[ge-talk] Vision for a usable commandline

[Ari Haviv]

On 1/10/07, Adrian Sanabria <adrian.sanabria at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.


What about VMS? Sorry mom :)
I'm in favor of maybe something like cygwin or perhaps a parallel "made for
haiku" cli alongside bash/terminal

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.


ported apps are good to begin with but there is a danger you end up looking
like another linux distro with gtk+ apps like gimp.
That is why i speak of a vision...to get people to think of new ideas now
and possibilities for the future.

We need to get off the ground but once we're secure, we shouldn't be scared
to change. Apple and linux *must* be unix so we have a unique opportunity
that they don't. But that doesn't mean we have to change right away. We just
shouldn't say we *must* be like unix or any other OS

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.


yes, firefox is probably the strongest argument for posix. It's not easy to
make a browser compatible with the world wide wild web and it has the best
real world compatibility of any non-IE browser. Still, people complain it's
slow, bloated and not multi threaded.

The mac people care about their OS. We need some of that. For example, they
know that firefox isn't doing something right when it uses its own spell
checker instead of the macos spell checker.

Our OS isn't just a place to have the same old apps run a bit nicer but also
pushes people to consider new ways of how apps should work. and look like.

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.


Are you talking about Windows users ? They will be scared by haiku being too
unix like. At least I believe the deskbar should be on the bottom and
control-c should be default for copy :)

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


This is glass elevator and I hope we can discuss even crazier far out ideas.
look at the Nintendo Wii. Lower specs and even the die hard halo fans want
it because it completely changes the way people play video games.
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