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First time I saw an idea like this was with termkit [1], which I thought was great and was sad to see it didn't get continued development.
I really feel like we overlook the ways in which we limit ourselves by having our CLI interfaces be tied to a thing that emulates a terminal from the 80s.
The composability, scriptability, history, etc. of CLIs is great, but why should that preclude us from being able to quickly show a PNG or graph a function?
Maybe it's an idea whose time has come.
[1] https://github.com/unconed/TermKit
TermKit was one of the inspirations for Extraterm ( https://extraterm.org/ ). It separates command output, allows for reuse of previous output, as well mixing content types.
The terminal VSCode has been picking up on these kinds of features lately. Now they can even "sticky" the previous command line at the top of the window when scrolling through long output.
It has taken a long time, but these ideas are slowing spreading around.
Back when I used a debian based distribution I made use of https://bedrocklinux.org/ to make use of the AUR. It's not for everyone though.
I haven’t tried this yet (so please take my commentary with a grain of salt), but my initial thoughts are: (1) it looks interesting, (2) it looks overwhelming (there’s a lot going on in those screenshots), and (3) it’s likely slow (I might be completely wrong).
To elaborate a bit…
1. I love good design work and well-designed (UI-wise) software, and it certainly looks like the creators of Wave Terminal have made that a priority.
2. UX-wise, there’s just too much going on. As someone who lives in my terminal (with the exception of browsing the web, I do virtually everything in my terminal), it’s the single most important piece of software on my computer and it can never get in my way. I used the same terminal for many years and only switched to kitty [0] a couple years ago after testing it for months. In all of those years, every single terminal I tested managed to get in my way. Somehow, kitty manages to be packed full of features without ever—not even once—getting in my way, being slow, or freezing up on me.
3. Generally speaking, I think building on open web standards is a great thing and a plus. Unfortunately though, even in 2023, my experience has been that it’s really hard to build performant software meant to be run on native platforms using web technologies; the few who get this right—e.g., Figma—are anomalies and they generally invest an enormous amount of time and engineering capital into squeezing out as much performance as possible. As I explained in #2, for something as critical as my terminal, not being performant is simply not an option, so as much as I love the idea of building on open web standards, it actually scares me for software like this.
That said, I’m obviously judging before trying here, so I’ll make some time to test Wave Terminal.
[0]: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty