4 ms·
I feel towards the unx shell the same way I feel towards Vim: there's quite a bit of cruft, some poor decisions, quite a bit I'd do differently if I decided to
by simias 6y ago
I feel towards the unx shell the same way I feel towards Vim: there's quite a bit of cruft, some poor decisions, quite a bit I'd do differently if I decided to write my own implementation from scratch. But on the other hand it mostly works well and I've learned over the years how to work around the awkward parts.
It's easy to make a laundry list of the ways the traditional unix shell falls short. The problem is creating an alternative that's superior enough to warrant learning something new and consensual enough that it can get mainstream appeal.
The article acknowledges that:
>There is arguably a rift here between those that prefer the ‘shove it in a browser’ or flashy UIs that animate and morph as you interact, and those that prefer staring into a text editor. It seems to me that the former category gets all the fancy new toys, while the latter mutters on about insurmountable levels of legacy. What I personally want is many more “one- purpose” TUIs and for them to be much easier to develop. They need to be simpler, more consistent, obvious to use, and more configurable. That’s nice and dreamy, but how are “we” supposed to get there?
But then I argue that they jumps the shark a bit. As far as I can tell the Arcan project seems more preoccupied with reaching feature-parity with Xorg than actually improving the CLI. And I'm sure for some people that's great, but for me personally that makes it a funny novelty thing that I don't see myself using. It reminds me when I first saw compiz ~15 years ago, where you had virtual desktops on a rotating 3D cube with all sorts of weird visual effects[1]. It looked cool, but I never actually used it because it wasn't practical and I had no use for it.
On the other hand I'd love for a better CLI implementation, better pipes, easier debugging, a more expressive scripting language, better task control, better feedback.
But then we went full circle to the core of the issue: everybody agrees that the unx CLI sort of sucks, but we don't really agree on what exactly needs fixing.
[1] https://youtu.be/B-FVJoZ-zwI https://youtu.be/B-FVJoZ-zwI
- dale_glass 6y agoThat's odd, I found the Compiz cube to be helpful actually. As a graphics effect it's about as basic as it can get -- even the venerable GLX Gears is more complex. And I found it to actually increase usability because it visually and very intuitively showed you the movement, so it made organization a bit neater. It made it easier to keep a mental map of what was where, because it could be arranged spatially. If anything, it didn't go far enough. I wanted more faces, and the possibility of working in a "zoomed out" state, for when I need to look at a whole bunch of stuff at once. The real novelty stuff to me were the Enlightenment effects like the water effect on the bottom of the screen -- now that chewed up CPU and did nothing of actual use.
- Nursie 6y agoI liked the cube for the same reason - virtual desktops just kinda clicked when I could rotate the cube to get to the stuff running just off screen. I've never really bothered with them before (or since). You could make the 'cube' have an arbitrary number of faces, but I don't think there was the zoom mode you talk about.
- dale_glass 6y agoI recall not being able to use the top and bottom faces, for instance. But maybe that was just the KDE implementation.
- Nursie 6y agoTrue, you could not when using compiz with gnome either, as I did back then. You could add more faces to the cube so that it became a slice of a pentagonal prism, hexagonal prism, heptagonal, octagonal etc. Or take one away so you were working on the sides of a triangular prism. But you're right, there was no vertical freedom of movement. You couldn't use a Rhombicuboctahedron, cool as it might be :) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhombicuboctahedron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhombicuboctahedron)
- hyakosm 6y agoI was searching for the quote because the text is italic, and I realized it's because you wrote UNIX with a star two times (for Unix-like ?)
- simias 6y agoIndeed, I got caught by the HN formatting. I meant un<star>x for unix/linux.