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I like this framing! Personally, I'd like to see the Unix shell evolve into a system with a GUI. Where text and graphics are integrated, and the shell isn't "

by chubot 1y ago

I like this framing! Personally, I'd like to see the Unix shell evolve into a system with a GUI. Where text and graphics are integrated, and the shell isn't "trapped" in the terminal. There is a historical, path-dependent conflation in this area -- a text-based UI doesn't necessarily imply a terminal-based UI Some links to work in that direction: https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2023/12/screencasts.html#headless-protocol-oils-web_shell https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2023/12/screencasts.html#headl... Excel is pretty good at combining the two paradigms -- it has the textbox where you can type (almost like a URL bar), and it has the GUI part. But for all its power, I don't want to use Excel ... I like spreadsheets, and use LibreCalc a bit, though it's limited. And I'd like if there were multiple GUI/graphical paradigms combined with text, not just the grid of cells (as useful as it is)

chaboud 1y ago
AutoCAD is kind of a classic form of integration of text with GUI via a command window. In general, any GUI I build these days I build to be scriptable, if possible, and I look to translate as much as possible through that scriptable interface. This has helped immensely with AI assistive (“vibe coding”) tools.
jynelson 1y ago
yes!!! this is exactly the direction i want to go with the post on “terminal of the future”—we should reimagine a structured terminal, where the interface isn’t dependent on emulating a VT100. have you seen https://www.warp.dev/modern-terminal https://www.warp.dev/modern-terminal? they’ve made really a lot of progress here, they just locked it all in a platform and then didn’t have the vision to let you metaprogram it.
- chubot 1y ago
  I'll keep an eye out for the blog post! We're still working (intermittently) on a better shell <-> terminal interface. We actually did the first demo back in 2021, before we became aware of Warp. And here is an update from a month ago, which mentions Warp / IntelliJ / VSCode: https://lobste.rs/s/viwe6p/open_source_can_t_coordinate#c_pxsfq1 https://lobste.rs/s/viwe6p/open_source_can_t_coordinate#c_px... That is, we did some demos with a nushell contributor, to see if there is a protocol that Oils and nushell can agree on. The big constraints seems to be bash and zsh. (I still believe in graceful evolution, not building a "inner platform") I think these 2025 demos went pretty well, but it's still in the demo/research phase. After working in this area for many years, I think the bottleneck is coordination, mentioned here - https://lobste.rs/s/ejcoud/dreaming_smel_shell https://lobste.rs/s/ejcoud/dreaming_smel_shell i.e. there are many separate projects doing similar things, and most of them get to 80% or so. I like that you mention a lot of prior art! More links: https://github.com/oils-for-unix/oils/wiki/Headless-Shell-Protocol https://github.com/oils-for-unix/oils/wiki/Headless-Shell-Pr... Feel free to join any of the Zulip discussions ... there are a bunch of prototypes floating around, but nothing set in stone!

by chubot 1y ago

chaboud 1y ago

AutoCAD is kind of a classic form of integration of text with GUI via a command window. In general, any GUI I build these days I build to be scriptable, if possible, and I look to translate as much as possible through that scriptable interface. This has helped immensely with AI assistive (“vibe coding”) tools.

jynelson 1y ago

yes!!! this is exactly the direction i want to go with the post on “terminal of the future”—we should reimagine a structured terminal, where the interface isn’t dependent on emulating a VT100. have you seen https://www.warp.dev/modern-terminal https://www.warp.dev/modern-terminal? they’ve made really a lot of progress here, they just locked it all in a platform and then didn’t have the vision to let you metaprogram it.

chubot 1y ago
I'll keep an eye out for the blog post! We're still working (intermittently) on a better shell <-> terminal interface. We actually did the first demo back in 2021, before we became aware of Warp. And here is an update from a month ago, which mentions Warp / IntelliJ / VSCode: https://lobste.rs/s/viwe6p/open_source_can_t_coordinate#c_pxsfq1 https://lobste.rs/s/viwe6p/open_source_can_t_coordinate#c_px... That is, we did some demos with a nushell contributor, to see if there is a protocol that Oils and nushell can agree on. The big constraints seems to be bash and zsh. (I still believe in graceful evolution, not building a "inner platform") I think these 2025 demos went pretty well, but it's still in the demo/research phase. After working in this area for many years, I think the bottleneck is coordination, mentioned here - https://lobste.rs/s/ejcoud/dreaming_smel_shell https://lobste.rs/s/ejcoud/dreaming_smel_shell i.e. there are many separate projects doing similar things, and most of them get to 80% or so. I like that you mention a lot of prior art! More links: https://github.com/oils-for-unix/oils/wiki/Headless-Shell-Protocol https://github.com/oils-for-unix/oils/wiki/Headless-Shell-Pr... Feel free to join any of the Zulip discussions ... there are a bunch of prototypes floating around, but nothing set in stone!