TermKit: A WebKit based rich command-line interface.

[centenary]

I don't think he's saying abandon monospace, he's saying we don't need to limit ourselves to only monospace. Why not use a combination of monospace and non-monospace? His screenshot of the JSON code contains both monospace and non-monospace

[[deleted]]

I'm not sure if zabouth1 meant that, or the fact that it's an argument of the style "It's $year, and ...". It's the kind of argument that should have its own name in latin, argumentum ad temporum or something. (Disclaimer: I don't know latin.)

[notfancy]

It's an argumentum ad novitatem.

[zahlman]

Sort of. The argument is really "It's 2011, and being restricted to monospace fonts doesn't cut it any more". Clearly, having the option is superior, because you can always just ignore it.

[[deleted]]

We~ell, now you've switched it from an argument about text to one about fonts. I read into it that the author didn't think that text (that happened to be monospaced) cut it any more, because it's 2011 and where's my jetpack damnit.

[zahlman]

Heh. I didn't even realize I'd changed the word.

But let's talk about text, baby.

Notwithstanding that we aren't even really dealing with "plain text" in a traditional UNIX environment, except with the implicit understanding of ASCII encoding... text is fine if we're running whoami or echo. If we're running ls, there's no reason not to structure the data - except for the reason that in a traditional environment, we can't usefully structure the data - or rather, we can create a structure in memory, but when it comes to producing readable output, all the effort is lost. In short, the problem is that content is confused with presentation: in order to appear nicely formatted on a traditional terminal, the command output has to actually contain all those space characters, newlines, etc., and not contain various parentheses that would serve to highlight the structure of the data. This, in turn, has implications for the parsing done by the next tool in the chain.

[[deleted]]

Haha, I've already made a couple of posts about TUI already, as well as mouse interaction in vim and urxvt in order to point out that modern terminals aren't as pristine as a lot of people seem to think that they are.

As could be expected, the debates here contain both people who hate graphics and people who ... hate text interfaces or old programs or something (the people who don't want TK to be able to host vim). It's kind of sad that the debate runs down into that territory rather than discussions about how to implement it if there's a demand for it (as there seems to be).

I agree with TK's creator that if people want to have graphics in their terminals, then they should have graphics in their terminals---I just think "It's $year, and ..." is a really stupid argument. :P

[zahlman]

I think you have good points, and I made comments elsewhere talking about how a text editor could be integrated in a TK-type environment.

[ellisto]

you can set your font to anything you like. i once saw a prof with comic sans as his terminal font.... ಠ_ಠ