Nice. I mean, is there anything more satisfying than comparing someone's concrete implementation with our perfect ideal of what they should have written? Ah, the software in our imagination is so wonderful! It is elegant! Bug-free! Conceptually unified! All of the abstractions match up nicely from hardware to application! Compared to our imagination, real software is a horrible, steaming, pile of shit.
And yet. I can't run your ideas on my computer, but I can run Finalterm. So Philipp Emanuel Weidmann wins the argument, by default. Sorry.
If HN isn't the place to have an honest discussion about the merits of a project's architecture, then I don't know where is.
The author of this has some very good ideas and I don't doubt that they are technically proficient. Nevertheless, I believe they have executed their idea the wrong way.
This may seem like a complaint that the end user doesn't have any reason to care about, but I disagree. Downthread[0] there is somebody lamenting tab being used to activate the completion. I don't know what shell they use, but if they use zsh they already have a myriad of completion options available to them. Taking advantage of the features provided in this terminal emulator and zsh simultaneously would undoubtedly be problematic (actually, last I heard they seem to have somehow broken 'vi support', so whether or not arbitrary zsh configurations will even work on it is questionable). If we want Finalterminal to support the extensive range of completion that zsh already does, we are going to have a lot of duplicated effort. Completion features should therefore be implemented at the same level that they have always existed at, the shell and/or application (think vim) layer.
But yours is not a criticism that Philip can really use. He's clearly decided on an approach: adding capability to a terminal. It's as if someone posted a Ruby framework and you criticized them for the fact that they should be using Python, because it's just better for web stuff. Or someone posts a Vim plugin and you criticize them for not using Emacs, etc. Or someone writing an IDE plugin and you say they should run it from the command line anyway. Etc.
It seems unlikely that the author of finalterm, Philip, didn't consider doing this as a shell addition. But, if he pops in here and says, "Gosh, I never thought of that! You're right I should scrap this project and do it in the shell!" then I will humbly apologize. But, I don't think that's going to happen.
I think you are misunderstanding the nature of my complaint however. This isn't an issue of somebody using a tool that I don't prefer.. use Vim, or use Emacs, or use Nano for all I care. You want to use gnome-terminal? I can't stand it, but be my guest.
This is me saying that Philip has a good idea but has implemented it in a way that does not play nicely with existing tools. He knows this obviously, since he (or maybe other Finalterm authors, I haven't really been paying attention to that) have pointed that out himself. What I am pointing out that this incompatibility is unnecessary and unfortunate.
The crux of my complaint is that he has ideas that I would like to use, but solely because he has implemented them in an unorthodox way, there is simply no way that I can incorporate this into my workflow.
I'm not going to not say this simply because he may have also thought of this and disagrees with me. HN should not be an echo chamber of praise.
Comments
Nice. I mean, is there anything more satisfying than comparing someone's concrete implementation with our perfect ideal of what they should have written? Ah, the software in our imagination is so wonderful! It is elegant! Bug-free! Conceptually unified! All of the abstractions match up nicely from hardware to application! Compared to our imagination, real software is a horrible, steaming, pile of shit.
And yet. I can't run your ideas on my computer, but I can run Finalterm. So Philipp Emanuel Weidmann wins the argument, by default. Sorry.
If HN isn't the place to have an honest discussion about the merits of a project's architecture, then I don't know where is.
The author of this has some very good ideas and I don't doubt that they are technically proficient. Nevertheless, I believe they have executed their idea the wrong way.
This may seem like a complaint that the end user doesn't have any reason to care about, but I disagree. Downthread[0] there is somebody lamenting tab being used to activate the completion. I don't know what shell they use, but if they use zsh they already have a myriad of completion options available to them. Taking advantage of the features provided in this terminal emulator and zsh simultaneously would undoubtedly be problematic (actually, last I heard they seem to have somehow broken 'vi support', so whether or not arbitrary zsh configurations will even work on it is questionable). If we want Finalterminal to support the extensive range of completion that zsh already does, we are going to have a lot of duplicated effort. Completion features should therefore be implemented at the same level that they have always existed at, the shell and/or application (think vim) layer.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6574405
But yours is not a criticism that Philip can really use. He's clearly decided on an approach: adding capability to a terminal. It's as if someone posted a Ruby framework and you criticized them for the fact that they should be using Python, because it's just better for web stuff. Or someone posts a Vim plugin and you criticize them for not using Emacs, etc. Or someone writing an IDE plugin and you say they should run it from the command line anyway. Etc.
It seems unlikely that the author of finalterm, Philip, didn't consider doing this as a shell addition. But, if he pops in here and says, "Gosh, I never thought of that! You're right I should scrap this project and do it in the shell!" then I will humbly apologize. But, I don't think that's going to happen.
I don't know what Philip did or did not think of.
I think you are misunderstanding the nature of my complaint however. This isn't an issue of somebody using a tool that I don't prefer.. use Vim, or use Emacs, or use Nano for all I care. You want to use gnome-terminal? I can't stand it, but be my guest.
This is me saying that Philip has a good idea but has implemented it in a way that does not play nicely with existing tools. He knows this obviously, since he (or maybe other Finalterm authors, I haven't really been paying attention to that) have pointed that out himself. What I am pointing out that this incompatibility is unnecessary and unfortunate.
The crux of my complaint is that he has ideas that I would like to use, but solely because he has implemented them in an unorthodox way, there is simply no way that I can incorporate this into my workflow.
I'm not going to not say this simply because he may have also thought of this and disagrees with me. HN should not be an echo chamber of praise.