Hey, On 20 May 2011 12:51, David Tweed <david.tw...@gmail.com> wrote: > Certainly the general implementation, the language and the > architecture do seem nasty. OTOH, it always depresses me that it's > kind of taken as a virtue that the interactive shell and the terminal > are know almost nothing about each other
fwiw, I agree. TermKit appears to be a very glossy turd, but there are certainly outstanding issues in our terminals, which is why in Plan 9 they tried to fix them by pairing a plaintext-only Rio term with graphical windows which actually replace the spawning term. It's not perfect, but the plaintext / graphics dichotomy does make things simpler in some ways. I think the way to solve this problem is not to add structure to pipes (which tend to be simple to use *because* they have no real structure), but to allow commands to draw directly to the terminal if they wanted. So the standard input / output piping system would remain unchanged, and all commands -- except those which rely on unhygienic escape codes, like curses -- would work just like normal. However, if the command would like it could communicate directly to the term and say "show this diagram", or whatever. The term would basically be an ever-downward-scrolling canvas, which shows mostly text but may occasionally display simple graphics too. It would need some experimentation to find out what the best system would be, but ultimately it's just the Plan 9 approach except the drawn information is printed onto the term itself, and thus scrolls with it, rather than replacing the term entirely. This doesn't inherently solve every problem you mentioned, David, but it would probably be a good first step toward an innovative new terminal, and would be less vain than TermKit's approach. Thanks, cls
