[ge-talk] Vision for a usable commandline

[Niklas Nisbeth]

Unix isn't meant to be easy to use, it's meant to be powerful. sed and 
regular expressions are nice once you get to know them. there's a 
learning curve, yes, it takes time, yes, but the point is that once you 
get over that learning curve you'll find that bash and the Unix tools 
is a very valid and very friendly way to work. Just because you can't 
get to grips with it by looking at it doesn't mean it's a bad design - 
it is not!

The reason Haiku must comply to posix standards (and hence be unix-like 
in some way) is that apps written for Unix can then easily be ported 
and a native gui put on top of them.

The idea of an object orientated command line is an exciting idea, 
obviously (a visual command line is one of the things I want to do at 
some point in my life), but I think there are much more pressing needs 
to attend to.

/NIklas

> We see all these UI's built on top on unix, including the unix 
> commandline.
> Even mac is now built on unix. I am always surprised why they would 
> be proud
> of such a unuser friendly system of sed, awk and ls. Haiku also uses 
> the
> unix interface but there is no why reason why we must. Apple on the 
> other
> hand is trying hard to be a real Unix and is even paying for official
> certification. This leads to an opportunity in a world of linux, BSD 
> and
> mac.
> 
> My vision is for an OS based on file versioning, objects and index 
> database
> (including indexing the files). Everything is an object, including 
> the
> folders and the trash and desktops are special objects. All reached 
> from the
> commandline. The CLI would have a consistent and intuitive structure. 
> it
> shouldn't wipe out your files if you make a mistake. It should be 
> easy for
> my mom to use.
> 
> But my mom is probably not like your mom. :) She loves VMS, which she 
> no
> longer uses...she also likes SQL. I'm also thinking of my brother who 
> is
> studying for a MCSE. Sysadmins also want a modern usable CLI
> 
> Haiku has great scripting capabilities but most people don't know any
> scripting language. Those who do, learned javascript first because 
> they
> copied from other websites and picked up the language piece by piece. 
> Since
> it was default scripting in browsers, there were plenty of examples
> available. It is English based so while you still had to learn the 
> syntax,
> you have still something to hold on to.
> 
> That is why Haiku needs a default scripting language. You can use any 
> you
> want but people will be able to learn how to script applications 
> through
> examples...as long as it doesn't look like ASM or unix. I know that 
> syllable
> uses orca/rebol as their default. And the new commandline would have 
> a
> similar, consistent syntax.