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Yes this is an amazingly dangerous and stupid idea. Sure it looks cool but so does a Lamborghini until it catches fire or you crash it into a tree at 150mph. G

by setquk 8y ago

Yes this is an amazingly dangerous and stupid idea. Sure it looks cool but so does a Lamborghini until it catches fire or you crash it into a tree at 150mph. Giving a user an opportunity to correct mistakes before they kill themselves is a major feature of Unix. Sure when you’ve decided you know what you’re talking about but don’t it will quite obediently shoot your face off. We don’t want to make that bit easier though. Edit: please don’t take this as derision but more factual. It certainly looks cool and opens the idea for further discussion.

LyndsySimon 8y ago
Dangerous, yes. Stupid, though? No. It’s a useful tool and a good idea that merely needs further refinement.
- jolmg 8y ago
  Stupid is too harsh, and I don't want to discourage anyone from contributing to open source, but I'm not sure this is all that useful either (at least not to me). Is the utility in not having to press Enter because this'll do it for me between every character? I can only think that the reason people like it so much is because it looks cool or most people don't know how to use command line editing keybindings effectively and like that they won't have to hit up arrow and move slowly across the command to edit. The fact that it doesn't have readline support, timestamped history support, or output the output of the last command to stdout at the end already seem like feature losses when compared to using a shell normally.
  - setr 8y ago
    At least one neat benefit I can imagine is not flooding your history with 20 minor edits to a regex in a long pipeline, and not flooding your stdout with garbage from a bad regex Inversion of the output (viewing the top, instead of the bottom, without scrolling on longer outputs) is also of note Imagine if this were simply the shell, with all its normal editing facilities, but laid out in this fashion. It seems obvious to me theres a usefulness anytime you’re trying to create a longer pipeline.. and doing the same thing the shell normally, but leaving a mess behind Your list of issues are all resolvable (and probably trivially so), and thus not really relevant to the question of whether this thing is worth having in the first place (which requires more fundamental questioning). IE the issue with rm executing when you’re typing in ‘rmore’ is absolutely fatal in the current design and makes it unusable. That can’t be fixed without a bunch of hacks, or losing one of its main features (swapping to enter-to-run is more than fine imo). With such a fatal flaw, it could be fair to call it stupid and useless. But for lacking readline support on first public listing..?
    - akavel 8y ago
      I couldn't find a good readline library in pure Go, that would also interact well with the tcell package I am using for the TUI. This annoyed me really hard, but eventually I said, screw that, and went with the minimum I had to write to make an input box usable at all :)
verytrivial 8y ago
I disagree. The example in the GIF is something I've done many times, usually with a bunch of temporary files. Where the commands are side-effect free and relatively cheap, but the specifics are fiddly, this looks to be really useful. But not universally applicable, no!
- XorNot 8y ago
  I think at the point something like this becomes useful though, I've usually just dropped into writing a Python script - which more often then not is the right choice because there's a high probability I'm going to need to do more things soon anyway if it's getting that complicated.
  - setquk 8y ago
    Exactly
anthk 8y ago
>Giving a user an opportunity to correct mistakes before they kill themselves is a major feature of Unix. That's the complete opposite philosphy of Unix. That's, in fact, MIT/LISP philosophy. Unix' Motto is DIE fast.
- setquk 8y ago
  Actually it’s more RTFM before you drive the car. A powerful skill many have forgotten which is supplanted by autonomous tools to make tripping over claymores easier.

by setquk 8y ago

LyndsySimon 8y ago

Dangerous, yes. Stupid, though? No. It’s a useful tool and a good idea that merely needs further refinement.

jolmg 8y ago
Stupid is too harsh, and I don't want to discourage anyone from contributing to open source, but I'm not sure this is all that useful either (at least not to me). Is the utility in not having to press Enter because this'll do it for me between every character? I can only think that the reason people like it so much is because it looks cool or most people don't know how to use command line editing keybindings effectively and like that they won't have to hit up arrow and move slowly across the command to edit. The fact that it doesn't have readline support, timestamped history support, or output the output of the last command to stdout at the end already seem like feature losses when compared to using a shell normally.
- setr 8y ago
  At least one neat benefit I can imagine is not flooding your history with 20 minor edits to a regex in a long pipeline, and not flooding your stdout with garbage from a bad regex Inversion of the output (viewing the top, instead of the bottom, without scrolling on longer outputs) is also of note Imagine if this were simply the shell, with all its normal editing facilities, but laid out in this fashion. It seems obvious to me theres a usefulness anytime you’re trying to create a longer pipeline.. and doing the same thing the shell normally, but leaving a mess behind Your list of issues are all resolvable (and probably trivially so), and thus not really relevant to the question of whether this thing is worth having in the first place (which requires more fundamental questioning). IE the issue with rm executing when you’re typing in ‘rmore’ is absolutely fatal in the current design and makes it unusable. That can’t be fixed without a bunch of hacks, or losing one of its main features (swapping to enter-to-run is more than fine imo). With such a fatal flaw, it could be fair to call it stupid and useless. But for lacking readline support on first public listing..?
  - akavel 8y ago
    I couldn't find a good readline library in pure Go, that would also interact well with the tcell package I am using for the TUI. This annoyed me really hard, but eventually I said, screw that, and went with the minimum I had to write to make an input box usable at all :)

verytrivial 8y ago

I disagree. The example in the GIF is something I've done many times, usually with a bunch of temporary files. Where the commands are side-effect free and relatively cheap, but the specifics are fiddly, this looks to be really useful. But not universally applicable, no!

XorNot 8y ago
I think at the point something like this becomes useful though, I've usually just dropped into writing a Python script - which more often then not is the right choice because there's a high probability I'm going to need to do more things soon anyway if it's getting that complicated.
- setquk 8y ago
  Exactly

anthk 8y ago

>Giving a user an opportunity to correct mistakes before they kill themselves is a major feature of Unix. That's the complete opposite philosphy of Unix. That's, in fact, MIT/LISP philosophy. Unix' Motto is DIE fast.

setquk 8y ago
Actually it’s more RTFM before you drive the car. A powerful skill many have forgotten which is supplanted by autonomous tools to make tripping over claymores easier.