Add Stories to Windows Terminal

[filmgirl]

Add a “Stories” Feature to Windows Terminal

Stories are the new hotness. Snapchat invented Stories but the paradigm of ephemeral updates has since been adopted by Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and most recently, Spotify. There is even a VS Code extension that adds this feature.

Why should LinkedIn get all the fun?! Windows Terminal might be a singular experience (but with user profiles, is it really), but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t create an ephemeral social layer into it.

Windows Terminal “Stories” could be in gist form (a la GitHub) or scripts in your favorite shell language (PWSH or BASH or ZSH, in da clurb we all fam), they could also be print screens of your current terminal session. Because who doesn’t want to show off their latest Neofetch/winfetch ASCII art!

As a longterm goal, there could even be a way to share a gist/link to your config file to share your specific terminal preferences and font/color information.

Proposed technical implementation details (optional)

In order to see Stories from others (assuming we don’t want to focus just on local users), we would need to run some sort of web server that ties into some type of social network for followers/displays. GitHub would probably be ideal for that.

Having said all this, as good of a feature as I believe Stories would be, it would probably require a lot of resources and overhead, not to mention possible performance concerns. Perhaps this is a better request for Hyper, since it is Electron and basically running a web browser anyway. (No shade to Hyper — Hyper is great and beautiful and I’m just teasing out of love!)

In fact, the more I write about this. Maybe it’s a bad idea.

[estruyf]

You got my support on this @filmgirl. +1

[LuiseFreese]

rooting for you @filmgirl 🎉

[girlgerms]

11/10, want to see this happen! 💜

[pandom]

Knowing that this is possible my life will not be the same without it

[GossiTheDog]

We need this.

[Lazza]

I guess probably something could be hacked together with Cowsay and Fortune. This would get closer to feature parity with a real Linux machine. 😏

[mvandemar]

I can't believe it hasn't already been implemented, this is a must have feature.

[okms]

This needs a kickstarter campaign

[ghost]

Can this be integrated with #469?

[leo60228]

most recently, Twitter

I think Spotify was more recent

[filmgirl]

most recently, Twitter

I think Spotify was more recent

Right you are! I’ve updated the issue accordingly.

[ghost]

I haven't seen any feature request in this repo having this much reactions (and upvotes) in such short amount of time. 🤯

[snickler]

This has my full support \o/

[kylesethgray]

I would love to see this happen.

[giggio]

How have I been using Terminal without this feature for so long? I'm using plain old terminal until we have it!

[Don-Vito]

Wondering if Terminal users are mentally prepared to such amount of social activity in their lives.. switching from 0 social life to this directly might be... overwhelming 😄

[ghost]

Wondering if Terminal users are mentally prepared to such amount of social activity in their lives.. switching from 0 social life to this directly might be... overwhelming 😄

@Don-Vito Are you talking about me? 😄

[Don-Vito]

Wondering if Terminal users are mentally prepared to such amount of social activity in their lives.. switching from 0 social life to this directly might be... overwhelming 😄

@Don-Vito Are you talking about me? 😄

About myself actually 😄

[suadev]

Doesn't it look cool? https://twitter.com/kose__suat/status/1329514405818732545

[zadjii-msft]

Well this thread was a good hilarious read to start my week. Thanks for that 🤣

I know that this is 90% a meme post from twitter, but this is also our actual work tracker, so I've gotta be at least 5% serious here:

I don't believe the Terminal is the place to implement most of this.

• We've already got a commandline ecosystem problem of users just executing random scripts that they download with curl - if we're letting users install scripts that they saw on someone's story, then i can guarantee you there'll be scripts like "Run Graphical Applications in WSL!!!" that actually just rm -rf /mnt/c. I don't want to be held responsible for contributing to that problem.
• I think GitHub gists are already better suited for a lot of this - they've already got syntax highlighting for different languages, they've already got accounts set up, and authentication, and hey, they've already got a web-scale website that can host all this, and frankly I'm not prepared, nor is anyone on the team, to build that ourselves.
• We've also already got Feature request: Recording #469 on the backlog for recording Terminal output to the asciinema format, for sharing on https://asciinema.org. Again, that's another site that's probably better suited for hosting recordings of terminal sessions, rather than us standing this up on our own.

So those are reasons why I would reject this feature request. However, this thread is definitely @cinnamon-msft's responsibility, so I'll let them handle it.

---

As far as the following is concerned:

there could even be a way to share a gist/link to your config file to share your specific terminal preferences and font/color information.

I believe there's been discussion about that in the past, and that I'm on board with. "Stories", not so much.

[bnb]

+1 this is a vital feature. pls ship @cinnamon-msft 🙏🏻

[cinnamon-msft]

This definitely was a fun read, but I agree with @zadjii-msft that this doesn't really make sense for Terminal. Kudos to @filmgirl for writing such an entertaining feature request, however I will have to close this issue since we aren't planning to implement it. 😄

[Don-Vito]

On the other hand a native support for twitter could prevent us from missing the meme post:

[trylaarsdam]

Command + Story = Cory?

[Spriithy]

@Darth4212 but is it really ?

[supesu]

@Darth4212 You use the terminal for coding?

[sunflsks]

@supesu Terminal? Coding? You must be insane, that is impossible! The terminal exists only for cmatrix

[Don-Vito]

@supesu Terminal? Coding? You must be insane, that is impossible! The terminal exists only for cmatrix

@Finermeerkat137 - you should try it. I recently switched to Terminal from VS 2019 and am really happy since then: same level of code completion and refactoring with almost twice less memory!

[ethankore]

[thenexus00]

Could you maybe engage who ever is doing the visual studio code stories: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=bar9.stories

Having something that is uniform across Microsoft development platforms will have a far better chance of being more than just a gimmick and have a solid base to grow.

[shanselman]

[GossiTheDog]

Btw can we call this Stories for Terminal E5 X?

[ghost]

I think someone could implement this as an extension 🤣

[Midi-In]

I seriously hope this is just a joke post

[user21944]

@supesu I use Terminal to access Vim on WSL as my main editor

[rubyFeedback]

It's a fun-take and I wanted to upvote it for the fun part, but then I thought it may send the wrong message so I had to downvote it, just to not confuse newcomers. ;)

Many people want super-simple stories - the terminal story. They want a terminal, that's the story! But if people want pink ribbon hipster dancing marquee tags in the terminal, well, the terminal can always be as customizable as possible. Perhaps make the themes epic as much as possible. But for me personally? Simplicity. (It's ok to have more options). And the simplest story is to keep it so simple that stories are not necessary. USING the terminal is already the best story. ;)

(Admittedly I am actually more likely to use e. g. KDE Konsole + WSL on windows these days than windows Terminal BUT this is not always possible, and in these cases, then, Windows Terminal is so much nicer than oldschool cmd.exe ...)

[rubyFeedback]

It's a fun-take and I wanted to upvote it for the fun part, but then I thought it may send the wrong message so I had to downvote it, just to not confuse newcomers. ;)

Many people want super-simple stories - the terminal story. They want a terminal, that's the story! But if people want pink ribbon hipster dancing marquee tags in the terminal, well, the terminal can always be as customizable as possible. Perhaps make the themes epic as much as possible. But for me personally? Simplicity. (It's ok to have more options). And the simplest story is to keep it so simple that stories are not necessary. USING the terminal is already the best story. ;)

(Admittedly I am actually more likely to use e. g. KDE Konsole + WSL on windows these days than windows Terminal BUT this is not always possible, and in these cases, then, Windows Terminal is so much nicer than oldschool cmd.exe ...)

[mvandemar]

Could you maybe engage who ever is doing the visual studio code stories: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=bar9.stories

Having something that is uniform across Microsoft development platforms will have a far better chance of being more than just a gimmick and have a solid base to grow.

@thenexus00 I thought you were kidding, but 11,819 installs...

[ntoskernel]

[ghost]

Even the Windows Kernel says NO!

[TameemS]

no

[NSG650]

no thanks

[zCri]

nsg 650

[emwno]

+1

[nitelite]

Please don't fill the issue tracker with jokes.

[ghost]

@zadjii-msft or @DHowett Please lock this thread

[zadjii-msft]

Alright yea, I thought we could all play along and enjoy a nice, lighthearted joke thread, but I guess I was wrong. I'm not gonna take lightly to comments disparaging any of our colleagues. Perhaps having a sense of humor is a desirable trait in an employee, something some participants in this thread are clearly lacking.

Obviously, we're not adding Stories to the Terminal. Anyone can read the thread and figure that out, if that's not asking too much.