<story><title>Rich Command Shells</title><url>http://waywardmonkeys.org/2014/10/10/rich-command-shells/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>zorbo</author><text>Text is the universal interface. You can do things with it. You can strip it, cut it, transform it, send it to other places. Humans can read it, programs can read it, your printer can output it. It can be sent to web APIs, it can be stored anywhere. It&amp;#x27;s compressible, can be colored and can be copy-pasted and is infinitely extendable. Thousands of protocols run over it.&lt;p&gt;The command line works with text. The command line remains the best interface I&amp;#x27;ve ever used. It&amp;#x27;s user friendly, composable and available everywhere. It&amp;#x27;s easy to automate and easy to extend.&lt;p&gt;I wish the &amp;quot;command line with pictures&amp;quot; idea would just go away already. It adds nothing for the general public. I can already view pictures on remote machines with X forwarding.&lt;p&gt;Command line with pictures never made it, because there are ten competing standards. With text, everybody just agreed on ASCII and now Unicode&amp;#x2F;UTF8. Text has hundreds of ugly clutches on top of it (Extended ASCII, ANSI, Escape codes, etc, etc). It still works. It&amp;#x27;s still simple. It has its problems, but nowhere near as many problems as GUIs.&lt;p&gt;Those who don&amp;#x27;t understand Unix are doomed to reimplement it... poorly.</text></comment>
<story><title>Rich Command Shells</title><url>http://waywardmonkeys.org/2014/10/10/rich-command-shells/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tubelite</author><text>If I might plug a rich command shell I&amp;#x27;m developing: &lt;a href=&quot;http://pigshell.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;pigshell.com&lt;/a&gt; (Source at &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/pigshell/pigshell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;pigshell&amp;#x2F;pigshell&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;p&gt;It provides&lt;p&gt;- A shell for the web. Runs in the browser, pure client-side.&lt;p&gt;- File-like abstraction for URLs and other entities exposed by web APIs&lt;p&gt;- Unix-like style of composing commands using pipes.&lt;p&gt;- Visualization using HTML&lt;p&gt;For instance, cp -r &amp;#x2F;gdrive&amp;#x2F;&amp;lt;username&amp;gt; &amp;#x2F;home will backup the contents of your Google Drive to your desktop (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://pigshell.com/v/0.6.2/doc/gdrive.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;pigshell.com&amp;#x2F;v&amp;#x2F;0.6.2&amp;#x2F;doc&amp;#x2F;gdrive.html&lt;/a&gt; for details). Replace &amp;#x2F;home with &amp;#x2F;dropbox&amp;#x2F;&amp;lt;username&amp;gt;, and the same command will back up GDrive to Dropbox. And so on.&lt;p&gt;While it is already useful, there is still some work, especially around hardening the file abstraction&amp;#x2F;APIs (and reams of documentation) before before it can be horizontally expanded to support a bunch more APIs and cloud stores. I am actively working on these and expect they&amp;#x27;ll take ~2 months.</text></comment>