A terminal renaissance

It’s amusing to me that LLMs, the bleeding-edge technological breakthrough so powerful as to cause existential worry, have sparked a renaissance of one of our oldest surviving computing interfaces: the terminal.

A few short years ago, many programmers who preferred to “just get stuff done” eschewed the terminal in favor of VSCode and JetBrains IDEs. Me included. But now:

• TUIs are first-class interfaces across Claude, Antigravity, Pi, etc.
• Herdr, a terminal multiplexer for agents, is blowing up, and there’s a bunch of other Herdr-esque tools getting attention.
• Superlogical Rex, a multiplexing terminal from Mitchell Hashimoto and team (the peeps behind Ghostty), is in beta and looks sweet.

To be fair, the terminal hadn’t exactly been abandoned. Modern emulators were already proliferating before the LLMsplosion: Ghostty, Kitty, WezTerm, Alacritty, Warp, Rio, Foot, etc. Not to mention all the CLI tools springing forth from the Rust boom.

But this latest movement still feels remarkable, especially in how it’s changing my workplace. I now have a great “business justification” to be in the terminal all day. Even my org’s boss, a sales leader three levels above me, is SSHing into a cloud VM to fire up an agent harness as part of his morning routine. If you know sales orgs, then you know that’s abnormal.

Completely ignoring the question of whether LLMs are good or evil, I’m enjoying the excuse to spend more time in the terminal, especially at work, where that time would otherwise be spent in the Google Workspace suite. I’ll take the small wins.