But the original terminal was also already using a side channel. You used them to connect to a remote piece of hardware and weren’t running anything locally. In that sense ssh itself is also a side channel.
I also don’t know why you consider manipulating the system clipboard a side channel. The terminal emulator provides a way of manipulating the clipboard but that is just convenience.
Any program can access the clipboard and a TUI program can do this as well. I have a grepalike that inserts a search match into the clipboard for convience. Somewhat ironically most of the time that match gets pasted back into the terminal.
I would actually like to have a network wide clipboard system. There are solution for that but I haven’t yet found any that isn’t too unwieldy.
> But the original terminal was also already using a side channel.
What? The serial link was the only way for the terminal to talk to the Big Machine. There never was a "side channel", in fact things like control flow are mixed in-band; that's why some programs get confused about C-s and C-q.
> The terminal emulator provides a way of manipulating the clipboard but that is just convenience.
That's different from the TUI application accessing the system clipboard. You need to use pbcopy or xclip, that's non-portable, won't work over SSH, relies on those external tools being installed, etc.
> I would actually like to have a network wide clipboard system. There are solution for that but I haven’t yet found any that isn’t too unwieldy.
Try any two Apple devices signed in to the same iCloud account. It works OOB, zero setup, 100% reliable. It's called Continuity: <https://support.apple.com/en-us/108046>
Yeah, proprietary, non-portable, etc. Choose your trade-offs.
I also don’t know why you consider manipulating the system clipboard a side channel. The terminal emulator provides a way of manipulating the clipboard but that is just convenience.
Any program can access the clipboard and a TUI program can do this as well. I have a grepalike that inserts a search match into the clipboard for convience. Somewhat ironically most of the time that match gets pasted back into the terminal.
I would actually like to have a network wide clipboard system. There are solution for that but I haven’t yet found any that isn’t too unwieldy.