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That exists, it's called GUI... Improving on the text model is almost always premature optimization, though. Consider the incredible cost for an observer to "u

That exists, it's called GUI... Improving on the text model is almost always premature optimization, though. Consider the incredible cost for an observer to "understand" what you are doing. Insane amounts of work (resulting in lock-in or a product never shipped) is not how the text model could become so successful. Why can tools like grep or sed be so immensely useful? Precisely because they don't need to understand what goes in (other than a stream of lines), what does the pattern mean (other than being a regular expression), and what goes out (other than a stream of lines). And what's the benefit of programs understanding "semantics of output" really? Everything is text. When a file is printed on the terminal, select it (e.g. double-click), type "vim " (or whatever), and middle-click. It's good enough most of the time. When there is some really dry repetitive work, bang out a command-line to automate that for you (along the lines of "while read filename; do vim filename; done"). A GUI can only help for the most common cases. If these are only a minority of cases, GUIs are only crippled tools preventing you from doing real work. (Personal anecdote: I use nothing but a browser and xterms on most days or even weeks).

WalterGR 10y ago
Everything is text. No. In PowerShell, console output is 'typically'[1] of a well-known type. It is therefore entirely possible for a shell + terminal to be aware of the operations available on its output. [1] For some definition of "typically"... PowerShell permits arbitrary manipulations of output, so obviously there are circumstances where this is impossible.
- jstimpfle 10y ago
  Yep, my post was unclear. "Everything is text" is the Unix idea. I know that PowerShell pipes objects and that's exactly the problem from an architectural standpoint. It's what makes it expensive to create and integrate components.

WalterGR 10y ago

Everything is text. No. In PowerShell, console output is 'typically'[1] of a well-known type. It is therefore entirely possible for a shell + terminal to be aware of the operations available on its output. [1] For some definition of "typically"... PowerShell permits arbitrary manipulations of output, so obviously there are circumstances where this is impossible.

jstimpfle 10y ago
Yep, my post was unclear. "Everything is text" is the Unix idea. I know that PowerShell pipes objects and that's exactly the problem from an architectural standpoint. It's what makes it expensive to create and integrate components.