TL;DR: Terminal Click will no longer offer release dates until further notice. I’m focused on ramping up streams and devlogs, rebuilding trust.

Hello everyone,

It’s been quite a while since my last update — too long, actually. We had early buzz around Terminal Click on Lobsters and Hacker News. (The introductory blog post took the top spot on Lobsters for a couple days.) Some months ago I had a fun discussion with my friendly competitor, Mitchell Hashimoto of ghostty fame, about the barren landscape of terminals trying to innovate. Finally, there was the YouTube premiere of my terminal talk from Software You Can Love.

However, I need to address the elephant in the room: the repeatedly promised, yet not delivered, beta for Terminal Click. I sincerely apologize for the breach of trust. This writeup isn’t a justification, but an attempt to shed light on why things didn’t go as planned.

Juggling Multiple Roles

My actual career is Handmade Cities, running indie tech conferences, which I’ve done full-time for two years now. In this climate of industry upheavals, keeping my small business (barely) afloat is an absolute miracle: we’ve seen the end of events like Deconstruct, E3 (freaking E3, man!) and Strangeloop. Attempts to kickstart a new conference are likely to fail, and there’s a bloody trail of failed conferences even when they initially showed promise.

Those who organize events are playing Doom’s Hurt me plenty. Anyone doing them without the cushion of sponsorship deals chose Ultra-Violence — a deliberate choice I’ve made for reasons that warrant a separate discussion.

Reflecting on my commitments to Terminal Click, I realize my mistake. I overpromised, due to a personal belief that my true worth hinged on shipping user software. The social work of putting together events is harder to measure objectively, and is frankly boring and/or undervalued by many programmers. At least, that’s been my honest-to-God impression of things.

What I should’ve done instead was become proud of being an indie organizer and promote awareness of why it’s valuable work. I should’ve focused exclusively on growing the business, to the point where I could afford additional staff to manage the workload.

Only after this would it have been prudent to embark on Terminal Click with a roadmap. The real question is officially now thus: how do we grow my indie business to the point where I can actually work on Terminal Click?

Refocusing and Moving Forward

Two years into the conferencing business full-time, I think I’m close to an answer about what to do.

With the recent addition of my event coordinator, Morgan Rammell, everyone was amazed at how smoothly Handmade Seattle ran compared to previous years. For the first time, I could get a decent night’s sleep! Therefore it seems wise to leverage Morgan’s talent a little more often, not just during Handmade Seattle. By gradually delegating more behind-the-scenes tasks, I could focus on what I excel at: being a charismatic public figure, inspiring programmers to align with Handmade’s values.

What does that look like? Streaming on Twitch, naturally! There’s also a nudge from my Handmade Cities staff to venture into YouTube (still thinking about that one.) But the real epiphany here is this: regular streams about both Handmade Cities and Terminal Click serve a dual purpose. They not only help expand our primary business, letting me hire help for longer periods of time, but we get to see how Terminal Click is chugging along.

And who knows, a gaming night here and there sounds low-key chill. ChocoVine and Zelda anybody?

New Beta Date?

No no no! For now, I’m pausing promises about Terminal Click. It’s crucial for me to rebuild trust rather than fuel fleeting excitement followed by disappointment.

The only expectation I want to create is that I want to get back to streaming soon™, with hopefully an uptick of written devlogs too. As the year unfolds, we’ll together gauge the right time to invite users to test the beta. Might even be good to call it an alpha first, like my buddy did for Disk Voyager, who to his amazing credit has shipped to users already!

Feel free to drop your thoughts at abner@terminal.click. And don’t forget to follow me on Twitch to catch my first stream of the year.

Yours sincerely,

Abner