alt Hacker News > or whatever the tycat thingy understands
> And then you only need access to the mouse position in pixel granularity, and you basically have the foundation for a graphical environment. We can implement Qt and GTK for that new thingy.
> But: What is it for? Why not use your graphical environment in a direct way?
> What is it for? Why not use your graphical environment in a direct way? The existence of terminal emulators is the proof for it being at least as strong (or stronger) as your terminal can ever get. Right?
We do also use our graphical environment. It's just that our terminal also happens to not be stuck in the 1970s and pretending it's running on a teletype. Decades ago someone could have made a very similar argument to the one you're making that we shouldn't have added colours to terminals because real dumb terminals are all green or amber screen.
It's at least partially about pushing the envelope, not accepting the status quo, and trying to improve things. Terminal emulators tend to have a fixed feature set and there's a bunch of things they can't do that would be nice to have.
I mentioned the kitty terminal emulator before. It's doing similar things. And it's quite popular with the kids. These enhancements to terminals are a good thing! I'm glad these people are experimenting with things even if they turn out to not be very useful (and many terminology improvements are great!)
Another great example of this type of thing is the tysend command, which lets you download files without starting a new ssh session: you're ssh'd into some remote machine and you want a file. You can switch to another terminal and scp, or (as long as the host you're logged into has tysend), you can just do 'tysend /path/to/file'. Terminology pops up a (very pretty) save dialog asking where you want to save the file, and then displays a (very pretty) progress bar while the transfer happens.
I think maybe you need to try terminology to understand the many, many ways it's superior to a more conventional terminal emulator. For me, terminology is definitely enlightenment's "killer app". You can try it just by installing it, btw - you don't need to be running enlightenment :)
> You're missing the point, which is that the EFL library just has media playback built into it - for a lot of different formats.
As far as I understand, you're missing the point. Every format that someone now wants to handle on terminal, needs to be supported by the EFL library?! Does it support LO spreadsheets? PDFs? Audacity projects? Raw camera images? HTML? Yes? And now I want to switch away from LO to some very new office tools, and I cannot, because EFL doesn't support it yet?
And all that just in order to show some previews in a terminal emulator instead of the graphical environment around it that is perfectly capable to do so since half a century? Where all the applications already exist?
> tycat doesn't need to know or care about file formats, nor does terminology
Fine. Just replace tycat with EFL in what I wrote before.
> I was playing around a while back with embedding GUI elements like buttons inside terminology. [...] Limited real-world practical value, perhaps, but interesting IMO.
Yes, it sounds like an interesting puzzle. But it's artificial. It solves a problem that just doesn't exist at all, and it doesn't actually improve anything, as long as it's not universally supported (at least in an actual Linux virtual terminal outside of X11/Wayland).
> Rasterman and I have both given examples of how this improves the terminal experience.
But why are you trying to improve the horse riding experience, if you actually have a car that is just artificially stripped down to feel like a horse? Just use the car as a car instead! ;)
What context switch are you talking about? Your eyes moving to where the new window opened? srsly?
Why can't the same folks not improve keyboard support in e.g. VLC? If it's actually so bad... Is it? I rarely feel the desire to keyboard control a media player, admittedly... But I would be surprised if VLC is worse in that regard than some terminal thingy that is a niche inside a niche inside a niche... A terminal media player needs the same explicit development work to get it right. It's not magically keyboard-friendly just because it involves antiquated technology for displaying.
> and time of having to fire up a media player to preview a file
You fire up a new tycat instance instead. What's the difference? Here VLC takes, idk, 500ms?! Half of it is the window animation that I could turn off, if I would dislike it (I don't).
> I mentioned the kitty terminal emulator before. It's doing similar things. And it's quite popular with the kids. These enhancements to terminals are a good thing!
Yeah, make them universally work on any virtual terminals, and then it'd be at least an interesting discussion whether this was an actual improvement or not. As long as I need some E terminal, or a particular terminal that is "popular with the kids", I really don't see at all why this is a good idea to spend any efforts for. Just use the car as a car, instead of disabling the engine, pretending it to be a horse, and then find clever ways to make it feel more like a car again. It already _is_ a car. Don't make up artificial restrictions that do not exist, just in order to find mediocre ways to somehow patch parts of them away a bit.
Give Dolphin a chance! It's like the kids' vi setup, just with slightly different shortcuts, and without all the weaknesses. It even can render actual icons without a patched terminal font! And if keyboard support is weak, then this is not because it's not a terminal application. Make them a bug report. Or, if appropriately skilled, send them a patch! Then we all profit from it.
Bonus: It can display emojis, without breaking alignment in half of the terminal emulators, because the actual glyph width differs from what the "API" (i.e. dancing some escape sequences and somehow intercept the answers from somewhere) tells you.