13 ms·

Ivo – a reimagined Unix terminal system

284 points by lubutu 15y ago

dfc 15y ago
> "We then add syntax highlighting and hyperlinks, so you can easily navigate between man pages" GNU info?
reirob 15y ago
This is one of the rare delightful articles. I came to understand, after 6 years of non-programming work, and now back in front of the console, that what I like the most is the freedom that the shell provides and the room for creativity when accomplishing a task in a readable composition of tools in one line. Certainly the provided successors of the Bourne shell might be more elegant. Certainly when piping data through several tools needs often transformation of the data representation to match the required input format. Sometimes the transformation uses different principles (regular expressions, shell wildcards, awk, sed, ..) which pollutes the logical flow of problem resolution. But I came to the conclusion that despite not being optimal, this data transformation noise holds information that, when reading or when needing to explain to others, helps to understand, or maybe remember the data model from the source to the sinks. However I believe, more uniform but more universal data transformation techniques would be a progress. Until now this comment is more about shell than terminals, but for me, these are the biggest advantages of working on a command line - freedom and creativity in the usage of available tools. Now, to come closer to the terminal aspect. I am a typing fan. I went through hell when moving from Germany to France and having to re-learn a new keyboard layout - none of the both layouts are good, but if you are used to one it is very annoying to get to used to another. After having had some missions in other countries with different keyboard layouts, I found a solution, that is in line with my philosophy of using typing tools: Learn US keyboard layout, to the point to use it blindly without needing letters on the keys - it is installed on all OSes in all countries. At home use the extension US International with AltGr dead keys - I can now write all German, French, Turk and many other Latin based accents with a single layout. When in mission at a customer I ask if in the open session I can switch to US layout (if needed) - until now there were only some raised eyebrows, but no objections. And at least for ThinkPads you can order them with US layout, even with the € sign. So for keyboard I tackled the problem. For text editors I resolved the problem already 10 years ago. I use VIM. VI is on all UNIXes, VIM is on Windows (I did not yet have to work on Macs). On the UNIX shell the first thing I type is: set -o vi Like this many VI shortcuts and commands are at the command line. One quote in the article made me smile the most: "... However, it’s worth noting that we don’t avoid the mouse because it is slow — if one wants to move the cursor to an arbitrary location elsewhere on the screen, one can often do so faster with a mouse than a keyboard. The problem is the transition from the keyboard to the mouse. It’s an expensive context switch, which should not be done lightly. ..." Yeah, this is the reason I use a track point instead of a mouse. Nothing to care with you, takes no space and you don't have to lift your hands from the keyboard. The only problem is the craving when having to sit at a customer at a keyboard that has not track point - I find myself sometimes searching for it with the fingers until I realize that I am not on my ThinkPad. It is a shame this device is disappearing on most computers. At last: I think what unites the aficionados of the command line is the choice to spend more effort and time in learning tools which are more difficult than their alternatives (mouse vs. track point, command line vs. GUI, ten finger typing vs. two finger typing) at the beginning but pay big times off in efficiency in the long run and as a plus give the pleasure of creativity and freedom. I encourage the author of the article to progress with his ideas! We absolutely need innovation in this space. It is just that the bar is huge because of all the tools we became used to.
- davidhollander 15y ago
  > Yeah, this is the reason I use a track point instead of a mouse. VIM + touchpad beneath space bar on a standard laptop works well too. I can left\right click with my left thumb and move the cursor with my right thumb without my primary digits leaving the home keys.
  - reirob 15y ago
    Sure. The thing is that (a) a good track point is ways more precise than a touch pad (b) to cross the screen from one corner to another on a touch pad you have to make several strokes, whereas with a track point you don't have to leave the device a single time
ddelony 15y ago
Acme seems to come pretty close to the author's idea, combining both a terminal and an editor.
- luriel 15y ago
  For anyone wondering: http://acme.cat-v.org http://acme.cat-v.org Fun fact: Acme was Dennis Ritchie's editor of choice.
- tikhonj 15y ago
  His vision also sounds quite a bit like Emacs, especially the GTK version.
pnathan 15y ago
I wholly agree that splattering chrome over a terminal isn't the best way forward. Emacs shell mode gets me all?most? of the way to the interface posed as the solution (text editor as interface to terminal). Being emacs, I am sure I could finish up the proposed solution with "a few lines of elisp". And I don't think it's the solution. These issues are spawned deeper in the design. Multiple streams of information are being spawned, and must be handled sanely: pipe redirection starts breaking down here because it's a line - what's needed is a graph of management that's able to handle different cases and join back for the next approach. One approach might simply be to develop a higher-powered programming language environment that calls directly into the system.
- thurn 15y ago
  Emacs shell mode was my first thought too. It doesn't try to implement a new standard for pipes, though. The idea of using invisible control characters as metadata is interesting. (My biggest complain about shell mode is that it's impossible to send certain characters to the underlying process, TAB being the most important one, so you can't rely on built-in tab completion behavior.)
- quanticle 15y ago
  Windows Powershell attempts to do what you're describing. PowerShell doesn't manipulate text streams, it manipulates .Net CLR objects. That allows shell programs to expose data in a much more meaningful way. You don't have to have a parser in every program that interacts with the shell when you can send and receive typed data. I haven't worked much with it lately, but I wouldn't be surprised if Powershell was the closest existing technology to what the author is thinking of.
  - mmc 15y ago
    I think he agrees, except for the textual display. From the article: Data structure. Windows PowerShell had a chance to redesign the terminal from scratch, but defaulted to the same old grid of ASCII. One innovative thing they did do was add structure to their data, piping .NET objects instead of raw text, allowing the user to select fields by name instead of writing elaborate AWK scripts. The shell for the research OS Famke does a similar thing for higher-order functions
sp332 15y ago
How about something like Archy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy#Features https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy#Features It was never polished but you can still play with an old (windows) build: http://users-www.wineme.fb5.uni-siegen.de/home/SebastianDraxler/WWW/Archy_build-124.exe http://users-www.wineme.fb5.uni-siegen.de/home/SebastianDrax... Edit: or for a gui, something like Enso (for the whole OS) http://humanized.com/enso http://humanized.com/enso or Ubiquity https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Latest_Ubiquity_User_Tutorial https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Latest_Ubiquity_User_... (for the browser) Both are abandoned open-source projects with a lot of the hard work already done (the internationalized parser in Ubiquity is very nice).
cturner 15y ago
You can and should separate view and controller. Imagine if you could spawn windows at monitors, and then have things display on them via pipeline. You might type into a tiny window on one monitor that never loses focus, but sends graphs and text and streams to these windows. There's no reason that the place you enter text should correspond to the output display, and a lot of value to be had by separating them. Imagine being able to plug display consumers into a port so that you could do visual demos.
- lubutu 15y ago
  The concept of a view and a controller are distinct, a terminal simply happens to be both, because it can do both. Commands are solely controllers, and you're right, a read-only terminal would be just a view.
- sp332 15y ago
  Most unixy programs actually do have them divided. stdin, stdout (and a third for stderr). It would be very easy to separate the streams to different places. ETA at the last place I worked, we actually had the touchscreen on one desk and the program running in a window on another computer. It was pretty nice to type something and make it show up across the room.
  - cturner 15y ago
    On this topic of stdin, stdout - wouldn't it be neat if - instead of signals - there was an input channel called stdctrl that you could send control messages in on. Glad to read about the scenario at your last place - I've never seen this in action.
    - jaylevitt 15y ago
      At AOL circa 2000, our application framework had a Tcl interpreter listening on a "control port", so that you could telnet to any app and get stats, change settings, etc. Of course, nowadays that's more commonly done with REST endpoints, which I think would satisfy your stdctrl idea.
    - 15y ago
mooism2 15y ago
The author confuses a terminal with a shell running in a terminal. I'd like for my terminal to be able to open a stream of html in my web browser. Use case: running `man blahblah` in a ssh session opens a nicely formatted page in a local browser window. I'd like for my terminal to be able to open a stream of text in my editor, and accept a stream of text back from my editor to save somewhere. Use case: running `sudo -e /etc/blahblah` in a ssh session allows me to edit the remote file /etc/blahblah in a local text editor, and save my changes back.
- acuozzo 15y ago
  Aren't you confusing a terminal with a terminal emulator?
  - mooism2 15y ago
    Possibly, although as far as traditional unix shells are concerned, they're the same thing.
hamoid 15y ago
This is text editing in OpenGL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O5DJTOy6EA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O5DJTOy6EA I'd like to have such a terminal.
- NinetyNine 15y ago
  Sublime Text is a text editor which runs on Open GL, it's not quiet what you mean though. http://www.sublimetext.com/ http://www.sublimetext.com/
  - false 15y ago
    It used to, but starting from version 2 it utilized software rendering.
johnwatson11218 15y ago
Sometimes when I have text files open I want to be able to run command line tools against them. I know I can go write a shell script but sometimes I want to write grep against my inbox or against all the windows I have open at the time. I want to be able to high lite some text (possibly in more than one window) and then have a transparent shell appear that lets me write expressions to work with that text, like sort it in place. Often I have to move things into and out of text files, spreadsheets,databases to be able to apply all the tricks that I like. I wish those tricks could just appear and work with what I'm looking at.
- aerique 15y ago
  Emacs (and Vim as well IIRC) can run shell commands against selections of text so just read the files in there. http://www.masteringemacs.org/articles/2011/10/19/executing-shell-commands-emacs/ http://www.masteringemacs.org/articles/2011/10/19/executing-...
  - johnwatson11218 15y ago
    I have used emacs before and I did like having multiple shells open and the ability to copy many text fragments into the buffer. I use windows for my day to day work so I'm thinking about something more geared to that. I want to be able to take the the best features from the command line, and the gui programs and package them up into something that just floats at the OS level. So that I use a keyboard shortcut to pull up a buffer that can grab text (or entire files) work on them and push the results back to whatever app/file I pulled it from.
    - kejadlen 15y ago
      I think DTerm (http://decimus.net/DTerm http://decimus.net/DTerm) is a step in the direction that you're describing...
      - johnwatson11218 15y ago
        That looks really interesting. I'm going to install it when I get home. If I'm able to be looking at a text file, launch DTerm with a keyboard shortcut, run something that modifies the file in place, and then have DTerm fade away then that will definitely be useful.
user911302966 15y ago
"And we, the users, play along, pretending our machine is a video terminal presenting a grid of ASCII characters in all of 256 colours. This is ridiculous." Not everybody uses their terminal to churn out HTML pages and add 'Nyan mode' to our 'newly discovered' emacs program. For those who do that, just buy a Macintosh or whatever is this week's hip flavor of Best Buy PC. Otherwise, use a language that doesn't require >256 different colors to be represented meaningfully. "Typography is the future"? Thank goodness X.org/XFree86 has supported custom fonts since the 1990's. "Opening a man page would scroll gently to the top of the page, letting you scroll down and read, or search through it as you would any text" See: MANPAGER. "We then add syntax highlighting and hyperlinks, so you can easily navigate between man pages" Many terminals and shells support these features already. "Finally we add visualisations so you can view plots of lines of code, etc., without having to context-switch." Huh? I read that as 'code folding' and clang compilation. I think the main takeaway here is that most of his "ideas" can be easily achieved within the current ecosystem of available programs, most of which are stock on modern UNIX-like OS distributions. I do think he misfiled this article under "Ideas"; it's more akin to a polite rant. edit: colours/color killed due to conflict with reality (and irrelevance anyway).
- lubutu 15y ago
  You don't seem able to see the forest for the trees... Taking quotes out of context and dismissing them is not sufficient to dismiss the entire article. Also, I'm British.
  - user911302966 15y ago
    All quotes save for one-liners are out of context. The points you make stand on their own. I don't dismiss the entire article; I appreciate thought and innovation in the space of the terminal, but I disagree with your ideas. Thanks for putting them out there to begin with.
  - 1010100101 15y ago
    I'm curious, have you used Plan9? If yes, how long did you use it?
adambyrtek 15y ago
Reading the introduction, I was really excited. I fully agree with the premise, but the proposed solution seems inadequate. Putting shell in an editor, adding hidden metadata, and making the output hyperlinked just don't feel radical enough. Also, some parts of the proposal are very vague (description of MVC), while others are extremely specific (whole paragraph about an obscure Unicode delimiter), which makes it hard to get the big picture. That said, improving the terminal is a really challenging and important problem, so I'm glad there are people thinking about it.
- 4ad 15y ago
  > improving the terminal is a really challenging and important problem, so I'm glad there are people thinking about it. People thought about it 20 years ago, not only about the terminal, but about improving UNIX in general. And not just any people, but the people that did UNIX and C in the first place. Their effort is called Plan9. Very few people have heard of Plan9 and of those people even fewer used it to the point of understanding the novel ideas. I use it. Even when I am forced to use UNIX I still use the Plan9 tools along with the Acme and Sam editors. Once you get used to the new Plan9 ideas, you feel crippled in UNIX and can never go back.
  - mcrittenden 15y ago
    > Once you get used to the new Plan9 ideas, you feel crippled in UNIX and can never go back. Would you care to expand on this? Any specific examples of things that Plan9 does for you that you feel crippled without? I ask out of genuine curiousity, as I've often heard Plan9 mentioned but have never given it enough research to understand its appeal. For example, I'm a full time web developer and I spent a lot of time in zsh and vim. Would you recommend that someone like me checks out Plan9? Is it the type of thing you could possibly use as your general purpose OS?
    - dexen 15y ago
      I'm using Acme for web devel. Yields very well to scripting. Together with plumber and a few scripts, it provides pretty much a complete IDE. The ability to simply click on any text to 1) execute it or 2) search for it or 3) copy/paste/replace is something that I miss from other editors. Essentially, any text becomes hypertext. Output from compiler or debugger links you to source files etc. Aside of that there's a big chunk of remote filesystem access ported from Plan 9, but I haven't used that yet. Acme is, in fact, a modern, windowing terminal -- it lets you view, edit, execute and navigate. No surprise given that it comes from Rob Pike -- one of the guys behind an earlier windowing terminal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blit_(computer_terminal) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blit_(computer_terminal) http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/blit/ http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/blit/ http://swtch.com/plan9port/ http://swtch.com/plan9port/ is quite easy to start with on any POSIX system.
Quequau 15y ago
This sort of reminded me of TermKit, which I think is still on Github... but sort of stagnant the last time I looked.
- wladimir 15y ago
  Yes its here: https://github.com/unconed/TermKit https://github.com/unconed/TermKit I still think the idea is great. This guys should work together instead of making yet another competing project.
- scottmp10 15y ago
  Yes, I really liked that project and I think the design is fantastic (it leverages WebKit for rendering). Both TermKit and this project will have an interesting dilemma with editing remote files though. The advantage of SSH is that you really aren't storing any remote files locally (only the currently visible characters are stored in memory). An editor that uses this new model and eliminates lag requires transfer of remote files to the local computer. There are a lot of situations where this is not a viable option.
  - lubutu 15y ago
    A very good point. My prototype protocol, rwr, reads only the data in the file it has to know. Additionally, when one inserts a character it simply says "insert 'a' at byte 4", rather than having to stream the entire file. That's another benefit of running filesystem models as daemons on remote servers.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
ImprovedSilence 15y ago
Kind of off topic, but this article just reminded me, I was thinking how nice it would be for a linux distro to be made for programmers. Bundled with every bit of programming language (from c to hakell and back), the standard editors with their syntax highlighting (the .vimrc already set up a little), cool special tools that maybe only serve a special purpose (stuff like gnu radio..) I was just thinking it'd be nice to have one big package, a here ya go, have at it, kinda linux. Maybe even with some alternative (but vetted) how-to documentation. For some reason I just can't get used to the flow and syntax of Man pages... And it can leave out lots of the fancy gui sidebars and stuff (not sayin get rid of the gui, just dumb it down, I'm here for the terminal, and maybe some IDEs.. maybe).
- keypusher 15y ago
  Read the koan in the above comment again. Your vision of a Linux distribution "for programmers" is very likely different from my vision, let alone that of Dennis Ritchie or Linus Torvalds. This approach is the fundamental mistake made by other operating systems: to assume you know what the user wants/needs, and give it to them in one nice shiny box with a bow on it. It would be so convenient... right? The core philosophy of Unix is to build tools that do one job well. By combining those tools, it is then possible to build great things. Do not assume that means you can hide the tools away and just give people the great thing, and realize it is naive to believe that you can solve everyone's problem by creating the one true master editor/program/os that combines all the great things from previous attempts, but this time "gets it right".
BonsaiDen 15y ago
While I like the terminal... I don't want to be one. Best Ivo
snotrockets 15y ago
I'll answer with a Koan, it's author long forgotten (if you know him, do tell me his name!): A UNIX wizard hears cries of torment from his apprentice's computer room where the apprentice is studying, and goes to investigate. He finds the apprentice in obvious distress, nearly on the verge of tears. "What's the problem?" he asks. "Why did you cry out?" "It's terrible using this system. I must use four editors each day to get my studies done, because not one of them does everything." The wizard nods sagely, and asks, "And what would you propose that will solve this obvious dilemma?" The student thinks carefully for several minutes, and his face then lights up in delight. Excitedly, he says, "Well, it's obvious. I will write the best editor ever. It will do everything that the existing four editors do, but do their jobs better, and faster. And because of my new editor, the world will be a better place." The wizard quickly raises his hand and smacks the apprentice on the side of his head. The wizard is old and frail, and the apprentice isn't physically hurt, but is shocked by what has happened. He turns his head to face the wizard. "What have I done wrong?" he asks. "Fool!" says the wizard. "Do you think I want to learn yet another editor?" Immediately, the apprentice is enlightened.
- p9idf 15y ago
  I'm not feeling immediately enlightened. The existence of a program doesn't inconvenience anyone. No-one has to use it if they don't want to. That wizard needs to chill out and not get so upset about people kicking ideas around.
  - freehunter 15y ago
    No one has to use it, but someone has to decide not to use it. A major concern with newcomers to many, many systems in a wide variety of markets is what option to pick. Most go with the default, which reinforces that default but doesn't necessarily fit their needs. They do this because the choice is overwhelming.
    - p9idf 15y ago
      I trust users who know how to use the shell to be able to decide what suits them best and to not be paralyzed by indecision between their system's default terminal emulator and some guy's obscure hobby terminal system.
derleth 15y ago
Weak typing and implicit coercion are not the same thing. They're not even close to the same thing. Haskell does (things equivalent to) implicit coercion when it adds a floating-point Number to an integral Number and nobody (sane) says Haskell is weakly-typed.
- rawatson 15y ago
  Haskell uses type inference, but that's not the same as implicit coercion, which Haskell explicitly avoids. That is: if you type 4 + 4.2 Then the compiler will infer that you mean (4::Fractional a=>a) + (4.2::Fractional a => a) However, you cannot add an integer and a float: (4::Int) + (4.2::Float) Couldn't match expected type `Int' with actual type `Float' In the second argument of `(+)', namely `(4.2 :: Float)' In the expression: (4 :: Int) + (4.2 :: Float) In an equation for `it': it = (4 :: Int) + (4.2 :: Float) This follows from the type of (+) :: Num a => a -> a -> a
  - derleth 15y ago
    I guess I still don't get how there could be a difference between Float and Fractional, then.
    - rawatson 15y ago
      Haskell uses type classes to support ad hoc polymorphism, or overloading. Consider the statement: (4.2::Fractional a=> a) + (4::Float) Float is an instance of the type class Fractional. That is: methods which are defined for all fractional types must be defined for floats. The compiler infers that (4.2::Fractional a=>a) must have type float, as it is being added to a float. This is compatible with the original type of the expression, as Float is an instance of fractional, so it is valid to read 4.2 as a Float. This diagram might help: http://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/basic.html#sect6.3 http://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/basic.html#sect6.3
jwhitlark 15y ago
There are some interesting ideas here. One thing that occurred to me while reading it was using a message queue to implement the pipeline functionality. I've been interested in Apache ActiveMQ/Camel for a while now and excited about some of the things it can do. With that model, each 'line' could have it's own set of headers, allowing for transformation by aware tools, but transparent by default. This would also blur the line between running commands and having background filters. It would also work nicely over the network. I did some experiments with clojure/camel at one point, and came up with stuff like this: (defroute context (from "file:/home/jw/scratch/inbox?noop=true") (to "file:/home/jw/scratch/outbox")) ; from http://codeabout.blogspot.com/2010/06/using-apache-camel-from-clojure.html http://codeabout.blogspot.com/2010/06/using-apache-camel-fro... Which is basically a continuous file copy. I could see different flags for "do now and exit", "do at HH:MM:SS", "do until I tell you to stop", "do when system is idle", etc.
- Arelius 15y ago
  I'm not sure what you'd really gain from using a message queue. Pipes with streams seems to be lower overhead and could be extended pretty trivially to get most of the functionality you'd want. Could you perhaps explain a bit better?
Semiapies 15y ago
I am skeptical about total reimaginations, and when I read this I started to take it as one of those airy "Dude, someone totally revolutionize this for me..." posts, but then I hit: I’m working on this in my spare time, starting with... and now I'm curious to see what the author comes up with. There's just something about an actual tool, no matter how prototypical, that improves the discussion of new tools.
haberman 15y ago
Here's my six-year-old rant about how crufty terminal technology is. It's not a visionary re-imagining of terminals like this article is, but personally I think that one of the biggest barriers to innovation in terminal technology is that the current stack is so incredibly baroque and difficult to program or extend elegantly. http://www.advogato.org/person/habes/diary/6.html http://www.advogato.org/person/habes/diary/6.html
bitcracker 15y ago
The beauty of Unix is its simplicity. This made Unix so reliable. If you want to write a beautiful terminal as _addon_ I have no problem with that. But I would not accept a _replacement_ of the old fashioned terminals. Because they are so simple, they just work.
- mmagin 15y ago
  Apparently you've never messed around with termcap. Or had to use terminals other than xterms and vt100s, or some very near clones of them.
- flomo 15y ago
  Meanwhile, it took Unix forever before the PC's backspace key 'just worked'. The terminal guts are unbelievably gnarly, and it's kinda surprising it hasn't been replaced with a simpler approach designed for virtual terminals by now.
  - bitcracker 15y ago
    > surprising it hasn't been replaced with a simpler approach designed for virtual terminals by now. Because they ... just work? :-)
peterwwillis 15y ago
Please don't forget that the terminal should be useful to just get work done without programming. It's also all designed to have a human interface - all the output can be grok'd by a human and not some complex tool or parser. This is what prevents things from just magically working and forces us to come up with hacks to pipe and grep and cut pieces of data to do what we want. If you really want to "reimagine" it, throw out the box and make a new one. If you redesigned all the standard unix tools to have a universal API and added hooks for each function they contain you could just specify a workflow to execute and the tools would figure out how to transmogrify the data internally. So for example: rehooliginator --store=val1 --filesystem=/proc/cpuinfo --rowname='model name' --match='([[:digit:].]\+)GHz' --store=val2 --filesystem=/proc/meminfo --rowname='MemFree' --match='([[:digit:]]\+) kB' --store=val3 --cmd=ps --fields=rss,comm --sort=rss --match='java' --field=rss --sum --math='$SUM*1024' --store=val4 --cmd=vmstat --samples=5 --field=cpu-idle --avg --output="Stats:\n\tCPU: $val1\n\tFree Memory: $val2\n\tResident memory used by Java: $val3\n\tCPU idle time: $val4\n" Not the greatest example but you get the idea. If this seems more complex than traditional one-liner scripting it's because you're trying to do a lot of little things on a single line. It may be better to shove all this into a little file in easy to understand non-programmer language and save it for later. (Also, the long GNU options could be replaced by short options for quicker use, depending on the API/module being used) This is obviously not getting away from the 'old school dynamic' of a fake terminal, but it does remove some of the need for it when we have tools robust enough that the terminal doesn't have to be as user-friendly as it is. You could combine a tool/framework like the above with a text editor to write multi-liners, sample the output and execute them on the fly. Build in hooks to execute commands over an ssh connection - or even gather output from various hosts at a time - and you could automate sampling your whole network from a one-liner. For a "friendly interface" I think a simple tree view file browser would work nicely. So basically an "explorer"-type app with an embedded text editor and output window to let you explore a system rapidly and also automate tasks on the fly. Hell, you could build an IDE or other friendly GUI to build your query tool's arguments using quick mouse clicks.
joeyh 15y ago
The idea of using an obscure unicode code point to indicate the start of metadata, in the expectation that nobody will use it, is probably self-defeating. As soon as that's is use, there will be a reason to use that obscure code point (in documentation, in code, etc), so you will still have to deal with escaping it.
- TheEzEzz 15y ago
  You'll have to deal with escaping it, but you won't need to escape as often, and may never need to escape if you aren't writing code/documentation dealing with the system itself.
jes5199 15y ago
Could someone try to distill out some sort of concrete proposal from this? I had trouble understanding what he was implying.
VMG 15y ago
I'd be 90% satisfied if we just got rid of termcap and friends. Let's just replace escape codes with some kind of markup language (or s-expressions or whatever).
- danking00 15y ago
  Interactive SCSH Shell. That's what I'm waiting for.
joebadmo 15y ago
I agree that there is too much focus on "intuitiveness," but I'm neither a programmer (I'm working on it) nor a sysadmin, and I'd like a more robust user interface too! I have a lot of work to get done, and I'm willing to learn a different set of interface axioms than the ones we've been working with for the last few decades. Here's the beginning of my thinking on the subject: http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/9325300749/a-different-kind-of-gui http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/9325300749/a-different-kind-o... It's great to hear other voices in this discussion, though!
nevinera 15y ago
This article appears to be functionally describing emacs.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
pshc 15y ago
While text editing interfaces could be more polished and modern--the underlying problem that causes your dissatisfaction is the text. Storing code as text is an evolutionary dead end. Storing code graphs in text requires the use of plaintext names for graph references, which binds logic and presentation together. The gap between the goal-completion logic a user comes up with and how they turn those mental instructions into plaintext is an unnecessary jump--an encoding--that produces no end of trivial but infuriating miscommunications. Storing code as pure structure (not XML or anything silly, the serialization is trivial) avoids a huge class of artificial problems we've had to deal with since the dawn of compilers, due to the disconnect between human meaning encoded in plaintext and machine parsing. Visualizing code as text--text as the primary view in the MVC, complemented with colours and annotations and hyperlinks and hints--is extremely useful. What we really need is a structural editor with the familiarity and ease of use of a text editor. But that is a hard problem, and more polished text manipulators are a nice stop-gap in the meanwhile.
- lubutu 15y ago
  I do completely agree with you that we ought to transition toward structural code editors (and therefore, I suppose, structural terminals), but as you say, that's a very hard problem -- I have yet to see one which isn't terribly clumsy to use.
  - danwills 15y ago
    VOPs in SideFX:Houdini are the best use of code-with-nodes I've ever used. You 'write' your code as a network of nodes, then on the fly it is converted to vex (a houdini internal scripting language) and compiled, the result runs very quickly. If you would like to check it out, get Houdini Apprentice and have a play with the 'VOPsop".
  - rjurney 15y ago
    Apple's Quartz composer is pretty interesting. Still clumsy, but improving: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Composer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Composer
- 15y ago
sedachv 15y ago
If you want to waste less time reinventing the wheel, why not try a Lisp-machine style terminal system with "live" objects (presentations)? It's proven to work, and many people liked it more than a terminal-based command line. Use polymorphic lines (http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/02782906f6c4d6e8 http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/02782906f6...) to get a very concise, powerful presentation. OpenDylan (http://opendylan.org/ http://opendylan.org/) and its IDE/editor Deuce implement these ideas.
kickingvegas 15y ago
While perhaps off-topic, I'll chime in with an anecdote in remote computing I had this past Thanksgiving. Short version: If you're an emacs veteran, tramp is the ssh version of ange-ftp. Long version: was down in the San Diego area for Thanksgiving and my development environment (Linux) was up here in San Francisco. Had ssh and VNC access to my Linux server in SF, however the latency was still pretty bad making VNC just barely usable. However I had access to a Mac in San Diego with MacPorts X11 emacs installed. I could then run emacs locally and use tramp to transparently access my remote files via ssh just like the old ange-ftp package. Another benefit is that running a shell within emacs with current tramp buffer will automatically ssh to that same server. Tramp would also work with version control (in this case svn). So the big wins here: 1) local editing speed. 2) efficient network communication (only the file data is transferred) 3) shell and version control support 4) can still use emacs. YMMV. http://www.gnu.org/s/tramp/ http://www.gnu.org/s/tramp/
- obtu 15y ago
  sshfs does that, and you don't have to use emacs. Gnome's VFS also does that, with its own protocol that gets exposed as a fuse filesystem for non-vfs applications.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
sepposade 15y ago
Eshell (The Emacs Shell) is a lot of what the original post already describes in terms of power: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/eshell.html http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/eshell.ht.... Too bad it isn't being very actively developed anymore.
_chendo_ 15y ago
iTerm2 already has the feature where you click on a filename and it opens the file. If you're running a newish iTerm2, give it a go: do an ls, then command click. I've called it Semantic History. It also let's you drag files out of the terminal as well. Old video walkthrough: http://vimeo.com/21872771 http://vimeo.com/21872771 It does not require any special ls. As long as there's a legit filename, it should work.
- iso8859-1 15y ago
  How does it know where you are standing when it isn't the full path? It must integrate with the shell somehow, right?
  - _chendo_ 15y ago
    Heh, that was a fun one to figure out. When digging around in iTerm2 source, I found out that you can figure out the current working directory of the shell, so that was relatively easy. The hard part was my goal of getting it to work even if you change the working directory, so that paths that were legit before stay legit. I found out that my shell sends an escape code that updated the terminal title when it changed directories, so I hooked it into that, but it turns out that's oh-my-zsh specific. I also added the ability for it to work even with spaces, which is essentially a brute-force, so it's not pretty.
Groxx 15y ago
I think they're seriously misunderstanding both TermKit's goal and the difference between running commands and editing text. TermKit, for instance, is not just a widget-infested terminal. The core idea behind it is what >50% of this post is about: data interchange that's not un-tokenized text that you have to `awk` to hell and back to do basic things. Meanwhile, text editors do two things incredibly differently than system-control interfaces: they edit blocks of text, and they can un-do almost every action. Next time you `rm` something accidentally, try pressing `u`, and see if it comes back. Or rewind that `drop database production;` your cat typed into your ssh session. I also don't want Bash to be my editor for similar reasons why I don't want to manipulate my filesystem with Vim - I rarely need to enter visual select mode when composing something in Bash, and Vim is poorly-suited to piping streams of text through multiple programs.
shepik 15y ago
Some months ago I tried to improve shell while keeping all it's features. So i made webkit-based terminal emulator (pseudoterminal; like xterm) with special esc-sequences to turn on html output (in a console, yes). Screenshots: https://github.com/shepik/wkterm/#readme https://github.com/shepik/wkterm/#readme
- arnoooooo 15y ago
  This looks pretty cool. I actually spend quite some time thinking about something like that. I came up with two things that I'd add to a shell : graphics and links. Graphics you did. It seems that is doesn't degrade gracefully though, like programs that do colored output disable it when run non-interactively ? I imagined links as something which when activated would be pasted in your command line. For example when running "git status" I would be able to get a ready made command to add a file by activating the "add" link next to it. Each file name would also be a link so that I don't have to copy/paste it. Ideally, links could be triggered with keyboard shortcuts to avoid using the mouse.
  - shepik 15y ago
    I don't think there is an issue with graceful degradation. Basically, wkterm is a terminal and a set of pretty-printers that read data from stdin and print it in html. As in my example with cpu usage graphic, there is some ./gen_cpu program which just prints cpu usage values as text, and there is graph drawing program. So, use them both for graphical output and use only the first for text. Links, as you describe them, can be implemented with javascript. I'll try to make an example on weekend.
- arnoooooo 15y ago
  You might also be interrested in the Cope project (https://github.com/yogan/cope https://github.com/yogan/cope). With the same approach, you could make existing commands return nice looking output for your html terminal.
skrebbel 15y ago
> our primary interface emulates a DEC VT100 terminal from 1978 Huh? I didn't know the DEC could run software like Visual Studio, Explorer and TortoiseGit. Whether you use an interface from the past or not is entirely a choice. Many developers apparently prefer it, and that's fine. I don't prefer it, so I use tools with a rather modern and well-designed interface, tailored towards developers.
tbourdon 15y ago
I've been thinking about a user interface for a long time. One that, leverages the graphical capabilities of the browser and the linguistic capabilities of the command line. The two enhancements over the command line that I envision are the discoverability of commands and the ability to select the output of commands. So what you'd is an Enso/Vimperator like command interface where the output would be rendered as an 'object' or list of 'objects'. Each output object would be selectable and able to be used as input for other commands able to digest them. You can sort of do this now with the command line but there are a few issues. The first is the inability to render graphical results in a terminal. The second is having to now something about the output of a command apriori before piping to the next command. Finally, it is difficult to know the commands available to your fingertips on the $PATH. The more I meditate on a system like this the more I think it would be wildly productive because a wide host of problems can be solved with this single workflow. COMMAND -> RENDER OBJECT(S) -> SELECT OBJECT(S) -> COMMAND -> ...
etanol 15y ago
I find the article a bit confusing. Given this statement: In addition, the keyboard is often more effective than the mouse for our work, since instead of floundering around in nested menus we can just type what we want. However, it’s worth noting that we don’t avoid the mouse because it is slow — if one wants to move the cursor to an arbitrary location elsewhere on the screen, one can often do so faster with a mouse than a keyboard. The problem is the transition from the keyboard to the mouse. It’s an expensive context switch, which should not be done lightly. I don't really understand the following: We then add syntax highlighting and hyperlinks, so you can easily navigate between man pages, or click on a grep result to visit that line in a file. Clicking on a hyperlinked directory in a file listing would reveal the contents of that directory in a nested list, slightly indented; clicking on a file would open it in a new tab. Too much clicking for my taste.

284 points by lubutu 15y ago

dfc 15y ago

> "We then add syntax highlighting and hyperlinks, so you can easily navigate between man pages" GNU info?

This is one of the rare delightful articles. I came to understand, after 6 years of non-programming work, and now back in front of the console, that what I like the most is the freedom that the shell provides and the room for creativity when accomplishing a task in a readable composition of tools in one line. Certainly the provided successors of the Bourne shell might be more elegant. Certainly when piping data through several tools needs often transformation of the data representation to match the required input format. Sometimes the transformation uses different principles (regular expressions, shell wildcards, awk, sed, ..) which pollutes the logical flow of problem resolution. But I came to the conclusion that despite not being optimal, this data transformation noise holds information that, when reading or when needing to explain to others, helps to understand, or maybe remember the data model from the source to the sinks. However I believe, more uniform but more universal data transformation techniques would be a progress. Until now this comment is more about shell than terminals, but for me, these are the biggest advantages of working on a command line - freedom and creativity in the usage of available tools. Now, to come closer to the terminal aspect. I am a typing fan. I went through hell when moving from Germany to France and having to re-learn a new keyboard layout - none of the both layouts are good, but if you are used to one it is very annoying to get to used to another. After having had some missions in other countries with different keyboard layouts, I found a solution, that is in line with my philosophy of using typing tools: Learn US keyboard layout, to the point to use it blindly without needing letters on the keys - it is installed on all OSes in all countries. At home use the extension US International with AltGr dead keys - I can now write all German, French, Turk and many other Latin based accents with a single layout. When in mission at a customer I ask if in the open session I can switch to US layout (if needed) - until now there were only some raised eyebrows, but no objections. And at least for ThinkPads you can order them with US layout, even with the € sign. So for keyboard I tackled the problem. For text editors I resolved the problem already 10 years ago. I use VIM. VI is on all UNIXes, VIM is on Windows (I did not yet have to work on Macs). On the UNIX shell the first thing I type is: set -o vi Like this many VI shortcuts and commands are at the command line. One quote in the article made me smile the most: "... However, it’s worth noting that we don’t avoid the mouse because it is slow — if one wants to move the cursor to an arbitrary location elsewhere on the screen, one can often do so faster with a mouse than a keyboard. The problem is the transition from the keyboard to the mouse. It’s an expensive context switch, which should not be done lightly. ..." Yeah, this is the reason I use a track point instead of a mouse. Nothing to care with you, takes no space and you don't have to lift your hands from the keyboard. The only problem is the craving when having to sit at a customer at a keyboard that has not track point - I find myself sometimes searching for it with the fingers until I realize that I am not on my ThinkPad. It is a shame this device is disappearing on most computers. At last: I think what unites the aficionados of the command line is the choice to spend more effort and time in learning tools which are more difficult than their alternatives (mouse vs. track point, command line vs. GUI, ten finger typing vs. two finger typing) at the beginning but pay big times off in efficiency in the long run and as a plus give the pleasure of creativity and freedom. I encourage the author of the article to progress with his ideas! We absolutely need innovation in this space. It is just that the bar is huge because of all the tools we became used to.

davidhollander 15y ago
> Yeah, this is the reason I use a track point instead of a mouse. VIM + touchpad beneath space bar on a standard laptop works well too. I can left\right click with my left thumb and move the cursor with my right thumb without my primary digits leaving the home keys.
- reirob 15y ago
  Sure. The thing is that (a) a good track point is ways more precise than a touch pad (b) to cross the screen from one corner to another on a touch pad you have to make several strokes, whereas with a track point you don't have to leave the device a single time

ddelony 15y ago

Acme seems to come pretty close to the author's idea, combining both a terminal and an editor.

luriel 15y ago
For anyone wondering: http://acme.cat-v.org http://acme.cat-v.org Fun fact: Acme was Dennis Ritchie's editor of choice.
tikhonj 15y ago
His vision also sounds quite a bit like Emacs, especially the GTK version.

pnathan 15y ago

I wholly agree that splattering chrome over a terminal isn't the best way forward. Emacs shell mode gets me all?most? of the way to the interface posed as the solution (text editor as interface to terminal). Being emacs, I am sure I could finish up the proposed solution with "a few lines of elisp". And I don't think it's the solution. These issues are spawned deeper in the design. Multiple streams of information are being spawned, and must be handled sanely: pipe redirection starts breaking down here because it's a line - what's needed is a graph of management that's able to handle different cases and join back for the next approach. One approach might simply be to develop a higher-powered programming language environment that calls directly into the system.

thurn 15y ago
Emacs shell mode was my first thought too. It doesn't try to implement a new standard for pipes, though. The idea of using invisible control characters as metadata is interesting. (My biggest complain about shell mode is that it's impossible to send certain characters to the underlying process, TAB being the most important one, so you can't rely on built-in tab completion behavior.)
quanticle 15y ago
Windows Powershell attempts to do what you're describing. PowerShell doesn't manipulate text streams, it manipulates .Net CLR objects. That allows shell programs to expose data in a much more meaningful way. You don't have to have a parser in every program that interacts with the shell when you can send and receive typed data. I haven't worked much with it lately, but I wouldn't be surprised if Powershell was the closest existing technology to what the author is thinking of.
- mmc 15y ago
  I think he agrees, except for the textual display. From the article: Data structure. Windows PowerShell had a chance to redesign the terminal from scratch, but defaulted to the same old grid of ASCII. One innovative thing they did do was add structure to their data, piping .NET objects instead of raw text, allowing the user to select fields by name instead of writing elaborate AWK scripts. The shell for the research OS Famke does a similar thing for higher-order functions

sp332 15y ago

How about something like Archy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy#Features https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy#Features It was never polished but you can still play with an old (windows) build: http://users-www.wineme.fb5.uni-siegen.de/home/SebastianDraxler/WWW/Archy_build-124.exe http://users-www.wineme.fb5.uni-siegen.de/home/SebastianDrax... Edit: or for a gui, something like Enso (for the whole OS) http://humanized.com/enso http://humanized.com/enso or Ubiquity https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Latest_Ubiquity_User_Tutorial https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Latest_Ubiquity_User_... (for the browser) Both are abandoned open-source projects with a lot of the hard work already done (the internationalized parser in Ubiquity is very nice).

cturner 15y ago

You can and should separate view and controller. Imagine if you could spawn windows at monitors, and then have things display on them via pipeline. You might type into a tiny window on one monitor that never loses focus, but sends graphs and text and streams to these windows. There's no reason that the place you enter text should correspond to the output display, and a lot of value to be had by separating them. Imagine being able to plug display consumers into a port so that you could do visual demos.

lubutu 15y ago
The concept of a view and a controller are distinct, a terminal simply happens to be both, because it can do both. Commands are solely controllers, and you're right, a read-only terminal would be just a view.
sp332 15y ago
Most unixy programs actually do have them divided. stdin, stdout (and a third for stderr). It would be very easy to separate the streams to different places. ETA at the last place I worked, we actually had the touchscreen on one desk and the program running in a window on another computer. It was pretty nice to type something and make it show up across the room.
- cturner 15y ago
  On this topic of stdin, stdout - wouldn't it be neat if - instead of signals - there was an input channel called stdctrl that you could send control messages in on. Glad to read about the scenario at your last place - I've never seen this in action.
  - jaylevitt 15y ago
    At AOL circa 2000, our application framework had a Tcl interpreter listening on a "control port", so that you could telnet to any app and get stats, change settings, etc. Of course, nowadays that's more commonly done with REST endpoints, which I think would satisfy your stdctrl idea.
  - 15y ago

mooism2 15y ago

The author confuses a terminal with a shell running in a terminal. I'd like for my terminal to be able to open a stream of html in my web browser. Use case: running `man blahblah` in a ssh session opens a nicely formatted page in a local browser window. I'd like for my terminal to be able to open a stream of text in my editor, and accept a stream of text back from my editor to save somewhere. Use case: running `sudo -e /etc/blahblah` in a ssh session allows me to edit the remote file /etc/blahblah in a local text editor, and save my changes back.

acuozzo 15y ago
Aren't you confusing a terminal with a terminal emulator?
- mooism2 15y ago
  Possibly, although as far as traditional unix shells are concerned, they're the same thing.

hamoid 15y ago

This is text editing in OpenGL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O5DJTOy6EA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O5DJTOy6EA I'd like to have such a terminal.

NinetyNine 15y ago
Sublime Text is a text editor which runs on Open GL, it's not quiet what you mean though. http://www.sublimetext.com/ http://www.sublimetext.com/
- false 15y ago
  It used to, but starting from version 2 it utilized software rendering.

johnwatson11218 15y ago

Sometimes when I have text files open I want to be able to run command line tools against them. I know I can go write a shell script but sometimes I want to write grep against my inbox or against all the windows I have open at the time. I want to be able to high lite some text (possibly in more than one window) and then have a transparent shell appear that lets me write expressions to work with that text, like sort it in place. Often I have to move things into and out of text files, spreadsheets,databases to be able to apply all the tricks that I like. I wish those tricks could just appear and work with what I'm looking at.

aerique 15y ago
Emacs (and Vim as well IIRC) can run shell commands against selections of text so just read the files in there. http://www.masteringemacs.org/articles/2011/10/19/executing-shell-commands-emacs/ http://www.masteringemacs.org/articles/2011/10/19/executing-...
- johnwatson11218 15y ago
  I have used emacs before and I did like having multiple shells open and the ability to copy many text fragments into the buffer. I use windows for my day to day work so I'm thinking about something more geared to that. I want to be able to take the the best features from the command line, and the gui programs and package them up into something that just floats at the OS level. So that I use a keyboard shortcut to pull up a buffer that can grab text (or entire files) work on them and push the results back to whatever app/file I pulled it from.
  - kejadlen 15y ago
    I think DTerm (http://decimus.net/DTerm http://decimus.net/DTerm) is a step in the direction that you're describing...
    - johnwatson11218 15y ago
      That looks really interesting. I'm going to install it when I get home. If I'm able to be looking at a text file, launch DTerm with a keyboard shortcut, run something that modifies the file in place, and then have DTerm fade away then that will definitely be useful.

user911302966 15y ago

"And we, the users, play along, pretending our machine is a video terminal presenting a grid of ASCII characters in all of 256 colours. This is ridiculous." Not everybody uses their terminal to churn out HTML pages and add 'Nyan mode' to our 'newly discovered' emacs program. For those who do that, just buy a Macintosh or whatever is this week's hip flavor of Best Buy PC. Otherwise, use a language that doesn't require >256 different colors to be represented meaningfully. "Typography is the future"? Thank goodness X.org/XFree86 has supported custom fonts since the 1990's. "Opening a man page would scroll gently to the top of the page, letting you scroll down and read, or search through it as you would any text" See: MANPAGER. "We then add syntax highlighting and hyperlinks, so you can easily navigate between man pages" Many terminals and shells support these features already. "Finally we add visualisations so you can view plots of lines of code, etc., without having to context-switch." Huh? I read that as 'code folding' and clang compilation. I think the main takeaway here is that most of his "ideas" can be easily achieved within the current ecosystem of available programs, most of which are stock on modern UNIX-like OS distributions. I do think he misfiled this article under "Ideas"; it's more akin to a polite rant. edit: colours/color killed due to conflict with reality (and irrelevance anyway).

lubutu 15y ago
You don't seem able to see the forest for the trees... Taking quotes out of context and dismissing them is not sufficient to dismiss the entire article. Also, I'm British.
- user911302966 15y ago
  All quotes save for one-liners are out of context. The points you make stand on their own. I don't dismiss the entire article; I appreciate thought and innovation in the space of the terminal, but I disagree with your ideas. Thanks for putting them out there to begin with.
- 1010100101 15y ago
  I'm curious, have you used Plan9? If yes, how long did you use it?

adambyrtek 15y ago

Reading the introduction, I was really excited. I fully agree with the premise, but the proposed solution seems inadequate. Putting shell in an editor, adding hidden metadata, and making the output hyperlinked just don't feel radical enough. Also, some parts of the proposal are very vague (description of MVC), while others are extremely specific (whole paragraph about an obscure Unicode delimiter), which makes it hard to get the big picture. That said, improving the terminal is a really challenging and important problem, so I'm glad there are people thinking about it.

4ad 15y ago
> improving the terminal is a really challenging and important problem, so I'm glad there are people thinking about it. People thought about it 20 years ago, not only about the terminal, but about improving UNIX in general. And not just any people, but the people that did UNIX and C in the first place. Their effort is called Plan9. Very few people have heard of Plan9 and of those people even fewer used it to the point of understanding the novel ideas. I use it. Even when I am forced to use UNIX I still use the Plan9 tools along with the Acme and Sam editors. Once you get used to the new Plan9 ideas, you feel crippled in UNIX and can never go back.
- mcrittenden 15y ago
  > Once you get used to the new Plan9 ideas, you feel crippled in UNIX and can never go back. Would you care to expand on this? Any specific examples of things that Plan9 does for you that you feel crippled without? I ask out of genuine curiousity, as I've often heard Plan9 mentioned but have never given it enough research to understand its appeal. For example, I'm a full time web developer and I spent a lot of time in zsh and vim. Would you recommend that someone like me checks out Plan9? Is it the type of thing you could possibly use as your general purpose OS?
  - dexen 15y ago
    I'm using Acme for web devel. Yields very well to scripting. Together with plumber and a few scripts, it provides pretty much a complete IDE. The ability to simply click on any text to 1) execute it or 2) search for it or 3) copy/paste/replace is something that I miss from other editors. Essentially, any text becomes hypertext. Output from compiler or debugger links you to source files etc. Aside of that there's a big chunk of remote filesystem access ported from Plan 9, but I haven't used that yet. Acme is, in fact, a modern, windowing terminal -- it lets you view, edit, execute and navigate. No surprise given that it comes from Rob Pike -- one of the guys behind an earlier windowing terminal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blit_(computer_terminal) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blit_(computer_terminal) http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/blit/ http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/blit/ http://swtch.com/plan9port/ http://swtch.com/plan9port/ is quite easy to start with on any POSIX system.

Quequau 15y ago

This sort of reminded me of TermKit, which I think is still on Github... but sort of stagnant the last time I looked.

wladimir 15y ago
Yes its here: https://github.com/unconed/TermKit https://github.com/unconed/TermKit I still think the idea is great. This guys should work together instead of making yet another competing project.
scottmp10 15y ago
Yes, I really liked that project and I think the design is fantastic (it leverages WebKit for rendering). Both TermKit and this project will have an interesting dilemma with editing remote files though. The advantage of SSH is that you really aren't storing any remote files locally (only the currently visible characters are stored in memory). An editor that uses this new model and eliminates lag requires transfer of remote files to the local computer. There are a lot of situations where this is not a viable option.
- lubutu 15y ago
  A very good point. My prototype protocol, rwr, reads only the data in the file it has to know. Additionally, when one inserts a character it simply says "insert 'a' at byte 4", rather than having to stream the entire file. That's another benefit of running filesystem models as daemons on remote servers.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

ImprovedSilence 15y ago

Kind of off topic, but this article just reminded me, I was thinking how nice it would be for a linux distro to be made for programmers. Bundled with every bit of programming language (from c to hakell and back), the standard editors with their syntax highlighting (the .vimrc already set up a little), cool special tools that maybe only serve a special purpose (stuff like gnu radio..) I was just thinking it'd be nice to have one big package, a here ya go, have at it, kinda linux. Maybe even with some alternative (but vetted) how-to documentation. For some reason I just can't get used to the flow and syntax of Man pages... And it can leave out lots of the fancy gui sidebars and stuff (not sayin get rid of the gui, just dumb it down, I'm here for the terminal, and maybe some IDEs.. maybe).

keypusher 15y ago
Read the koan in the above comment again. Your vision of a Linux distribution "for programmers" is very likely different from my vision, let alone that of Dennis Ritchie or Linus Torvalds. This approach is the fundamental mistake made by other operating systems: to assume you know what the user wants/needs, and give it to them in one nice shiny box with a bow on it. It would be so convenient... right? The core philosophy of Unix is to build tools that do one job well. By combining those tools, it is then possible to build great things. Do not assume that means you can hide the tools away and just give people the great thing, and realize it is naive to believe that you can solve everyone's problem by creating the one true master editor/program/os that combines all the great things from previous attempts, but this time "gets it right".

BonsaiDen 15y ago

While I like the terminal... I don't want to be one. Best Ivo

snotrockets 15y ago

I'll answer with a Koan, it's author long forgotten (if you know him, do tell me his name!): A UNIX wizard hears cries of torment from his apprentice's computer room where the apprentice is studying, and goes to investigate. He finds the apprentice in obvious distress, nearly on the verge of tears. "What's the problem?" he asks. "Why did you cry out?" "It's terrible using this system. I must use four editors each day to get my studies done, because not one of them does everything." The wizard nods sagely, and asks, "And what would you propose that will solve this obvious dilemma?" The student thinks carefully for several minutes, and his face then lights up in delight. Excitedly, he says, "Well, it's obvious. I will write the best editor ever. It will do everything that the existing four editors do, but do their jobs better, and faster. And because of my new editor, the world will be a better place." The wizard quickly raises his hand and smacks the apprentice on the side of his head. The wizard is old and frail, and the apprentice isn't physically hurt, but is shocked by what has happened. He turns his head to face the wizard. "What have I done wrong?" he asks. "Fool!" says the wizard. "Do you think I want to learn yet another editor?" Immediately, the apprentice is enlightened.

p9idf 15y ago
I'm not feeling immediately enlightened. The existence of a program doesn't inconvenience anyone. No-one has to use it if they don't want to. That wizard needs to chill out and not get so upset about people kicking ideas around.
- freehunter 15y ago
  No one has to use it, but someone has to decide not to use it. A major concern with newcomers to many, many systems in a wide variety of markets is what option to pick. Most go with the default, which reinforces that default but doesn't necessarily fit their needs. They do this because the choice is overwhelming.
  - p9idf 15y ago
    I trust users who know how to use the shell to be able to decide what suits them best and to not be paralyzed by indecision between their system's default terminal emulator and some guy's obscure hobby terminal system.

derleth 15y ago

Weak typing and implicit coercion are not the same thing. They're not even close to the same thing. Haskell does (things equivalent to) implicit coercion when it adds a floating-point Number to an integral Number and nobody (sane) says Haskell is weakly-typed.

rawatson 15y ago
Haskell uses type inference, but that's not the same as implicit coercion, which Haskell explicitly avoids. That is: if you type 4 + 4.2 Then the compiler will infer that you mean (4::Fractional a=>a) + (4.2::Fractional a => a) However, you cannot add an integer and a float: (4::Int) + (4.2::Float) Couldn't match expected type `Int' with actual type `Float' In the second argument of `(+)', namely `(4.2 :: Float)' In the expression: (4 :: Int) + (4.2 :: Float) In an equation for `it': it = (4 :: Int) + (4.2 :: Float) This follows from the type of (+) :: Num a => a -> a -> a
- derleth 15y ago
  I guess I still don't get how there could be a difference between Float and Fractional, then.
  - rawatson 15y ago
    Haskell uses type classes to support ad hoc polymorphism, or overloading. Consider the statement: (4.2::Fractional a=> a) + (4::Float) Float is an instance of the type class Fractional. That is: methods which are defined for all fractional types must be defined for floats. The compiler infers that (4.2::Fractional a=>a) must have type float, as it is being added to a float. This is compatible with the original type of the expression, as Float is an instance of fractional, so it is valid to read 4.2 as a Float. This diagram might help: http://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/basic.html#sect6.3 http://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/basic.html#sect6.3

jwhitlark 15y ago

There are some interesting ideas here. One thing that occurred to me while reading it was using a message queue to implement the pipeline functionality. I've been interested in Apache ActiveMQ/Camel for a while now and excited about some of the things it can do. With that model, each 'line' could have it's own set of headers, allowing for transformation by aware tools, but transparent by default. This would also blur the line between running commands and having background filters. It would also work nicely over the network. I did some experiments with clojure/camel at one point, and came up with stuff like this: (defroute context (from "file:/home/jw/scratch/inbox?noop=true") (to "file:/home/jw/scratch/outbox")) ; from http://codeabout.blogspot.com/2010/06/using-apache-camel-from-clojure.html http://codeabout.blogspot.com/2010/06/using-apache-camel-fro... Which is basically a continuous file copy. I could see different flags for "do now and exit", "do at HH:MM:SS", "do until I tell you to stop", "do when system is idle", etc.

Arelius 15y ago
I'm not sure what you'd really gain from using a message queue. Pipes with streams seems to be lower overhead and could be extended pretty trivially to get most of the functionality you'd want. Could you perhaps explain a bit better?

Semiapies 15y ago

I am skeptical about total reimaginations, and when I read this I started to take it as one of those airy "Dude, someone totally revolutionize this for me..." posts, but then I hit: I’m working on this in my spare time, starting with... and now I'm curious to see what the author comes up with. There's just something about an actual tool, no matter how prototypical, that improves the discussion of new tools.

haberman 15y ago

Here's my six-year-old rant about how crufty terminal technology is. It's not a visionary re-imagining of terminals like this article is, but personally I think that one of the biggest barriers to innovation in terminal technology is that the current stack is so incredibly baroque and difficult to program or extend elegantly. http://www.advogato.org/person/habes/diary/6.html http://www.advogato.org/person/habes/diary/6.html

bitcracker 15y ago

The beauty of Unix is its simplicity. This made Unix so reliable. If you want to write a beautiful terminal as _addon_ I have no problem with that. But I would not accept a _replacement_ of the old fashioned terminals. Because they are so simple, they just work.

mmagin 15y ago
Apparently you've never messed around with termcap. Or had to use terminals other than xterms and vt100s, or some very near clones of them.
flomo 15y ago
Meanwhile, it took Unix forever before the PC's backspace key 'just worked'. The terminal guts are unbelievably gnarly, and it's kinda surprising it hasn't been replaced with a simpler approach designed for virtual terminals by now.
- bitcracker 15y ago
  > surprising it hasn't been replaced with a simpler approach designed for virtual terminals by now. Because they ... just work? :-)

peterwwillis 15y ago

Please don't forget that the terminal should be useful to just get work done without programming. It's also all designed to have a human interface - all the output can be grok'd by a human and not some complex tool or parser. This is what prevents things from just magically working and forces us to come up with hacks to pipe and grep and cut pieces of data to do what we want. If you really want to "reimagine" it, throw out the box and make a new one. If you redesigned all the standard unix tools to have a universal API and added hooks for each function they contain you could just specify a workflow to execute and the tools would figure out how to transmogrify the data internally. So for example: rehooliginator --store=val1 --filesystem=/proc/cpuinfo --rowname='model name' --match='([[:digit:].]\+)GHz' --store=val2 --filesystem=/proc/meminfo --rowname='MemFree' --match='([[:digit:]]\+) kB' --store=val3 --cmd=ps --fields=rss,comm --sort=rss --match='java' --field=rss --sum --math='$SUM*1024' --store=val4 --cmd=vmstat --samples=5 --field=cpu-idle --avg --output="Stats:\n\tCPU: $val1\n\tFree Memory: $val2\n\tResident memory used by Java: $val3\n\tCPU idle time: $val4\n" Not the greatest example but you get the idea. If this seems more complex than traditional one-liner scripting it's because you're trying to do a lot of little things on a single line. It may be better to shove all this into a little file in easy to understand non-programmer language and save it for later. (Also, the long GNU options could be replaced by short options for quicker use, depending on the API/module being used) This is obviously not getting away from the 'old school dynamic' of a fake terminal, but it does remove some of the need for it when we have tools robust enough that the terminal doesn't have to be as user-friendly as it is. You could combine a tool/framework like the above with a text editor to write multi-liners, sample the output and execute them on the fly. Build in hooks to execute commands over an ssh connection - or even gather output from various hosts at a time - and you could automate sampling your whole network from a one-liner. For a "friendly interface" I think a simple tree view file browser would work nicely. So basically an "explorer"-type app with an embedded text editor and output window to let you explore a system rapidly and also automate tasks on the fly. Hell, you could build an IDE or other friendly GUI to build your query tool's arguments using quick mouse clicks.

joeyh 15y ago

The idea of using an obscure unicode code point to indicate the start of metadata, in the expectation that nobody will use it, is probably self-defeating. As soon as that's is use, there will be a reason to use that obscure code point (in documentation, in code, etc), so you will still have to deal with escaping it.

TheEzEzz 15y ago
You'll have to deal with escaping it, but you won't need to escape as often, and may never need to escape if you aren't writing code/documentation dealing with the system itself.

jes5199 15y ago

Could someone try to distill out some sort of concrete proposal from this? I had trouble understanding what he was implying.

VMG 15y ago

I'd be 90% satisfied if we just got rid of termcap and friends. Let's just replace escape codes with some kind of markup language (or s-expressions or whatever).

danking00 15y ago
Interactive SCSH Shell. That's what I'm waiting for.

joebadmo 15y ago

I agree that there is too much focus on "intuitiveness," but I'm neither a programmer (I'm working on it) nor a sysadmin, and I'd like a more robust user interface too! I have a lot of work to get done, and I'm willing to learn a different set of interface axioms than the ones we've been working with for the last few decades. Here's the beginning of my thinking on the subject: http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/9325300749/a-different-kind-of-gui http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/9325300749/a-different-kind-o... It's great to hear other voices in this discussion, though!

nevinera 15y ago

This article appears to be functionally describing emacs.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

pshc 15y ago

While text editing interfaces could be more polished and modern--the underlying problem that causes your dissatisfaction is the text. Storing code as text is an evolutionary dead end. Storing code graphs in text requires the use of plaintext names for graph references, which binds logic and presentation together. The gap between the goal-completion logic a user comes up with and how they turn those mental instructions into plaintext is an unnecessary jump--an encoding--that produces no end of trivial but infuriating miscommunications. Storing code as pure structure (not XML or anything silly, the serialization is trivial) avoids a huge class of artificial problems we've had to deal with since the dawn of compilers, due to the disconnect between human meaning encoded in plaintext and machine parsing. Visualizing code as text--text as the primary view in the MVC, complemented with colours and annotations and hyperlinks and hints--is extremely useful. What we really need is a structural editor with the familiarity and ease of use of a text editor. But that is a hard problem, and more polished text manipulators are a nice stop-gap in the meanwhile.

lubutu 15y ago
I do completely agree with you that we ought to transition toward structural code editors (and therefore, I suppose, structural terminals), but as you say, that's a very hard problem -- I have yet to see one which isn't terribly clumsy to use.
- danwills 15y ago
  VOPs in SideFX:Houdini are the best use of code-with-nodes I've ever used. You 'write' your code as a network of nodes, then on the fly it is converted to vex (a houdini internal scripting language) and compiled, the result runs very quickly. If you would like to check it out, get Houdini Apprentice and have a play with the 'VOPsop".
- rjurney 15y ago
  Apple's Quartz composer is pretty interesting. Still clumsy, but improving: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Composer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Composer
15y ago

sedachv 15y ago

If you want to waste less time reinventing the wheel, why not try a Lisp-machine style terminal system with "live" objects (presentations)? It's proven to work, and many people liked it more than a terminal-based command line. Use polymorphic lines (http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/02782906f6c4d6e8 http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/02782906f6...) to get a very concise, powerful presentation. OpenDylan (http://opendylan.org/ http://opendylan.org/) and its IDE/editor Deuce implement these ideas.

kickingvegas 15y ago

While perhaps off-topic, I'll chime in with an anecdote in remote computing I had this past Thanksgiving. Short version: If you're an emacs veteran, tramp is the ssh version of ange-ftp. Long version: was down in the San Diego area for Thanksgiving and my development environment (Linux) was up here in San Francisco. Had ssh and VNC access to my Linux server in SF, however the latency was still pretty bad making VNC just barely usable. However I had access to a Mac in San Diego with MacPorts X11 emacs installed. I could then run emacs locally and use tramp to transparently access my remote files via ssh just like the old ange-ftp package. Another benefit is that running a shell within emacs with current tramp buffer will automatically ssh to that same server. Tramp would also work with version control (in this case svn). So the big wins here: 1) local editing speed. 2) efficient network communication (only the file data is transferred) 3) shell and version control support 4) can still use emacs. YMMV. http://www.gnu.org/s/tramp/ http://www.gnu.org/s/tramp/

obtu 15y ago
sshfs does that, and you don't have to use emacs. Gnome's VFS also does that, with its own protocol that gets exposed as a fuse filesystem for non-vfs applications.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

sepposade 15y ago

Eshell (The Emacs Shell) is a lot of what the original post already describes in terms of power: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/eshell.html http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/eshell.ht.... Too bad it isn't being very actively developed anymore.

_chendo_ 15y ago

iTerm2 already has the feature where you click on a filename and it opens the file. If you're running a newish iTerm2, give it a go: do an ls, then command click. I've called it Semantic History. It also let's you drag files out of the terminal as well. Old video walkthrough: http://vimeo.com/21872771 http://vimeo.com/21872771 It does not require any special ls. As long as there's a legit filename, it should work.

iso8859-1 15y ago
How does it know where you are standing when it isn't the full path? It must integrate with the shell somehow, right?
- _chendo_ 15y ago
  Heh, that was a fun one to figure out. When digging around in iTerm2 source, I found out that you can figure out the current working directory of the shell, so that was relatively easy. The hard part was my goal of getting it to work even if you change the working directory, so that paths that were legit before stay legit. I found out that my shell sends an escape code that updated the terminal title when it changed directories, so I hooked it into that, but it turns out that's oh-my-zsh specific. I also added the ability for it to work even with spaces, which is essentially a brute-force, so it's not pretty.

Groxx 15y ago

I think they're seriously misunderstanding both TermKit's goal and the difference between running commands and editing text. TermKit, for instance, is not just a widget-infested terminal. The core idea behind it is what >50% of this post is about: data interchange that's not un-tokenized text that you have to `awk` to hell and back to do basic things. Meanwhile, text editors do two things incredibly differently than system-control interfaces: they edit blocks of text, and they can un-do almost every action. Next time you `rm` something accidentally, try pressing `u`, and see if it comes back. Or rewind that `drop database production;` your cat typed into your ssh session. I also don't want Bash to be my editor for similar reasons why I don't want to manipulate my filesystem with Vim - I rarely need to enter visual select mode when composing something in Bash, and Vim is poorly-suited to piping streams of text through multiple programs.

shepik 15y ago

Some months ago I tried to improve shell while keeping all it's features. So i made webkit-based terminal emulator (pseudoterminal; like xterm) with special esc-sequences to turn on html output (in a console, yes). Screenshots: https://github.com/shepik/wkterm/#readme https://github.com/shepik/wkterm/#readme

arnoooooo 15y ago
This looks pretty cool. I actually spend quite some time thinking about something like that. I came up with two things that I'd add to a shell : graphics and links. Graphics you did. It seems that is doesn't degrade gracefully though, like programs that do colored output disable it when run non-interactively ? I imagined links as something which when activated would be pasted in your command line. For example when running "git status" I would be able to get a ready made command to add a file by activating the "add" link next to it. Each file name would also be a link so that I don't have to copy/paste it. Ideally, links could be triggered with keyboard shortcuts to avoid using the mouse.
- shepik 15y ago
  I don't think there is an issue with graceful degradation. Basically, wkterm is a terminal and a set of pretty-printers that read data from stdin and print it in html. As in my example with cpu usage graphic, there is some ./gen_cpu program which just prints cpu usage values as text, and there is graph drawing program. So, use them both for graphical output and use only the first for text. Links, as you describe them, can be implemented with javascript. I'll try to make an example on weekend.
arnoooooo 15y ago
You might also be interrested in the Cope project (https://github.com/yogan/cope https://github.com/yogan/cope). With the same approach, you could make existing commands return nice looking output for your html terminal.

skrebbel 15y ago

> our primary interface emulates a DEC VT100 terminal from 1978 Huh? I didn't know the DEC could run software like Visual Studio, Explorer and TortoiseGit. Whether you use an interface from the past or not is entirely a choice. Many developers apparently prefer it, and that's fine. I don't prefer it, so I use tools with a rather modern and well-designed interface, tailored towards developers.

tbourdon 15y ago

I've been thinking about a user interface for a long time. One that, leverages the graphical capabilities of the browser and the linguistic capabilities of the command line. The two enhancements over the command line that I envision are the discoverability of commands and the ability to select the output of commands. So what you'd is an Enso/Vimperator like command interface where the output would be rendered as an 'object' or list of 'objects'. Each output object would be selectable and able to be used as input for other commands able to digest them. You can sort of do this now with the command line but there are a few issues. The first is the inability to render graphical results in a terminal. The second is having to now something about the output of a command apriori before piping to the next command. Finally, it is difficult to know the commands available to your fingertips on the $PATH. The more I meditate on a system like this the more I think it would be wildly productive because a wide host of problems can be solved with this single workflow. COMMAND -> RENDER OBJECT(S) -> SELECT OBJECT(S) -> COMMAND -> ...

etanol 15y ago

I find the article a bit confusing. Given this statement: In addition, the keyboard is often more effective than the mouse for our work, since instead of floundering around in nested menus we can just type what we want. However, it’s worth noting that we don’t avoid the mouse because it is slow — if one wants to move the cursor to an arbitrary location elsewhere on the screen, one can often do so faster with a mouse than a keyboard. The problem is the transition from the keyboard to the mouse. It’s an expensive context switch, which should not be done lightly. I don't really understand the following: We then add syntax highlighting and hyperlinks, so you can easily navigate between man pages, or click on a grep result to visit that line in a file. Clicking on a hyperlinked directory in a file listing would reveal the contents of that directory in a nested list, slightly indented; clicking on a file would open it in a new tab. Too much clicking for my taste.