what is a “modern terminal experience”?
Here are a few things that are important to me, with which part of the system is responsible for them:
multiline support for copy and paste: if you paste 3 commands in your shell, it should not immediately run them all! That’s scary! (shell, terminal emulator)
infinite shell history: if I run a command in my shell, it should be saved forever, not deleted after 500 history entries or whatever. Also I want commands to be saved to the history immediately when I run them, not only when I exit the shell session (shell)
a useful prompt: I can’t live without having my current directory and current git branch in my prompt (shell)
24-bit colour: this is important to me because I find it MUCH easier to theme neovim with 24-bit colour support than in a terminal with only 256 colours (terminal emulator)
clipboard integration between vim and my operating system so that when I copy in Firefox, I can just press p in vim to paste (text editor, maybe the OS/terminal emulator too)
good autocomplete: for example commands like git should have command-specific autocomplete (shell)
having colours in ls (shell config)
a terminal theme I like: I spend a lot of time in my terminal, I want it to look nice and I want its theme to match my terminal editor’s theme. (terminal emulator, text editor)
automatic terminal fixing: If a programs prints out some weird escape codes that mess up my terminal, I want that to automatically get reset so that my terminal doesn’t get messed up (shell)
keybindings: I want Ctrl+left arrow to work (shell or application)
being able to use the scroll wheel in programs like less: (terminal emulator and applications)
There are a million other terminal conveniences out there and different people value different things, but those are the ones that I would be really unhappy without.
So basically it’s the features that have been standard in shells and terminal emulators for the past couple of decades.
14 Comments
null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 20 pts · 1y
What on earth is a modern terminal?
There's lots of terminal emulators. I like ghostty. You can just install it.
drspod@lemmy.ml · 34 pts · 1y
First paragraph after the introduction:
So basically it’s the features that have been standard in shells and terminal emulators for the past couple of decades.
null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 11 pts · 1y
Ooohh this is blog spam?
Sorry I thought it was a question.
glitchcake@piefed.blahaj.zone · 1 pts · 359d
I thought it was a question too, but Evans is legit, all of her stuff is golden and always worth the read.
frongt@lemmy.zip · 9 pts · 1y
Yeah, most of those you get out of the box. Even on Windows.
LiveLM@lemmy.zip · 7 pts · 1y
The whole article basically boils down to "Install fish. Done." lol
just_another_person@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 1y
Just use whatever works. Stop worrying about what others are doing and trying to be cool with the in-crowd.
DeuxChevaux@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 1y
Of all of these things, i only miss a shared clipboard between Vim and the rest of the system (or vice versa). That would be rad!
CorneliusTalmadge@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 1y
This is possible you just need a version of VIM that was compiled with the clipboard feature enabled.
bisby@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 1y
Sometimes you need to specify in config which clipboard to use on unix systems that might have multiple clipboards too
dislabled@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 1y
Are you talking about the + register? You could also map this to be the default "yank" register.
DeuxChevaux@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 1y
I set it like this in .vimrc
set clipboard=unnamedplusBut when I yank anything, I cannot insert it somewhere else with ctrl-c.
bubbalouie@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 1y
sudp apt-get install kitty
You can do other stuff to make it pretty and change your prompt, too. Bam - modern 'terminal'.
golden_zealot@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 1y
Is that a starship prompt? How do you style that divider above the prompt that way? It looks really good.
edit: I've read up a bunch on starship and now understand, very nice.