Every week I see a new terminal app here on HN, and it's always some startup with no good will that's built it on Electron and filled it full of always-online trackers.
Why is this a thing, and why do companies think this is a market worth pursuing?
The inflow of new engineers which are not so familiar with traditional tools like a basic terminal and a text editor. That was all which was needed to write software. Most of the software stack was quite flat back then. Today, the way everyone starts is by installing a bunch of tools, frameworks and an IDE to navigate through those tools. Even a simple web page requires to install 100MBs of dependencies. Trying to learn those tools from scratch is not useful because it's all abstracted and is almost never dealt with. These terminals are making the use of those tools simpler using features like autocompletes, suggestions, metadata about the command etc. It's just like how an IDE became necessary for some languages like .NET or Java because it was no longer just the language. For terminals it's now good 'ol coreutils vs a bunch of npm crap.
I personally don't like to use pimped up terminals because they are written in electron and are not portable. The whole point of using a minimal terminal is being snappy and portable. Just like engineers today can't write code without autocomplete, new engineers won't be able to navigate the cli without assistance.
An analogy would be, vim purists with 0 config vs people who have elaborate configs.
> An analogy would be, vim purists with 0 config vs people who have elaborate config
I find this pretty offensive. I have a vim config that automated my workflows, and integrated linters and build tools etc...and I am using Linux based systems for over 22 years now.
While I consent with the rest of your comment, I think that most people don't want to deal with shitty syntaxes that are less memorable than they should be. Computers and TTYs have moved far beyond 80 character screenlines these days.
Having a -s instead of "sync", for example, doesn't make sense from the UX perspective. Most of the reimplementations of common CLI tools of coreutils and others are mostly there because they were fed up with inconsistent parameters, options, and flags of those programs that have historically grown out of proportions.
On the other hand I can also understand why people use zsh, even when I don't like it because I'd consider myself a minimalist. Though I also have a lot of aliases for common tools I use, because I would go rogue when I would have to type all those parameters on a regular basis.
The issue most terminals try to solve is explainability and predictability, because they see terminals as a human interface, and not as a tool to write yourself one.
The clashes of those different philosophies are also found in shell implementations. I mean: off the top of your head, do you know all string manipulation syntaxes in bash? Probably not.
vim wars. I am on the vim side. I don't care about vscode that much. The only gripe is the first class support vscode gets in terms of plugins as compared to (neo)vim.
The vim purist having 0 config wasn't my original thought. I had heard about it before and I have seen talks where the speaker would do everything with default vim syntax and not use plugins or maps. I personally have a bunch of plugins and shortcuts because I can't touch type. so I need most used keybindings close by.
I agree the inconsistencies with coreutils. Having helper tools and scripts vs spoon feeding with all options using arrow keys. Just the extremes, having aliases is all good and I never remember awk and sed syntax.
> I personally don't like to use pimped up terminals because they are written in electron and are not portable.
Alacritty, Wezterm and Kitty say hi. Uber-fast native apps that also render all the modern Unicode symbols correctly (well OK, Kitty has some Python).
You are also over-exaggerating and coming across as the "get off my lawn" guy.
I am 42, I was there when terminals were as bland as non-salted spaghetti in boiling water with nothing else in. Nowadays I like the autocompletes (with context nonetheless -- a huge improvement; you can autocomplete GIT verbs for example), I like the fuzzy finders that I integrate with (a) looking for files, (b) looking in my command history, (c) looking in my OS process list and (d) looking through all modified / untracked GIT files in a repo, I like the colors, I like the icons for separate file types, and I like modern incarnations of coreutils whose output provides you visual aid that objectively reduces the amount of parsing that your eyes must do on the screen. Eye and mind fatigue are real and all visual aid [that's not overdone] helps a ton. There are even scientific studies on it.
Want me to go on?
Conservatism like yours is not productive. Like with everything in life, there's good and there's bad e.g. I won't ever use the terminals that are written in Electron and phone home -- that gets an immediate "NOPE!" from me -- but there are objectively useful terminals, terminal extensions and CLI tools out there.
That you judge all of them by a few hip repos that are making the rounds here on HN only says something non-flattering about your abilities to gauge innovation.
Be more open-minded. It helps in an objective manner and with objectively improving metrics to show for it afterwards. At least it did for me and 30+ colleagues.
I use Alacritty full time (tried kitty, didn't work with my workflow), personal and work. I am not ruling those off. I don't mean to come as mean and conservative. I just don't like the over emphasis on "spoon feeding" tools across media. I know there are much better tools which can help with productivity. But, new engineers are only going to pick tools which are "marketed", the "hip" ones without weighing merits. But for sure, whatever works for them, who am I to judge.
I too use a whole lot of tools to keep the output less messy and I know some tools which have changed my life, ripgrep, exa, neovim, zsh, alacritty, git extensions, fzf and what not.
I'm baffled by the repeated insistence that alacritty and kitty are fast (never tried wexterm). There's noticeable lag spawning either on my reasonably new and fast laptop, which xterm just doesn't have.
When I need a terminal, mod+enter spawn one and close it. I'll often do this to download a file, start yt-dlp, mpv etc. The session is all tmux so I never keep the window around when not in use.
Me too. On my systems, running Debian with dwm, a Kitty terminal appears instantly. It’s the fastest terminal I’ve ever used, by a big margin, including xterm. The fact that I can do things such as ssh into a remote machine and see an image in that machine’s filesystem displayed in the terminal are bonuses. I mainly use it because of its speed and Unicode support.
Sure, if that's your workflow then I get it. I and many others keep around several persistent windows or tabs however. I don't care if Alacritty takes 1s to start.
Still doesn't invalidate its usefulness, too. Alacritty in particular is often times a better Unicode-rendering citizen compared to other terminals.
> The inflow of new engineers which are not so familiar with traditional tools like a basic terminal and a text editor.
I think many people start learning to use these tools at the same time they learn to program, I know I did. You expect junior devs to be terminal wizards?
> Even a simple web page requires to install 100MBs of dependencies.
No it doesn't? Some tooling requires lots of dependencies, but it's still very possible to open a text editor and spin up a web page.
They aren't literally claiming a physical requirement, they are describing todays most common workflow.
If I said you need to install 100's of mb of gcc to produce a binary, would you say "no you don't? you can write bytes directly from the shell right into a file" It would be a technical fact, and yet kind of stupid to pretend not to understand that today, in all practical senses, one produces a binary with a compiler suite of one sort or another.
Today, it's a growing trend that software is developed using huge ides and stacks of frameworks. And a new developer is started right off at the highest most abstract (most automatic and magic, sold as most "productive" or "practical") layers possible, which requires the fattest of ides and the tallest of stacks.
Yo! exactly my point. I never expect new devs to be experts. But the labor I am spending to teach one of those newbies (well 1.5yrs of experience) about how to check for a port listening is just astonishing. Being a whiz and knowing the basics of the environment you are working with daily, there is a difference.
I understand it takes one text editor to write a static website. But hear me out, If you asked a dev today to make a landing page, they look for templates instead of writing that stuff. It's possible, but it's not probably today. Everyone is going to whip up a react or it's derivative to even write a simple project.
> Even a simple web page requires to install 100MBs of dependencies
I had problems with having to log in to a bunch of audio encoders last weekend to find out why they were engaged.
I looked at the webpage, a few calls with http/digest returning xml.
I strung together a quick perl script to take an ip/user/password, fire it off to the device, decode the output, fire off more queries, and dump out a <tr>, and then wrapped that in a bash script which generated the rest of the page for the N devices I wanted the status of. Took less than 60 minutes. Deployed it as a new apache virtual host with +ExecCGI.
3878 bytes plus OS provided packages for things like kernel etc, and now I can save time again and again by looking at the status page.
You can choose to make a simple webpage to perform a simple task and have it take 100s of MB, or you can choose not to.
The purists got it wrong. The maximalist JS devs got it wrong. Imo the best way for most things in life is to have it as simple as possible without abstracting away everything, kinda like a middle path- like using zsh with autocomplete and highlighting in st, huh?
For electron, because it is the only reasonable multi platform UI platform out there. I do not like that fact but it is true.
For why, because the terminal protocol is atrocious, mix data with control signalling, mix together multiple layers making it really hard to extend it, is stuck emulating an emulator of a physical device from the 70s, is bursting at the seams and is blocking dozens of possibilities in ergonomics that would make our industry kill less people.
Is it well done or can it make money ? I doubt it. Is there an obvious need with wide impact? Fuck yes.
Small correction:
2. The licensing makes it very expensive for non-open-source applications that are unable to comply with the restrictions of the LGPLv3.
As stated _many_ times: Qt can be used via LGPLv3 in commercial software. Only a few components like QtQuick3d are GPLv3 only.
Having used both QT and Electron, my subjective experience is that Electron is just more ergonomic to use. And it's not because I'm new to C++ either. I have more years logged writing C++ than I do in the JS ecosystem. It's also not because I actually like Electron very much (I have several big problems with it), but if I needed to build a new cross-platform UI app these days Electron would be my default.
Lack of customisation should be seen as a good thing. As a user I want apps built to fit into my platform, not for the app to be consistent across disparate platforms. I understand why marketing does not like this, though.
Indeed, it’s not “native” many places, but at least does not tend to become a blank canvas for marketing to build something completely custom on. I’d take QT over electron any day, but would pay for a native app over using either.
> Lack of customisation should be seen as a good thing
It’s not.
> As a user I want apps built to fit into my platform
As a user, I don’t care that about that. As long as the standard keyboard shortcuts exist, as well as reasonable integration with the OS which Electron does perfectly, I’m all set.
I don't use Amarok, but looking at screenshots, it looks similar to other Qt applications on Windows that seem to sit in this uncanny valley of coming quite close to looking native, but just different enough to feel strange. I also don't use the Spotify app, but it seems from screenshots to do a better job of appearing like a native Windows 10 application to me.
QT talent pool and ecosystem is a rounding error compared to what we have with the web ecosystem. If you want to make something with medias, graphs, a few custom widgets, a reactive layout and deep routing, it will take 10 to 30 times longer with QT.
I myself prefer the snapiness of QT apps, but budget and time to market will win.
Electron apps are always resource hogs, frequently slow and generally integrate extremely poorly. As a consumer I care not one whit for how large the "talent pool" for the web ecosystem is, I care about how terrible the application is.
As a developer I must say calling it talent is in most cases a huge stretch, as I do believe you can probably make something in Electron that performs passably, integrates passably and will still be a resource hog. The reason we see basically none of this is because people simply don't care to engineer these applications well. "It's just the browser", after all. Why look deeper?
Sure but most teams do the maths for the cost/benefit ratio and make the call.
In this context the argument is moot: a better app that is too expensive or slow to make is simply not going to be released vs the worse one that actually gets published.
That's all there is to it.
That's why people still use wordpress, excel or jupyter notebooks for important stuff.
You may want things to be different, and for good reasons, but it's still what's the market has decided.
Quite, I guess developers like that electron looks equally wrong everywhere? There’s teams of smart people at Apple, Microsoft, GNOME, KDE and other environments that spend a lot of time making things consistent (okay, perhaps not MS) so that users know intuitively how things work. Why throw all that away?
Not to mention it spins up an entire chrome process for every app? And doesn’t work on natively wayland?
It’s hard not to conclude that devs working this way hate their users.
I’m 100% confident that a Multi-Platform Terminal can be built with C#, XAML and .NET 6. The dotNET ecosystem has multi-platform UI toolkits such as MAUI, Uno and Avalonia UI and Standard APIs to interact with all OS.
Can we acknowledge that just because we don’t have a particular problem, doesn’t mean other people won’t? Will these companies be profitable? I have no idea. No one does. But I don’t understand this sentiment unless you’re being forced to use their product.
When you start investing you quickly realize how difficult it is to gauge a “good” idea. The only thing that matters is how the market responds and it seems like these solutions have a small, dedicated and quickly growing user base.
It's your choice to read that question as either curiosity or complaint.
I don't see anything in the question that exactly says "get this crap off my screen" "these companies should not be allowed to exist". I see a critical opinion but that is entirely allowed. Your critical opinion like the one you just wrote is presumably allowed.
But I do see an observance of phenomenon, and I find any phenomenon interesting.
This post is a perfectly valid question, just at it's academic face value.
The OP is very negative in tone[1], although curious. I think the person you’re responding to provided a solid answer to OP’s question, whilst imbuing their answer with a reasonable response to OP’s tone.
[1] "(badly)", "always some startup with no good will", "Electron" (arguably), "filled it full of always-online trackers"
If they're re-inventing the terminal poorly it can only ever make things worse. What is not to understand about the sentiment that the world should not get worse?
> The only thing that matters is how the market responds
The only thing that matters is whether or not something can in aggregate make the world a better place. Tons of stuff does and is profitable, but most things that are profitable emphatically do not. So this is a terrible signal.
What is the problem with that ? I've tried both warp.dev and fig.io, except thier annoying telementry events, I love them both.
Developers use terminals frequently, and there have been no major improvements in terminal software in the last few years. I'd be happy to see more terminals developed because they are useful. I would rather encourage them than discourage it
Much like IRC, I expect the old-timers to keep insisting that this ancient un-extendable mess is “good enough” (Who cares about mobile phones? They’re just a fad, nobody really uses them) - until something like Discord comes along to show what actual user-friendliness looks like, and then a few years after that we’ll get some janky open-source clones...
Why do comedians make jokes about hotels and airplane food? Because it's what they live and breathe every day. It doesn't mean that audiences want those jokes.
The demand for fancy terminals is unproven, but anybody who's pressed <Tab> in their shell or tried to process files with shell pipelines has thought - this could be better.
Discover the app that does a specific thing or discover the options inside the app? For the former I don't see how to help except studying what's available. For the latter we've been having man and info since at least the 80s.
Both. GUI interfaces and apps have menus and undo that help with discoverability. To do something equivalent in CLI after not using a tool requires several invocations of man, --help, etc., and checking and rechecking that you hadn't got something wrong that can result in something catastrophic. Stuff like Warp seems like they with that, by interactively displaying most relevant info to help you write the right invocations.
made me think about my NEED of what I have regarding terminals.
I think I am using about 2% of the potential of what the terminal is offering me.
So my need for a new terminal app would be one which - undisruptive - trains me to unlock more and more power of the terminal.
first idea, a panel on the right hand side which explains what I just did, highlights pot improvements (how I could have chained the last 5 tasks) and explains similar or pot. next steps.
A beginners terminal.
What are your unmet needs in regards of the terminal app?
I agree. I always feel like my use of shell scripting and unix tools to perform basic tasks is so much less than it could be. I enjoy the ideas of portability and speed that comes from these tools, but often I just want to get the task done and end up writing something in Python.
Things that always get me:
- Meaningful whitespace in bash.
- Differences between Mac BSD-derived utilities and POSIX utilities. (Perils of using a Mac, I guess, I know I can install the GNU versions of most things but ugh)
- Not being able to just use PCRE everywhere
- The magic of awk
- Differences in parameter/flag placement between different tools
- The amount of edge cases that you have to account for, usually to do with various levels of globbing, or special
characters or even spaces in file names or utility output.
- More, I'm sure, that I can't think of right now.
there's just this underlying sense of inconsistency that I have when dealing with these tools that I feel results in me always having to check the man pages or StackOverflow whenever I want to string together more than a couple of operations.
I agree, discoverability has always been a paint point of command line interfaces, and I'm not sure what the best solution is. The most annoying thing for me is having to switch back and forth between some documentation of the commands I'm trying to use and the terminal.
Also I hate how clunky the interfaces feel when you're trying to view something which happened prior. It might be there, might not, some command you ran might have cleared the terminal at some point, some overwrite over themselves to do things like progress bars, and god forbid if you resize the terminal at some point because this will reflow everything that was written to it earlier into garbage.
- Better support for multiline editing. Including full mouse support so that I can click to highlight a word in the command I want to replace rather than having to slowly arrow key to it and then backspace it out. And automatically stripping the newlines so I don't have to end every line with a backslash.
- Support for things like multiple cursors, again so that I can edit my terminal commands efficiently.
I like the idea of beginners terminal. To make them used to using keyboard instead of hunting for icons and menus. Once they are comfortable, they will find faster alternatives and end right back to the default plain terminal.
Same with "MLOps" tools... same with every niche, bunch of useless tools just trying to grab some market.
But this is not a recent thing, every time the current thing gets flooded with crap ideas competing for some market share (ie longtail theory).
Sometimes the old ideas are just rebuilt, nocode is just RAD with different branding, event sourcing is just ESB, microservices is basically SOA...
What is scary that actually very little is being created, and a huge amount of crap just resuscitates from old tech, or is a skewed version of some working technology which tries to make it different so it doesn't look like a complete ripoff.
I love terminals, but honestly there isn't much to improve there IMHO is already good, I admire those who try and honest people who try to get a good idea into the market, I despise completely people trying to push any random hello world as a product which is basically a spyware full of trackers.
I don’t know, what about snowflake (for example). Before they launched you could argue it’s not needed; now, it’s got customers and is publicly traded. Hard to tell.
The thing you’ve described hasn’t happened though. You’re really talking about two recent projects - Fig and Warp - neither of which are Electron and only one of which is a terminal. It’s true however that both of them have been rightly criticised for their frankly offensive telemetry shit.
I like the interest in modernizing the terminal as an interface. There's still room for innovation and improvement. That's probably the big reason. Unfortunately this push is mired in app culture yak shaving bloatware bullshit (with a few exceptions). I'm surprised the market hasn't been flooded with Web3 DAPP terminal apps that will "revolutionize the terminal somehow, bro". Anyway, I love the enthusiasm but I'm not using a 100MB+ terminal app that requires a cloud account. I'll keep on BASHING like its 1989, thank you.
Human centered design research established long ago that GUI applications are easier to learn and easier to use. Terminals are a good 'lowest common denominator' due to their simple design and low cost implementation. People want the benefits of GUI with the portability of terminal applications which has resulted in ASCII-art boxes, menus, progress bars, trees, etc. These fancy new terminal emulators further enable these high-end-for-a-terminal-though-low-end-for-a-GUI features.
I wouldn't call that a re-invention UNIX as much as a serendipitous streamlining of it. At the rate features are being added to Linux, I wonder how long before it collapses under its own weight, and these passion projects like plan9, serenity os, redox, etc. take center-stage to pick up the pieces.
Just because those who don't understand UNIX are doomed to reinvent it doesn't mean that those who do understand UNIX aren't also doomed to reinvent it.
None. Being explicit about the files I'm deleting tends to make me think about what I'm actually doing. Hacking in a windows-style garbage folder isn't exactly difficult either.
As someone who doesn't use any of these terminal-modernizing tools: because terminals are archaic and mediate most of the important engineering work done in tech? It doesn't seem complicated. What's weirder is fixity the terminal interface has compared to the rapid evolution of all our other tools, from text editors to database interfaces.
I believe that this is partially because default shells (mostly bash) are not 'really' beginner friendly, and you usually need to spend some time configuring them to be comfortable working with them. That said, i use fish shell so what do I know :)
They are trying tho? Warp terminal has experimental ai command search that allows you to translate natural language to bash (shell) commands. That means that you could use your terminal without ever learning how to use the shell, effectively replacing not just your terminal but your shell too.
Terminal is just the program that shows text. New terminal emulators (not all new terminal emulators, but the ones mentioned in comments, the ones op asked about mostly) are way more than just programs showing text, they are also replacing/re-imagining the shell, or re-imagining the way you interact with the shell; thay are wrappers around the shell (and more).
It makes no sense to me as well. Iterm2 + zsh + oh-my-zsh + tmux and you have everything you need.
On linux I just use gnome-terminal + zsh + oh-my-zsh and I am perfectly capable. For me, this is a case of "it's not broke so why are you messing with it?"
No one forces you to use their product and given Linux and GNU's raison d'etre and success it's hard to imagine any commercial product ever could become a monopoly in devtools.
So after that I'd look at: historically has a venture capital firm ever funded innovation? And I think the answer is yes.
So worst case they have a spyware product you don't need to use. Best case they actually innovate.
I'm cool with letting that play out.
Not that I think this thread on HN or my opinion makes any difference to what these companies do/don't do. :)
I think it points to a lack of creativity, plus the modern surveillance economy. Try to sell someone what they already have, but with stalking built in, so you can skim off a profit for doing basically fuck all.
I think the more pertinent question is why these startups are receiving funding. A firm funding dev tools must have a few people who'll understand why these products will struggle to find a good market fit.
Geeky founders think they are so smart that others should work way they are working.
They forget that other geeky developers think the same way and don't care about using someone else tools/workflows because "they" themselves are smarter.
For founding people with money - they see hype of development and they don't know most of geeks will think that tool is crap. They might "there are 100k developers we can reach if each pay $10 we have lots of money" - they don't know geeks don't want to pay for anything because they can build their own tools and their own Dropbox.
I can totally see how there are people with blind spots why these products won't work.
One thing is that terminals are a kind of magic. While the rest of the graphical interface gets bogged down with drawer pull animations and blinking buttons it can be possible to run a whole series of commands with reasonable responsiveness. Systems are drowning in response choking complexity. Did an app just start a download in the background? There is probably an app that will tell you, but even a bad terminal can probably tell you faster. It is a one size fits all immediate gratification head above the churning waves maneuver in an accessible package.
There is one but I'm scared that the HN Gods will forever curse my account if I post the word "bad" and the name of that terminal here in the same sentence.
Is even worse. Is the same old, bad, ancient, archaic, obsolete, terminal thingy with a small improvement (https://github.com/nushell/nushell is the only I see that are half-there).
And it existed MUCH better tools for interactive programming (of the past) to copy instead.
I think it's in large part due to Hyper's original successes (that's Vercel's (fml. ZEIT) Electron-based terminal emulator, one of - if not THE - first of its kind).
There was a lot of hype built around it at the time, and a lot of people that used and believed in it. I think a lot of people saw that and thought "I could market that".
it's one of those things that makes me want to quit technology, people get bored out of their minds and try to reinvent the wheel instead of doing something useful
Compared to docker-wrangling, ML grinding, & dodging the latest kick-in-the-nuts from appstores/browsers/search engines/cloud providers, re-inventing the VT-220 sounds pretty sweet!
Today, people like to collect data in all possible variations. The data itself can be sold, but equally they show that they can do it. so at best they can secure an order for data storage.
A data probe? One that high value targets will install themselves? Poppycock! How dare you besmirch the industry with such unseemly accusations, sir!? ;-)
First, there's only 2 apps. Second, none of the terminals you're talking about is in Electron, and neither is cross-platform ( partially as a result). Fig isn't really a terminal for that matter.
So you're just ranting for ranting's sake without even understanding the subject?
As for what the market is, maybe they're trying to emulate Docker's switch to developer tooling and make money off enterprises buying team licenses. It's not the worst business model I've heard of, and could work if they get traction. And funnily that's where we get to the other part of your rant - telemetry. Without that data they have significantly lower chances of making it. I don't particularly trust their promises they'll make it opt-in once they've gained enough traction and data, but i think it's unfair to suggest they're collecting errors and usage patterns to sell that data ( which IMHO doesn't make sense, and they would need to warn users that's the case, thank you GDPR).
I personally don't like to use pimped up terminals because they are written in electron and are not portable. The whole point of using a minimal terminal is being snappy and portable. Just like engineers today can't write code without autocomplete, new engineers won't be able to navigate the cli without assistance.
An analogy would be, vim purists with 0 config vs people who have elaborate configs.