What projects are out there seeking to innovate in the terminal and command line space, and improve or revolutionize the terminal environment?
- NuShell is one such example, a shell that uses structured data in its pipelines. Many other experimental shells out there innovating in different spaces.
- An even more daring example is DomTerm. It’s a terminal emulator with more rich rendering. Supports rich text, images, etc while maintaining xterm compatibility.
Please do not shy from answering projects that are very experimental, early stage, break a lot of backwards compatibility or radically change the current way of doing things.
Zellij - a better way for a cli application to communicate with the terminal
Warp - a terminal emulater that integrates LLM completion natively
Fish - a shell that generates completions automatically from a man-page
Thanks for the answer!
Warp has really cool features (seems to be beyond LLM?), but what kept me from trying is that its not open source, and seems to have anti privacy features, and VC-funded. It is still a very tempting product, so maybe I will try it.
Zellij seems interesting. I’ll check that out!
Can you talk more about zellij? The docs don’t really explain much. It seems to be a multiplexer like tmux?
One reason I haven’t used multiplexers yet is that I use tiling window managers, and so the tiling is managed by that through separate terminal windows.
If you want to have a single window for multiple shells or you want to replace use of tmux in an SSH context, Zellij is exactly that. The plus side is if you work remote from your machine, an ssh connection will feel faster than a VNC session to the same machine. IMO 100% a difference you can feel if you already remote to your work desktop.
I haven’t seriously used it yet but I should. If you’re a fan of text environments it’s worth a shot. I’m still rocking multiple putty windows like a caveman.
Sorry, I can’t find the blog post. I remember reading something about how zellij’s goal was to allow cli apps to create pop-ups, overylay windows and other stuff all in the terminal. Idk where it is though
Need to check Zellij.
On desktop I use Kitty multiple windows on dual monitor with layouts, ditch tmux for kitty.But i still use tmux on server with tmuxinator to create layouts, Zellij looks to be a good replacement
Basically everything from https://charm.sh/
I use glow all the time, I love it!
I’ve been playing with wish too, I see a lot of potential for it
I’m very bitter that I can’t use charm.sh lib’s in Python applications 💔
break a lot of backwards compatibility or radically change the current way of doing things
Plan 9. We can still have textual interfaces without emulating the ancient use of teletypewriters.
The bell labs plan9?
The one from outer space!
Yes, or one of the forks.
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Seems like a dead project? Sad because it looks amazing.
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Oils is interesting.
Yeah I think YSH can pipe around structured data. This wiki page has some details:
Fzf isn’t really experimental. It’s pretty mature at this point. I found it to be pretty innovative, though, adding an interactive spin to the find program.
Terminology was pretty dope in its day
https://www.enlightenment.org/about-terminology.md
The whole concept of terminal emulation is stuck. But would different be adopted?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
This guy is experimenting with radically improving command line ux
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
It might not be what you are looking for, but I think nnn is a interesting reimagining of terminal file navigation/management.
What problems are you trying to solve?
I like exploring and learning about innovative software.
Sometimes, I don’t know about a problem until I find its solution. For example, before ever using the terminal seriously, I never felt I had any problem working with my computer. Nonetheless, the terminal world has given me a lot of enjoyment and solved a lot of problems around navigating a computer and working with it.
Be aware, most corporate environments running Linux or a UNIX will be using POSIX compliant (or mostly compliant) shells. Fish is fun, but if you aren’t comfortable with bash, dash, zsh, and/or AT&T ksh, your time ramping up to supporting the systems will take a lot longer.
Same for those python shells. Handy as hell, but not widely deployed around businesses. So you’d need to be on point with real python skills and POSIX style shells.
If you aren’t using, or don’t intend to, do any of this for corporate jobs, then sky’s the limit and have fun. This is not to say you can’t find these in a job somewhere, just that it won’t be very common.
