[ge-talk] Vision for a usable commandline

[Niklas Nisbeth]

> Valid point. However there's many ways the ordinary CLI can be 
> improved. TBH
> I don't have much experience with UNIX-like shells, but plenty with 
> Window
> XP's cmd.exe, and I think some little things would go a long way in
> improving the experience. Not just tab-completion, but also small 
> things
> like icons for quick recognition of filetypes,

> copy&paste that actually
> works from GUI to CLI (does the BeOS shell have that actually?), and
> drag&dropping a file causing the filename to be pasted into the CLI.

We have that. As does OS X, and I think GNOME, and KDE, and XFCE too. 
I'm surprised that Windows doesn't, actually.

> Or
> clicking on a filename in a directory listing in the CLI doing the 
> same, or
> double-clicking to open it. Stuff like that.

See this is where it gets complicated (and interesting!). UNIX commands 
just dump text. The terminal doesn't know anything about the text, and 
once the output from a command is printed, the terminal doesn't care 
about it anymore. Clicking output would mean a complete redesign of the 
core concepts of how the terminal works, I think - and as for icons in 
the terminal, I think it'd be much better to just add a bash-like 
prompt that attaches to Tracker windows :)

/Niklas