Redesigning Terminal Infrastructure: The Challenge of Moving Beyond 1980s Legacy Systems
By
miguelraz
If you only eat one bagel today, this is the bagel.
Summary
The article examines the fundamental design challenges of terminal software, arguing that terminal internals are a mess due to historical decisions from the 1980s that are now impossible to change. It presents a mental model of terminals with four key components: terminal emulator, pseudo-terminal (PTY), shell, and applications. The core argument is that redesigning infrastructure requires allowing incremental adoption while simultaneously moving the entire design space at once, drawing parallels to how Rich Hickey redesigned Clojure by taking the entire Lisp language and moving the whole design rather than piling new features on top.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledTerminal internals are a mess. A lot of it is just the way it is because someone made a decision in the 80s and now it's impossible to change.
This is what you have to do to redesign infrastructure. Rich [Hickey] didn't just pile some crap on top of Lisp [when building Clojure]. He took the entire Lisp and moved the whole design at once.
At a very very high level, a terminal has four parts: The 'terminal emulator', which is a program that renders a grid-like structure to your graphical display. The 'pseudo-terminal' (PTY)...
To redesign infrastructure, you have to allow incremental adoption, while simultaneously moving the whole design space at once.
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