> There's been a lot more pushback on the scrolling decision than I had anticipated.
Even if tmux is in theory a better solution, it's not such a radically better solution that the benefits outweigh the switching cost. Terminals with scrollback have been around at least 30 years at this point [1], and scrollback is by far the majority use mode. You're asking 95%+ of your potential userbase to spend a bunch of time retraining themselves for little or no benefit.
Scrolling down and back is a key part of the web user experience. Even if every terminal emulator got rid of scrollback, most of your users would still have scrolling back baked into their brains. When they want to see something that just scrolled past, they are going to do what they do in a web browser, which is to look for a scroll bar, hit a scrolling key, or perform a scrolling gesture.
That's not to say you shouldn't try radical things. But if you want user adoption, you have to make sure the benefits you offer are very much larger than the costs you impose. So radically different UI can't be about as good as the existing one; it has to be radically better.
[1] And of course terminals are made to emulate teletype machines, which had infinite scrollback to begin with.
Even if tmux is in theory a better solution, it's not such a radically better solution that the benefits outweigh the switching cost. Terminals with scrollback have been around at least 30 years at this point [1], and scrollback is by far the majority use mode. You're asking 95%+ of your potential userbase to spend a bunch of time retraining themselves for little or no benefit.
You're also up against a variant of Jakob's law:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/end-of-web-design/
Scrolling down and back is a key part of the web user experience. Even if every terminal emulator got rid of scrollback, most of your users would still have scrolling back baked into their brains. When they want to see something that just scrolled past, they are going to do what they do in a web browser, which is to look for a scroll bar, hit a scrolling key, or perform a scrolling gesture.
That's not to say you shouldn't try radical things. But if you want user adoption, you have to make sure the benefits you offer are very much larger than the costs you impose. So radically different UI can't be about as good as the existing one; it has to be radically better.
[1] And of course terminals are made to emulate teletype machines, which had infinite scrollback to begin with.