheritance (for example)?

subhav.bsky.social•44 days ago

I made a bunch of Figma mockups of this sort of thing back in like 2018!

Chrome DevTools meets a File Explorer. :)

krubner.bsky.social•44 days ago

Isn't this just a GUI? What is the underlying protocol?

subhav.bsky.social•44 days ago

Yup! That's pretty much it. I don't see any reason why we couldn't have had GUIs for command line shells since like 1995. But alas. Every shell is *designed* to run inside of a terminal emulator.

subhav.bsky.social•44 days ago

That said, there are fancy terminal emulators that hook into shells. @warp.dev is one. VSCode and JetBrains have some shell integration features too.

I know Andy Chu (https://oils.pub) is interested in a special kind of "headless shell protocol" for communicating with GUIs, that would be more robust.

subhav.bsky.social•44 days ago

Terminal emulators are archaic and should be unnecessary. We can have GUIs for command-line shells, just like we have nice GUIs for programming REPLs.

And it would unlock so many niceties. Copying the output from commands, navigating long outputs, rich text, modern line editor, etc.

n0fpv.choomga.ng•43 days ago

REPL stands for "Read, Evaluate, Print, Loop"

It's a mode of working with a parsing engine that runs on the CLI...

Giving it a gui means you slapped a border around the window pane.

CLI, are a form of API, and as such they generally get built before the GUI tools that use them.

subhav.bsky.social•43 days ago

A GUI for a command line interface can be more than a border slapped around a terminal emulator, though.

Mathematica, Jupyter and Chrome DevTools all have such fancy GUI features as autocomplete and a text box. It would be nice to have that for OS shells too, not just JavaScript and Python.

n0fpv.choomga.ng•43 days ago

Auto complete isn't a GUI feature.

There are actually shells that behave that way.

Fish shell has fantastic OOTB auto complete.

Nushell is based around tabular data workflows

Not saying GUIs don't provide value, it's just that the main value they provide is discoverability.

dvrc.bsky.social•43 days ago

Could the alternative be a graphic console? Hovering on a file or name highlights it, the action executed depends on mouse + keyboard combo, and the file type or the name.

Somebody told me that the Genera/CLIM Listener comes pretty close.

zafodbeeblebrox.bsky.social•43 days ago

If it can't be done on a teletype with paper tape as your only form of non-volatile storage, it's really not worth doing!

alurm.bsky.social•44 days ago

it would be cool to have something like acme but for touch screens.

wondered what could it look like for a bit.

it could be possible to implement mouse buttons with by pressing with multiple fingers and maybe even chords, but I'm not sure it would be optimal.

jimmy.zelinskie.com•44 days ago

Is this post eschewing the CLI in general or its legacy?

jsnfwlr.com•43 days ago

CLI is nit limited to Terminal/TTY.

carolinaregulators.bsky.social•43 days ago

Keep the old ways so you know how far you've come.

robert.at.arles.us•43 days ago

my phone has an excellent terminal. iSH. I get what you are saying, though, but I would argue that terminal emulators are coming along now, and could be much better. Auto completion, for example, is awesome, though cli editing is still a bit painful.

suddenlylotte.bsky.social•43 days ago

Uh, mine does... Termux ftw!

lvngstn.bsky.social•43 days ago

you are absolutely in the minority, and in this case, it is because you are wrong. ttys may be outdated, but CLIs are an alternative user mode that are much more powerful and flexible than GUIs.

far from holding us back, any competent programmer should be comfortable with a CLI.

robpike.io•43 days ago

I neither mentioned nor intend to impugn CLIs.

lvngstn.bsky.social•43 days ago

my bad for misreading. do you have an alternative to ttys in mind?

akkartik.name•42 days ago

You didn't ask me, but I've been building some text-first UIs atop a graphical canvas:

https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/pensieve.love (instead of left-lines of text that scroll down, each command from a palette appends a column of notes to the right)

https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/driver.love (unconstrained infinite 2D surface)

lvngstn.bsky.social•42 days ago

wow, that's so cool! awesome proof of concept. does it interface with existing CLI programs? sorry if i missed that on your repo

akkartik.name•41 days ago

Unfortunately it only interfaces with programs designed a certain way. I currently build them in Lua using the LÖVE game engine, but the protocol they use to talk to the driver is a simple text-based one that you can use with other dynamic languages (that allow redefining top-level definitions).

jackrusher.com•41 days ago

Have you ever tried Acme?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M

rtr.tombob.com•41 days ago

Love Acme, use it every day

subhav.bsky.social•43 days ago

command line =/= grid of monospaced characters

Rob's talking about the grid of characters.

lvngstn.bsky.social•43 days ago

i understand the difference. i misread rob's intent with his tweet

inktvis75.bsky.social•43 days ago

On a side note, terminology is essential. In my Linux Fundamentals and LPI 1 courses, I always teach the students about the terminal, virtual terminal (including the reference to the teletypewriters of the old days), pseudo-terminal, /dev/console, and shell.

joekoko.bsky.social•43 days ago

The Modern Era ended in 1945. I think ttys can be called modern. 😜

chuntr.bsky.social•44 days ago

If the keyboard was better I would 100% use a terminal on my phone

bitnacht.bsky.social•44 days ago

I wholeheartedly agree.

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