Reading the introduction, I was really excited. I fully agree with the premise, but the proposed solution seems inadequate. Putting shell in an editor, adding hidden metadata, and making the output hyperlinked just don't feel radical enough.
Also, some parts of the proposal are very vague (description of MVC), while others are extremely specific (whole paragraph about an obscure Unicode delimiter), which makes it hard to get the big picture. That said, improving the terminal is a really challenging and important problem, so I'm glad there are people thinking about it.
> improving the terminal is a really challenging and important problem, so I'm glad there are people thinking about it.
People thought about it 20 years ago, not only about the terminal, but about improving UNIX in general. And not just any people, but the people that did UNIX and C in the first place. Their effort is called Plan9.
Very few people have heard of Plan9 and of those people even fewer used it to the point of understanding the novel ideas.
I use it. Even when I am forced to use UNIX I still use the Plan9 tools along with the Acme and Sam editors. Once you get used to the new Plan9 ideas, you feel crippled in UNIX and can never go back.
> Once you get used to the new Plan9 ideas, you feel crippled in UNIX and can never go back.
Would you care to expand on this? Any specific examples of things that Plan9 does for you that you feel crippled without? I ask out of genuine curiousity, as I've often heard Plan9 mentioned but have never given it enough research to understand its appeal.
For example, I'm a full time web developer and I spent a lot of time in zsh and vim. Would you recommend that someone like me checks out Plan9? Is it the type of thing you could possibly use as your general purpose OS?
I'm using Acme for web devel. Yields very well to scripting. Together with plumber and a few scripts, it provides pretty much a complete IDE. The ability to simply click on any text to 1) execute it or 2) search for it or 3) copy/paste/replace is something that I miss from other editors. Essentially, any text becomes hypertext. Output from compiler or debugger links you to source files etc.
Aside of that there's a big chunk of remote filesystem access ported from Plan 9, but I haven't used that yet.
Also, some parts of the proposal are very vague (description of MVC), while others are extremely specific (whole paragraph about an obscure Unicode delimiter), which makes it hard to get the big picture. That said, improving the terminal is a really challenging and important problem, so I'm glad there are people thinking about it.