Ironically enough, this reminds me a lot of eshell, the shell implemented in Emacs lisp. Since it runs in a rich environment, it can augment a lot of standard u

Ironically enough, this reminds me a lot of eshell, the shell implemented in Emacs lisp. Since it runs in a rich environment, it can augment a lot of standard unix functionality with really useful features, and you can extend it in a language that's not insane. For example, grep/find results are hyperlinked, you can pipe commands directly to buffers (or even lisp functions) rather than just files, and such. In fact, now I'm tempted to add the ability to cat an image and have it display inline; should be pretty easy to implement in elisp.