> 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.
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.