Rethinking the Terminal: Spatial Navigation in a Linear World

The terminal is linear. Commands scroll up. Output disappears. Information exists only in the moment. But what if it didn’t have to be this way? The Problem with Traditional Terminals I spend most of my day in a terminal. SSH sessions, log tailing, git operations, monitoring scripts. The workflow is always the same: run a command, read the output, run another command. Previous context scrolls away into oblivion. To cope, we invented tools: ...

February 4, 2026 · 8 min · jcaldwell-labs