After seeing something about this yesterday, I said on Rstat.us/Twitter that I thought it was pretty but disagreed with the whole premise. I still do, I think,

After seeing something about this yesterday, I said on Rstat.us/Twitter that I thought it was pretty but disagreed with the whole premise. I still do, I think, but I'm very impressed with how reasonable Steven's response was. He wrote me and asked pretty much "Why?" I said essentially "Unix philosophy" and attached the link that ended up in his blog post.[1] He wrote back and at some point he wrote this post, probably replying to all the people who were taking snipes at him. So this is a long way around to say, kudos for being gracious and serious in the face of people glibly writing off your hard work. Having said that, I'm still not sold on the concept - yet. I've played with it a bit this morning. Obviously it's still pretty alpha (more than one seize up or crash), but that's fine. My larger problem is in figuring out how it would fit into my daily work flow. After trying it out now, here are some concrete issues: + No monospace fonts for code. The output of cat looks like teeny-tiny website font. Things are no longer "lined up". That's bad. + I can't use any applications that take over the terminal (irssi, mutt, vim, less). Steven says as much - it's not part of his design - but for me it's a big problem. It means that even if I embrace TermKit, I still need those 1980s terminals. + No scripting language built in. As bad as shell scripting might be, I get an absolute ton done with it. I don't want to give that up unless something will make up for all that "getting shit done".[2] + TermKit (maybe?) forces me to change habits I can't afford to lose. One small, but I think important, example: If you try to run this: awk '{print $1}' file.txt TermKit doesn't echo the single quotes. That is, you can type them, but they don't show up on the screen. I'm not really sure what to do with that. Does that mean I should stop typing them? Does that mean that I still must type them, but TermKit strips them because they aren't pretty? Does TermKit allow me to do it either way? I'm going to need to remember how to quote things when I log into a remote machine over ssh, so if TermKit will force me to change habits, that's a big, big problem. (After a few experiments, it seems like the single quotes are still required. Without them, TermKit tokenizes the stream differently. If that's the case, why refuse to echo them to the screen?) [1] http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch01s06.html http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch01s06.html [2] Cf. Ryan Tomayko's Shell Haters talk: http://shellhaters.heroku.com/ http://shellhaters.heroku.com/