This little gif demonstrates what it can do now: https://github.com/sedwards2009/extraterm/raw/master/docs/ed...
Some more demos of its features are here: https://github.com/sedwards2009/extraterm/blob/master/docs/t...
It is still early days for Extraterm although I use it myself daily (mostly on Windows and Linux). It too is built on Electron. It makes it possible to try out ideas relatively quickly and grants access to a megaton of 3rd party libraries and tools.
A lot of them, actually. Sixel is a thing.
>Completion popups? Browsable history?
No terminal emulator supports that. Because that's not the emulator's responsibility. That's your shell's job. Asking for your terminal emulator to support command completion is like asking X Windows to add tab completion to Gedit.
Go grab a copy of fish if you want, though. I've heard a lot of good things about it.
>Current directory widget? Collapsible output?
Those are just hard to implement, and usually not worth the effort. The directory widget is essentially provided by your prompt in many shells anyways.
How is the shell supposed to make a popup when it can only output text? It can't make popup windows.
> Those are just hard to implement
Presumably easier if you're using Electron though!
Not entirely sure, but probably in the same way like other TUI applications, e.g. vim, emacs...
Thus over-engineering has been with us all along, much of it legacy cruft.
It might be worth considering abandoning traditional terminal emulation entirely in favor of something else if more features are desired.
Personally I think remote and virtualized devices (think qxl/spice, remote audio, etc), could use some love. We have the bandwidth to improve on these technologies today.
I mean, if you want images, history, tabs, to support every language under the sun, and support for most platforms, I'd say a browser is a fantastic way to get most of that "for free".
I can't really blame them (Linux, like every nix, does something unique at the tty level that breaks reasonable assumptions), and I'm sure it'll get a lot worse once they try to run their JS bindings over the pty/tty subsystem of something like Solaris.
I personally prefer that the terminal delegate just about everything besides I/O to plugins or extensions, so Hyper is probably out of the picture for me. That being said, my current terminal of choice (urxvt) doesn't do much on that front either. I hope that other terminal emulator projects pay attention to the development here and adopt the best innovations.
Me too, although in the case of terminal apps, they really haven't moved on since the 70s. How many support images? Completion popups? Browsable history? Current directory widget? Collapsible output?
Honestly if it takes some insane over-engineering to get some actual innovation in terminal apps I'm all for it! And when I say "innovation" I mean "obvious features that should have been there decades ago".