[ge-talk] Vision for a usable commandline

[Ari Haviv]

On 1/10/07, Adrian Sanabria <adrian.sanabria at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, if the Wii is common inspiration, then we're on the same page. It changed the way people play video games, and you can still play every Nintendo game ever made on the one console.
>
> The cygwin approach sounds like a good one. VMS? I'm using its bastard grandchild right now (XP Pro).

cmd.exe on XP has nothing to do with VMS. That's basically ms-dos. VMS
was easy to understand but also had pipes, indexed files and
versioning. You can tell it was designed by 1 organization. Every
command is syntax checked and the whole line is bounced if a single
error is detected. (still, confirm isn't default. Otherwise it would
be "user friendly")

The things XP and VMS have in common are the kernel and also the case
insensitivity

Here's a nice list of VMS vs unix commands
http://www.physnet.uni-hamburg.de/physnet/vms-unix-commands.html
and more in depth:
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/732FINAL/9996/9996PRO.HTML

It's good to study different cli's just as it is good to study
different gui ideas.
Why should all the innovation be focused solely on the GUI?

> The original BeOS seems like the best inspiration as far as app compatibility goes. Porting posix apps was a possibility, but there were many advantages and incentives to writing native apps. The result was many native apps that were nicer to use, and in many ways superior to the Windows/UNIX competition.
>
> I don't want to say we must do any one thing or another, but I used Alphagrip as an example for a reason. Great idea + great product + HUGE learning curve = Limited sales.

Yes and that is why linux has a big problem, even with all the so
called easy to use DE's and distros. You still end up dealing with a
very unintuitive console. With Haiku i don't have to use the CLI. But
I would like a CLI that people would want to use. Convert the masses!
:)

> Of course, the Wii is the perfect example, because it demonstrated that revolutionary changes in design don't have to result in a huge learning curve.
>
> --Adrian

Games would have to be rewritten to deal with the new interface. So it
does expect a bit more from developers.