zadjii

Joined 11 years ago

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247

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Aug 18

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Comment · 6 months ago

LSH feels like it's being massively undersold here. The `grammars/` directory of helix is something like 183MB. That would be a non-starter for a lot of use cases for edit (which is already only 167kB). tree-sitter might be more powerful, but this is more than good enough, and it is orders of magnitude smaller.

I'd love to read a longer blog post that details how y'all compared existing implementations and came to the conclusion that writing your own was the best path here. This kind of attention to craftmanship is something I feel like we're desperately missing these days in software.

Comment · 11 months ago

You're most welcome! Working on it to help serve the whole developer ecosystem has been the delight of my career :)

Comment · 11 months ago

Y'know, I spent a week investigating doing something similar with the Windows Terminal about 18 months ago: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/16495#issuecomm...

There's even more under the "Updates archive" expando in that post.

It was a pretty compelling prototype. But after I played with Polyglot Notebooks[1], I pretty much just abandoned that experiment. There's a _lot_ of UI that needs to be written to build a notebook-like experience. But the Polyglot notebooks took care of that by just converting the commandline backend to a jupyter kernel.

I've been writing more and more script-like experiments in those ever since. Just seems so much more natural to have a big-ol doc full of notes, that just so happens to also have play buttons to Do The Thing.

[1]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-dotne...

Comment · 11 months ago

Notably this article was written based on Windows Terminal 1.18. That was before WT 1.22, which included this PR: [^1] which roughly doubled the terminal's throughput. That combined with a couple of other PRs in 1.22 made some scenarios up to _16x_ faster[^2]

[^1]: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/pull/17510

[^2]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-terminal-...

Comment · 1 year ago

It's shipped with Windows since Windows 11. Updates come via the Store (since that's a lot faster than OS updates), but it's definitely preinstalled these days

Comment · 1 year ago

FWIW The definitive thread on "images in terminals" is probably found in these threads:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/terminal-wg/specifications/-/...

there's lengthy discussion from just about everyone at this point in those threads, about why images in terminals is Hard

Comment · 1 year ago

No love for Windows Terminal? I know that linux has a much richer terminal ecosystem, but WT ranks a lot higher than a wide breadth of terminal emulators on linux now. Could anyone have imagined that 10 years ago?

Comment · 1 year ago

Low key: Loop is actually great. I think it's the first thing I've used that's captured the dream of what Google Wave wanted to be

Comment · 1 year ago

What complaints do you have with the Windows Terminal specifically? I can get having issues with CMD or PowerShell - they're very non-unix-y. But WT itself is probably one of the most feature-complete terminal emulators out there these days. I'd love to know what you think it's missing

Comment · 1 year ago

Yedit actually was written by a Microsoft employee :P

It had some problems however with handling unicode (iirc). Basically, shipping yedit would have required a huge re-write of its underlying text buffer. In the end the discussions we had with Malcom concluded that just writing a new one was probably easier and more maintainable in the long run.

Comment · 1 year ago

who would have guessed that we're all lurkers here too :P Hacker News isn't just for linux stans - Windows devs like to hang out here too

Comment · 2 years ago

That is _technically_ correct (the best kind). There's some plumbing between conhost and Terminal we need to clean up before we can add it to Terminal too. We've got a branch ready, we've just got to merge a whole stack of PRs first before we can get there.

Comment · 2 years ago

Has been for like, five years now ;)

Comment · 2 years ago

We shipped it (the Terminal) with the first versions of Windows 11. I don't think the "default terminal" feature defaulted to the new Terminal in the first win11 builds, but it should now. And you can always pick whichever terminal you want as the default terminal

Comment · 2 years ago

Conhost and Terminal share quite a lot of code in fact. The text buffer, the renderer, the VT sequence parser - all that's the same codebase. That allows bugfixes and improvements to the the Terminal to also flow back to the vintage console (for people who still use that)