2mo ago

What's involved in getting a "modern" terminal setup?

jvns.ca

Linux @programming.dev

cm0002 @programming.dev

2mo ago

What's involved in getting a "modern" terminal setup?

jvns.ca /blog/2025/01/11/getting-a-modern-terminal-setup/

15 comments

What on earth is a modern terminal?
There's lots of terminal emulators. I like ghostty. You can just install it.
- First paragraph after the introduction:
  what is a “modern terminal experience”? Here are a few things that are important to me, with which part of the system is responsible for them:
  multiline support for copy and paste: if you paste 3 commands in your shell, it should not immediately run them all! That’s scary! (shell, terminal emulator)
  infinite shell history: if I run a command in my shell, it should be saved forever, not deleted after 500 history entries or whatever. Also I want commands to be saved to the history immediately when I run them, not only when I exit the shell session (shell)
  a useful prompt: I can’t live without having my current directory and current git branch in my prompt (shell)
  24-bit colour: this is important to me because I find it MUCH easier to theme neovim with 24-bit colour support than in a terminal with only 256 colours (terminal emulator)
  clipboard integration between vim and my operating system so that when I copy in Firefox, I can just press p in vim to paste (text editor, maybe the OS/terminal emulator too)
  good autocomplete: for example commands like git should have command-specific autocomplete (shell)
  having colours in ls (shell config)
  a terminal theme I like: I spend a lot of time in my terminal, I want it to look nice and I want its theme to match my terminal editor’s theme. (terminal emulator, text editor)
  automatic terminal fixing: If a programs prints out some weird escape codes that mess up my terminal, I want that to automatically get reset so that my terminal doesn’t get messed up (shell)
  keybindings: I want Ctrl+left arrow to work (shell or application) being able to use the scroll wheel in programs like less: (terminal emulator and applications)
  There are a million other terminal conveniences out there and different people value different things, but those are the ones that I would be really unhappy without.
  So basically it’s the features that have been standard in shells and terminal emulators for the past couple of decades.
  
  Ooohh this is blog spam?
  Sorry I thought it was a question.
  
  Yeah, most of those you get out of the box. Even on Windows.
  
  From watching the questions the author was asking others just before writing this, I think at least part of the purpose of this article is to draw attention to how the shell, the kernel, the terminal emulator and other components work together to provide these features. Or, to look at it another way, which of the components is the one responsible for each part, so that the reader might know which part they need to reconfigure if they want to achieve a particular result.
  
  The whole article basically boils down to "Install fish. Done." lol
Just use whatever works. Stop worrying about what others are doing and trying to be cool with the in-crowd.
Of all of these things, i only miss a shared clipboard between Vim and the rest of the system (or vice versa). That would be rad!
- This is possible you just need a version of VIM that was compiled with the clipboard feature enabled.
  
  Sometimes you need to specify in config which clipboard to use on unix systems that might have multiple clipboards too
- Are you talking about the + register? You could also map this to be the default "yank" register.
  
  I set it like this in .vimrc
  set clipboard=unnamedplus
  But when I yank anything, I cannot insert it somewhere else with ctrl-c.
sudp apt-get install kitty
You can do other stuff to make it pretty and change your prompt, too. Bam - modern 'terminal'.
- Is that a starship prompt? How do you style that divider above the prompt that way? It looks really good.
  edit: I've read up a bunch on starship and now understand, very nice.

15 comments