Tried it again today, replacing urxvt+zsh for an hour or so. Most of these problems are probably due to the fact they use a custom shell:
- ctrl-r (history search) just reloads the electron window and clears everything [0]
- does not work with virtualenv (bin/activate just messes up the shell to the point where even `ls` stops working – `Black Screen: command "ls" not found.`) [1]
- weird tab completion
- none of the "advanced" shell features work over ssh (well, that's expected, since ssh starts a standard bash/zsh/whatever shell on the server)
- had to install bunch of additional npm deps [2] to make it start on Linux
- `tmux` is less broken that it used to be when i first tried it, but still not without any problems, same for `htop` and `vim`
- it reports that some built-in commands are present, but they don't work at all (eg. print, source) [3]
Yeah, implementing a new terminal emulator (and a custom shell!) is pretty rough going. I've heard the idea expressed that it's hard to get programmers to use a new code editor, even if you have a killer feature, because they need to see every feature that's ever been implemented in every old editor before they'll switch. Reminiscent of Light Table.
Those are basic features, not "every feature". Black Screen needs to have basic features before it can be considered usable. Besides, it's macOS only, so I won't use it any time soon.
Tried it again today, replacing urxvt+zsh for an hour or so. Most of these problems are probably due to the fact they use a custom shell:
- ctrl-r (history search) just reloads the electron window and clears everything [0]
- does not work with virtualenv (bin/activate just messes up the shell to the point where even `ls` stops working – `Black Screen: command "ls" not found.`) [1]
- weird tab completion
- none of the "advanced" shell features work over ssh (well, that's expected, since ssh starts a standard bash/zsh/whatever shell on the server)
- had to install bunch of additional npm deps [2] to make it start on Linux
- `tmux` is less broken that it used to be when i first tried it, but still not without any problems, same for `htop` and `vim`
- it reports that some built-in commands are present, but they don't work at all (eg. print, source) [3]
Plus it's kinda slow. Terminals are hard.
[0] https://github.com/vshatskyi/black-screen/issues/260
[1] https://github.com/vshatskyi/black-screen/issues/94
[2] `npm install fs-vacuum init-package-json npm-install-checks npm-registry-client read-installed`
[3] https://github.com/vshatskyi/black-screen/issues/600