“Terminals, also known as command lines or consoles, allow us to accomplish and automate tasks on a computer without the use of a graphical user interface. Using a terminal allows us to send simple text commands to our computer to do things like navigate through a directory or copy a file, and form the basis for many more complex automations and programming skills.”

trymesh.me • August - October 2019 • Designer

**Mesh** is a terminal that helps bring the scripts 
that your team uses all the time out of Confluence pages, 
Slack messages,your Ctrl-R history, **right into the command line.**

Context.

Terminal was originally designed in mid 1960-s to suit a very different need in computation — on a high level, the need to mirror the automation of repetitive tasks and inter-process communication (Source). But in a post-Internet world, the way we work with tech has largely moved away from the baggage of physicality. It also doesn’t help that the Terminal has stayed the same for almost 50 years.

Design Principles.

I believe to make it progress in its evolution/ move forward in the interaction paradigm, we have to be guided by these design values/principles:

• Fluid experience driven by human intent. People have to feel fluid in the environment, which means frictionless and focused. Seemingly minor moments of friction burdens our cognitive load, distracting us from our intentions and from entering flow state. It also means information will not be presented to the user unless they said so. (Inpired by Jason Yuan Desktop Metaphor)
• Tangible user interface. Currently a chaos of text lines in the Terminal is the basic medium of the info representation: that is intangible. We have to find certain affordances to enable people to feel in control of the internal computation. This will solve the need stated in the Notion, “ Make it easy for beginners to use and confidently know what they're doing.”
• Balanced familiarity and novelty. As ****we bring new features and concepts like shortcuts, we have to be ensured that they are organically integrated in a familiar way. So that novel things will live up to user expectations.