Prompt - by Christian Hergert (GNOME)
Prompt is a terminal that marries the best of GNOME Builder’s seamless container support, the beauty of GNOME Text Editor, and the robustness of VTE. I like to think of it as a companion terminal to Builder.
Though it’s also useful for immutable/container-oriented desktops like Fedora Silverblue or Project Bluefin where containers are front-and-center.
This came out of a prototype I made for the GNOME Builder IDE nearly a decade ago. We already had all the container abstractions so why not expose them as a Terminal Workspace?
Prompt extracts the container portion of the code-foundry into a standalone program.
My prototype didn’t go anywhere in recent years because I was conflicted. I have a high performance bar for software I ship and VTE wasn’t there yet on Wayland-based compositors which I use. But if you frequent this blog you already know that I reached out to the meticulous VTE maintainers and helped them pick the right battles to nearly double performance this GNOME cycle. I also ported gnome-terminal to GTK 4 which provided me ample opportunity to see where and how containers would integrate from an application perspective.