UI tweak for cleaner timeline

[edison23]

OK, I just got an idea when I wanted to tweet, then mistyped confirmation letter (u instead of y xD) and my timeline got littered with all that stuff. Image just to illustrate:

The idea is simple (and still kinda vague), implementation would be super hard, I guess, but I'll leave it here:

There could be some form of a split window (or a fixed (user settable) multiline window at the bottom?) where would be displayed the temporary stuff like these:

• (expanded to ...
• -- verify you want to tweet: ...
• -- send to server? (only y or Y is affirmative): y
• possibly other stuff like /th, /again and such (although these might be a bit too long for that)

It would steal a few lines from the screen, but the timeline wouldn't get so littered with the auxiliary outputs.

What do you think?

[Llammissar]

Sounds like the status lines in screen or vim. I do like the idea; I've had this problem in the past (especially since Term::Readline::TTYtter doesn't know about name expansions).

Amusingly, we might be able to get close through liberal application of moderately-evil hacks. Basically, I'm thinking we could abuse ANSI cursor movement sequences to overwrite the most recent status message as long as no more tweets have been received in the interim. I realise this is fairly awful, but it gets us a good bit of the way there without any more dependencies.

I think the major thing to know is how many lines we have to go back and erase. It might require knowing the current terminal boundaries, too, so maybe a SIGWINCH handler.

To do it well, though, I think oysttyer would have to move away from being a (relatively) simple line-oriented script and start pulling in something like curses, which calls all sorts of things into question, like what happens when you scroll up in your terminal buffer.