I just wanted to make a quick follow-up to my previous post ranting about the state of modern terminal emulators. Hacker News recently had a link to an awesome project called FinalTerm. I can’t say that I think it’s perfect (not thrilled exactly about terminal autocompletion – that should be the shell’s business), but it’s the most promising terminal improvement I’ve seen in a long time. Sadly there’s no OSX support on the horizon.
Just to be clear regarding my previous rant. I know all the tricks for intermingling the system clipboard with the shell (xclip on linux and pbcopy/pbpaste on OSX) but these to me seem hacky to me and I’ve had varying success with them depending on the display manager i’m using. Also, this seems to me to be properly the domain of the emulator, which is the ambassador from GUI land with which I visit TTY land. More practically, all of those tricks only work in the command shell (bash, zsh) and fall apart when I actually need them in other shells (irb, the python repl, posgres, etc).