Imagining the CLI For the Modern Machine

scc writes "TermKit is a re-think of the storied Unix terminal, where human views, input and data pipes are separated. Output viewers render any kind of data usefully. It may not be a new idea, but it's certainly a new take on it." I know you are quite comfortable in your shell of old, but this sort of thing sure gets my juices going. The best of both worlds.

Comments

Re:Mac only.

[The MAZZTer]

Addendum: I think I figured it out. After reading the instructions more carefully I assume there are client and server portions, and it's the client portion that is mac-only, and that a WebKit browser should work there. The server portion is pure node.js stuff and the node.js runtime is cross-platform.

Re:PowerShell

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, this is quite straightforward copy of PowerShell. It looks like they ported Microsoft PowerShell to Mac. Fantastic.

Re:Everything is an INCOMPATIBLE object

[Anonymous Coward]

'Objects' have this terrible problem that you always need a specific program to read and write them.

Except that in PowerShell all of the objects are reflective and automatically have a textual representation, even if one is not provided by the author.

With plain text you can see the data structure at a glance, you don't need to get some separate documentation that may be wrong, not up to date, or not even exist.

Being reflective you can also see the data structure instantly, clearly defined by type, even if the author never wrote any documentation. Moreso, as all programs are similarly reflective, you can tell all parameters that it can accept as well as all data that it can return without documentation.

Plain text is output to the screen and input from the keyboard. Any program that writes text to the console can send data to any program that reads text from the keyboard.

PowerShell programs are fully capable of streaming text as well as intermixing object streams with text streams.

This means development and testing is simple, you do it one module at a time, type the input and watch the output.

As you can in PowerShell.

And you can very easily combine different programs in a way that no one tried before.

As you can in PowerShell, except that you don't have to concern yourself with additionally parsing and reformatting those text streams in order to allow them to be consumed. Moreso, as virtually all of the object models that exist within Windows is available within PowerShell as objects, including WMI, LDAP, COM and .NET, you can combine disparate libraries into a single command line treating all objects as equals and without having to write any additional plumbing code.