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> The problem is to break away from ANSI escape sequences and the like means also rewriting 50 years of command line tools. Are we really that reliant on those

by bmitc 2y ago

> The problem is to break away from ANSI escape sequences and the like means also rewriting 50 years of command line tools. Are we really that reliant on those command line tools? I only use a handful of them, and any time it gets more complicated, I reach for a real programming language to do the scripting. Those tools just do a bunch of string parsing, and the user interfaces are usually incredibly esoteric, inconsistent, and obtuse.

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
In a word: Yes. The long tail is very long, and it's not just the bare text tools, it's the bare text tools (including tools that were written 30 years ago and that haven't changed since, and the tools that barely even count as cli tools), and also anything that ever did anything more interesting. You're not just talking about rewriting coreutils, you're also talking about redoing vim and emacs and top and all the *stat programs and tmux and screen and ...