The terminal of the future

Re "stage 2: persistent sessions", iTerm2 already does this. The PTYs are owned by background processes independent of the GUI application. So iTerm2 can upgrade the application without interrupting the running terminal sessions.

this is really cool omg! i didn't know that, i'll do some research.

one of the strange things to me about the terminal landscape is how little knowledge sharing there is compared to other domains i'm familiar with. iTerm has a bunch of things no one else has; kitty influenced wezterm but otherwise no one else seems to have valued reflection; there's a whole bunch of extensions to ANSI escapes but most of them are non-standard and mutually incompatible. it's weird. if i compare to something like build systems, there's a lot more cross-pollination of ideas there.

And GNU screen, and GNU Emacs and Vi and ...

If we are going to broaden this to Screen and its "TUI" style features, then the most complete effort at a programmable TUI in the Linux space I've seen is `desktop-tui`.

https://github.com/Julien-cpsn/desktop-tui

It is incomplete but takes what is almost a side aspect of TWIN and runs with it.

https://github.com/cosmos72/twin

TWIN is nearly 20 now and does quite a lot. It even has a Wikipedia page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_(windowing_system)

It runs on lots more OSes than just Linux.

You do make a good point there. There's a tonne of insular parochialism: "my tool is the best tool and I will loftily ignore the others."

This is why I wrote this:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/24/tiling_multiplexers_s...

Trying to bring a bunch of related tools together in one place and compare and contrast them.

I ment programs that implement persistent (shell) sessions.