>>Aside: I’d also like to see a command line shell which runs outside the terminal emulator rather than inside it.

Plan 9 did something like that with its rio windows (that replace the terminal emulators) and its rc shell.

https://9p.io/wiki/plan9/using_rio/index.html

http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/1/rio

> The problem with such a shell would be that all the simple utilities and tools one likes to use in a shell will not work without a tty (or pty or fake-pty-conhost.exe). So the shell by itself would be pretty useless.

Right -- no vi, no emacs, no readline, no curses -- nothing that uses cursor addressing. You have to start all over. Plan 9 can be seen as an experiment to find out how much you can simplify if you can abandon backwards compatibility.

I’m suggesting running outside the terminal by which I mean pulling up new terminal emulators as necessary rather than running inside a single terminal emulator and taking over the whole thing for each command (and allowing applications to get it into a bad state). If you want to run less on the output of one command or watch some thing change while still running other commands you either need to open a new second terminal emulator and go to the same place as the first or you need to use something like tmux (and either have some janky hack or be very careful about when you run tmux if you want to duplicate shells on a remote box for example).

I also think it’s not so useful anymore to just set up a pipeline and let it run off and do it’s work. Interactive shell usage is often mostly about editing or extending a small suffix of the previous command, so I think a shell should be optimised to do that well.

hmm, so much like the console subsystem on Windows where you can start shells pretty much arbitrarily, detached from any real tty.

Could be do-able in Unixy OSes, with a lot of work to detach the OS from the concept of a tty.

Interesting !