> Terminal.app does suck but if you’re happy in it

Clarification: As noted above, Terminal.app is indistinguishably suck from all the rest in the areas that are materially important to me, so no meaningful gain in happiness exists with any current alternative. I enjoy one of the specific features it offers but I’d give that up the instant a relevant-to-me improvement over the status quo was available. Perhaps someday.

I would probably have to make a video, honestly. Have considered it. Usage faded out years before screen recording was accessible. I’m going to be late for class but I can’t allow that article to stand unsupported by story tidbits.

The built-in editor for all files had two modes, line-based and character based. In edit (char) mode, you edited the text file as usual. In line (command) mode, you selected lines and hit Return on them to begin execution there.

Commands were wrapped in curly braces; non-wrapped text was ignored.

The built-in phone directory was just a macro file with a dedicated keystroke; so you could structure and annotate it however you liked, and navigate it with search or with line-based mode up/down/pgup/pgdn as one would expect. Each entry was something like {dial 472627} {user x} {pass y} {ifca {goto :autologin_wwiv}} {end} with whatever niceties you enjoyed outside the curly braces.

It understood {gets} and {puts} from the modem tty (I don’t remember the actual command names) and it had conditional logic and substring index stuff.

If you needed human input, you could throw a {dialog} and get it, acting according to the result.

In modern parlance, imagine if your terminal emulator had ansible playbook support embedded into it and pressing alt-E popped up an editor for the playbook that let you start playback from any point in the script, JMP/GOTO-style.

You can see an example playbook at https://ftpmirror.your.org/pub/misc/dos/cavebbs/The%20Cave%2... inside PWRMC30S.ZIP. Read everything that isn’t a .MAC file first so that you know where to start reading. POWER.MAC is the main attraction; 53k of playbook macros serving as bionic assistance to TradeWars players.

My own archives are currently probably-lost unless I get very lucky someday, or else I’d share my own archive of playbooks built up over five years to auto-dial and auto-QWK hundreds of local BBSes for two-way mailing list packets.

I think of it every time I see 'ansible' come up, because the ability to create and run what everyone calls 'playbooks' now should have beeen integrated into the terminal like it was back in the 80s over dialup. I'm all for being able to git commit the resulting script (they’re just text files!) but being able to launch a playbook and halt it and repair it and resume was, like.

Sigh.