Recently, Ghostty updated itself. I switched to Ghostty some time ago, as I like to try new stuff and find better tools for my workflow. With this new update, I noticed something changed in Ghostty. There are now 3 dots at the top of the window, in the center.
I bet most people would not event notice it, but I have been blessed with being a pedantic person, and these 3 dots hurt in my eyes. I live in my terminal: I use NeoVim for coding, I write this blog (and my tech blog) from the terminal, I manage servers from the terminal, and I install applications from the terminal. 80% of my time at my computer is spent in the terminal (the other ~19% in Firefox).
And so I asked Claude what’s up with the 3 dots, and Claude found this pull request which introduced split drag and drop.
Scrolling through GitHub, I tried to find a way to disable it.
I don’t use terminal tabs, drag and drop, or mouse interaction; I live in NeoVim + tmux.
And I didn’t find any way to disable it.
I ended up commenting on this issue where another user said:
agreed. this should not even exist
to which one of the contributors replied:
Bold claim, as there’s no other way to move splits. A feature that was far more requested.
I never requested this. I never wanted splits or a way to drag and drop them. Now, sure, this is someone else’s project, and they can develop it the way they see right. But for a very long time I had this idea of “complete and usable software”.
A complete and usable software, is a software that has reached its maturity and now is in maintenance mode, i.e. bug fixing and keeping up with updates to the host machine / OS / etc.
tmux, for example, is a complete and usable software.
A terminal emulator, is a complete and usable software once it reaches a state where it can, well, emulate video terminal, like Alacritty.
But there is a fine line with complete and usable software, that if you keep pushing features, you enter the enshittification era — an era where your software goes into the rabbit hole of being too feature-rich to a point it is no longer usable by anyone. You keep justifying it with “but users requested this feature”, yea well, the problem is that there is no “unrequest feature” option. I liked Ghostty because it was a minimal terminal emulator that you would install and it worked out of the box.
I don’t want to sound overdramatic, but I switched back to Alacritty. Yes, these 3 dots killed my enthusiasm for this software. A good software is a software that does its work and gets out of the way of the user. Updates should be essentially invisible.
Take iOS. The iOS on my iPhone was good. I got used to it, I got used to the layout, the design, and the controls. But then, I got a new iPhone, and it came with Liquid Glass, and now I want to throw my iPhone away. Despite the fact that I have upgraded from a 6-year-old iPhone, to a “better, more powerful, the best iPhone we have ever made”(c) (as of September 2023), the experience just sucks. The liquid ass design that I never wanted, with the slow and clunky interface. I never wanted it. So I would like to “feature unrequest” it.
And I could keep going on and on about software that was feature complete, but had to invent features in order to justify future development, or simply because software engineers don’t like the term “maintenance”. So everyone chases “feature requests”, but I’d argue that “features unrequests” should be as important as feature requests.