- Author
- jyn
- Published
- 11 November 2025
- Kind
- Personal blog post, a design proposal with no built system
- Original
- jyn.dev/the-terminal-of-the-future
- Subject
- Future of computing
What it is
jyn writes a personal site on computing. The post imagines what a better terminal could look like. It then proposes four build stages that each improve on current tools.
What it says
- jyn says a terminal has four parts: emulator, pseudo-terminal, shell and spawned programs.
- jyn names Jupyter as the closest analogue. For shells it has problems with completion, long-lived processes and reruns.
- jyn says shell integration, as in Warp, marks where commands start and stop.
- jyn says tmux and Mosh add an extra renderer, with the bugs that brings. Lighter tools like alden only handle detach.
- jyn proposes rerun and undo through dataflow tracking. Sandboxed processes would act as pure functions of their inputs.
- jyn lists features, including searching commands by output and running many LLMs in sandboxes.
- jyn proposes four stages, ending with a Jupyter-like frontend. The author expects the work to take about a decade.
What evidence it gives
The post offers argument and a design sketch. It points to working tools for single pieces, such as Warp, iTerm2 and Pluto.jl. It reports no prototype or tests of the full design.
Interests and limits
The proposal is untested and the author says it would take about a decade. Sandboxed tracing of every process is asserted as feasible, not shown. The post skips details of alternate-screen mode.