alt Hacker Newsthat's actually not what i am after. what i envision is a graphical terminal, that is a terminal that uses graphic elements to display the output.
consider something like grep on multiple files. it should produce a list of lines found. the graphical terminal takes that list and displays it. it can distinguish the different components of that list, the filenames, the lines matched, the actual match, etc. because it can distinguish the elements, it can lay them out nicely. a column for the filenames, colors for the matched parts, counts, etc.
grep would not produce any graphics here, just semantic output that my imagined graphical terminal would be able to interpret and visualize.
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We call those “web browsers” nowadays, they even can execute untrusted code to make your UI livelier…
Isn't that Emacs?
That'd be really cool. I'd never thought about enabling deeper graphical capabilities in a shell. But if you were to have a shell with rich objects rather than dumb bytes, that is a world that would open up!
PowerShell, for instance, has Format.ps1xml[0] that allows you to configure how objects get displayed by default (i.e. when that object gets emitted at the end of the pipeline). Such a concept could in principle be extended to have graphical elements. How cool would it be to have grep's output let you collapse matches from the same file!
[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...