The retro future renaissance of the terminal emulator

In 2020, when I took over Terminator, I was seriously worried about the state of the terminal emulator ecosphere. It seemed like nobody wanted to write or maintain terminal emulators.

People behind the GNOME terminal were burning out, The tilix maintainer was announcing that he would sunset the project, and I had to do a lot of wrangling to keep Terminator alive. It seemed like very shortly, we would just have ancient emulators like rxvt and xterm, and emulators maintained by the big DEs like Konsole, GNOME Console, and xfce4-term, which are generally kind of bare-bones, and designed more for people who dip their toes into the command-line when they have to.

I was really worried that the terminal emulator was dying, just due to a lack of interest, and we were heading for a future where the command-line and TUIs would also die out, just because of a lack of access to a proper way of using them.

Boy, was I wrong. Alacritty and kitty were still in beta at the time, and were flying under the radar, but they would spawn a new bunch of terminal emulators, Microsoft was working on their console, and there was a new interest in the simplicity of writing and running applications designed to be used in a simple interface

Combined with the general lack of cross-platform GUI toolkits along with the proliferation of cross-platform command-line oriented languages like rust and go would lead to many people to write a whole new generation of utilities and applications designed to run in terminal emulators. There’s a renewal of interest in terminal based text editors like Vim and Emacs.

It really seems like we’re riding a wave of technology where the future looks a lot like the 1970s.