Terminals All the Way Down

Abstract

The terminal is a remarkably resilient interface for many programming activities. From its humble beginnings as a teletypewriter more than half a century ago, through video terminals like the VT100, to present-day windowed terminal emulators, it has remained a relevant and productive, albeit very gaunt, interface. This is in stark contrast with feature-rich integrated development environments (IDEs), which on top of their innate complexity allow for the creation of custom extensions. Indeed, researchers have been prolific in proposing innumerable, but often ignored, plug-ins. We propose using inter-connected windowed terminal emulators as the foundation for a new type of distributed and language-agnostic development environment. By delegating the handling of a system’s source code to a set of dedicated windowed terminal emulators we aim at complementing existing visual tools and leveraging the large body of existing command-line and terminal-based development tools. We present the architecture of the terminal-based development environment that we envision, outline our future implementation plans, and discuss how such an environment can be evaluated both in terms of its usefulness and usability.