[ge-talk] Vision for a usable commandline

[Adrian Sanabria]

I don't see any reason why you can't do both with the command line. Start
with a UNIX-based command-line, keeping backwards-compatibility with the
UNIX commands that many of us are already familiar with from using Linux,
UNIX, and even BeOS. Then build on it. I don't see anything wrong with
having more than one way to do something on the command line. You can please
the old hackers and UNIX crowd, while competing with new tech like
Powershell. Command line apps are generally small, so having extra
functionality shouldn't result in much (if any) bloat in the OS.

As far as POSIX compatibility, I don't see any other way to go. That was
always a great benefit of the original BeOS, that it (usually) didn't take a
lot of effort to port a UNIX app over to it. The benefit of POSIX vs. Win32
porting is that all the OS-side stuff is open, published and available with
a huge amount of open source apps just waiting to be ported over. Most of
the software on the Windows side that is open source was ported from Linux
anyway, and usually uses Cygwin libraries to run on Windows.

Bottom line is that you don't want to create huge learning curves, and
incompatible APIs while trying to create the perfect OS. You'll end up with
a great idea that no one will use. You were pointing out the strategic
placement of BeOS back in the MacOS9 days. The important difference back
then was that people cared about the OS. Nowadays, people care about their
apps. THAT's the first thing they want to know when they use an OS, "Where's
Firefox? Does it run on this OS? Why not?". You don't want to start from
scratch on monolithic apps, like a web browser. Netpositive was great back
then, when we were viewing the equivalent of webpages written on stone
tablets, but these days, everyone expects their Web 2.0 sites to work
flawlessly, or they go somewhere else.

I agree that we shouldn't implement a broken idea in favor of backwards
compatibility, but at the same time, we don't want huge learning curves to
kill public interest. 99% of people are too scared to try something new that
is too different.

Just for the record though, should we go the "all new" route, I'll still be
one of the %1 plugging my Alphagrip <http://www.alphagrips.com> into Haiku.

--Adrian

On 1/10/07, Ari Haviv <arielbhaviv at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 1/10/07, Niklas Nisbeth <niklas at nisbeth.dk> wrote:
> >
> > 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!
>
>
> What design? :)
>
> This is what we and unix have to compete with. The Microsoft power shell:
> http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh.mspx
> http://arstechnica.com/guides/other/msh.ars
>
> 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.
>
>
> Are you saying haiku must have "backwards compatibility" and legacy just
> like Windows and linux are stuck? One could also say that haiku needs win32
> api's so that thousands  of Windows apps could be ported to Haiku. There are
> a lot more Win apps than posix and most people think they are better.
>
> I mean if someone just wanted posix apps with a nice GUI there's gnome,
> kde or even macos X. We need to be better. It made more sense for BeOS in
> the macos 9 days because then Be could say "we have a mac like GUI with the
> powerful unix cli" but there is less difference now.
>
> 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
>
>
> I want to put everything on the table. Even the color picker... :)
> I also like the idea of integrating graphics with the console. do you mean
> visual as in icons in the console or visual as in visual basic?
> like
> http://cosycmd.thetaxitau-software.qarchive.org/
>
> I'm more concerned about the functionality than about how nice the
> interface is. I could perhaps tolerate the unix style but the standard unix
> tools can't deal with our meta data and filetypes very well, the concept of
> indexed files, vms style file versioning or os/2 style object templates and
> objects in general like the trash concept.
>
>
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