I was excited to learn about two new terminal emulator app which seemed to have a lot of cool new features, warp and wave. Then I looked closer and found that both are a no go for me.

Warp is closed source and you need to create an account to use your terminal. Jebus Christus, no, thanks, but no.

Wave is an Electron app. While that’s better than not having a Linux version, I’ve seen how Electron apps behave. They are the ones which hog all memory and get killed by the OS first. So that’s a no from me too.

I guess I keep my Tilix for now.

  • nous@programming.devEnglish
    01·
    8 days ago

    I think the issue fundamentally is that this isn’t what terminal emulators are. The terminal emulator initializes a TTY session and enters a shell environment (sh, zsh, fish, etc). The medium is text and cannot be anything else.

    This is 90s thinking. Why must terminal emulators only be text and only do things that a physical terminal could? What makes teminals so nice is not that they work on 90s technology. Some terminal emualtors can already display images. Which is great. And the ideas they are introducing are still fundamentally text based, but are geared towards structuring that texts a bit more than a constant stream of characters on the screen.

    Skill issue. Pipe your output to something (like a file or the “less” command)

    This is a convenience issue not a skill issue. Yes you can pipe output to things but you need to know before hand that you want to do that. And with less you lose that output once you close less. And with files you have to clean them up after the fact. Both of these are inconvenient and need to be thought of before you run a command. IMO it would be nice to just run a command and then be able to collapse or expand or search its output after the fact and not have to preempt everything beforehand.

    The argument that you can already do that in a much less convenient way is not a very good argument.