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:Everything is an INCOMPATIBLE object

[mangu]

Objects can be rendered on the terminal as well

Rendering them is different from the object itself.

Even though the pipeline streams objects, the output from the last command of a pipeline is rendered on the terminal

Again, rendering is not the object. I can have a list of different operation I need to do, passing things from one program to the other. If all I can see is the rendering of the last command I cannot see what is actually being passed from one command to the next one.

Developing is incremental. The power of Unix is that this simple fact is everywhere. I need to see all the processes:

ps aux

Which ones are owned by boris?

ps aux | egrep '^boris'

What are the process numbers and creation time?

ps aux | egrep '^boris' | awk '{print $2, $9}'

OK, sort that by process number

ps aux | egrep '^boris' | awk '{print $2, $9}' | sort -n

In Unix I build up my commands step by step. What I learn in one place can be used somewhere else. The same sort command I use for process numbers is the one I use for my phone book.

If I can't remember exactly how awk works I can test it by typing

echo "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11" | awk '{print $2, $9}'

It would not work if 'echo' showed a representation on the terminal that is not exactly the same thing it pipes to 'awk'

I'll grant that PowerShell is a more natural fit for Windows given that so much of the OS and applications are exposed as objects.

That's a shortcoming of windows, not an advantage of powershell.