[WD-42]

Mitchell,

What has it been like witnessing terminal emulators make such a huge comeback with the advent of Claude Code et. all? I remember comments here in the early days of Ghostty along the lines of "Why is he working on a terminal emulator? We need people working on future problems, not the past!" Pretty funny considering I regularly hear people say they are in the terminal more than the browser now. Crazy times!

[mitchellh]

Overall I would describe it as "amusing."

If you told me 3 years ago that terminal usage would _increase_ I would've laughed. Beyond that, I'm now having regular conversations with the frontier agentic coding companies (since they're far and away the largest terminal users at the moment) and if you had told me 2 years ago that that would be happening because of a terminal, I would've laughed even harder.

So, it's amazing. But overall, its amusing.

[xeonmc]

Would a terminal deal with them have added another billion to your account if it hadn’t been nonprofit?

[pkulak]

Wait, really? So I’ve used the terminal for everything for decades, and now, because of vibe coding, all The Kids have joined me? I don’t even know how to feel about that. Better terminals are nice though.

[thewebguyd]

Right? It’s been kind of funny watching everyone “rediscover” the terminal and I’m over here feeling like a true graybeard “silly kids, I’ve been here the whole time.”

What’s old is new again is apparently just as true in tech as it is in fashion.

[chrysoprace]

I think terminal workflows are intimidating for a lot of people, because the discoverability is lower than GUIs. You can't necessarily intuit how a CLI works, you have to read the documentation or watch a tutorial, which my 10 years in the IT industry has taught me a big barrier even for really experienced SWEs. The new coding TUIs are a more gentle introduction to that.

[lovecg]

Yeah it’s been amusing to see people rediscovering tmux as well

[nine_k]

/* Claude Code is the strongest case of the return to the mainframe: a closed, bespoke, paid service that nothing locally run compares to. Terminals are just a natural part of the mainframe world! */

[txdv]

Once he fixes the past he will have more time to fix the future

[robinwhg]

He was on a podcast recently where he talked about that a little. It’s on Youtube.