Linux Shell Replacement

[Jon]

A few months ago I read a news article somewhere in the internet about a guy that had developed a new shell for Linux, it allowed for graphics alongside the command prompt and looked fantastic from a usability perspective. I can't for the life of me remember what the name of this shell replacement is called, this is a long shot but has anybody heard of this graphical shell replacement?

[just brew it!]

Nope, never heard of it.

I'm also having some difficulty picturing what "graphics alongside the command prompt" even means -- care to elaborate on that at all?

[Jon]

In the article I watched a video where the guy demonstrated what the new shell was all about. He could load images inside the shell alongside the text. This wouldn't trigger the startup of another application and then view the image inside that app. There were a host of other features that made it look like a really modern-day shell replacement. I'm grasping at strings here.

EDIT: It could have been a Terminal replacement. It looked fairly next-gen to me.

[just brew it!]

The only thing that immediately springs to mind as an example of this sort of thing is the xkcd CLI interface they implemented a couple of years back as an April Fools joke. (It's amazingly functional -- when you tire of viewing old xkcd strips via CLI, try typing "wget <any valid URL>" for example -- and also contains various Easter eggs that reference everything from old text-based adventure games to other xkcd strips.)

[arsenhazzard]

Pretty sure you're talking about TermKit

[Jon]

Pretty sure you're talking about TermKit

That's exactly what I was looking for....thanks!

[just brew it!]

Looks interesting.

I especially like this:

It makes me wonder, when sitting in front of a crisp, 2.3 million pixel display (i.e. a laptop) why I'm telling those pixels to draw me a computer terminal from the 80s.

It's actually worse than that -- the width of those terminals (80 columns) was designed to match the number of character positions on an IBM punch card... which was designed in 1928!

(The sector size of the original 8" floppy disk was dictated by the punch card as well. Each sector needed to be able to store at least 80 characters, so a sector size of 128 was chosen, since it was the smallest power of 2 which was greater than 80!)

[notfred]

I don't see it catching on, look at the first two screenshots in the article. In the first (a standard terminal) an ls has output 7 lines with room for more, whilst in the second (a termkit terminal) the ls has only output 5 lines before needing to scroll. As a developer, context is everything and scrolling sucks whilst you are coding.

[thegleek]

The only thing that immediately springs to mind as an example of this sort of thing is the xkcd CLI interface they implemented a couple of years back as an April Fools joke. (It's amazingly functional -- when you tire of viewing old xkcd strips via CLI, try typing "wget <any valid URL>" for example -- and also contains various Easter eggs that reference everything from old text-based adventure games to other xkcd strips.)

Here's something that most people haven't tried with that xkcd shell:

Code: Select all

:(){ :|:& };:

Hilarious! I typed that in, and it simulates a crash like a fork bomb would do!

[Flatland_Spider]

I don't see it catching on, look at the first two screenshots in the article. In the first (a standard terminal) an ls has output 7 lines with room for more, whilst in the second (a termkit terminal) the ls has only output 5 lines before needing to scroll. As a developer, context is everything and scrolling sucks whilst you are coding.

He's a Mac guy, what do you expect. He doesn't do any real work on it.

There are some good ideas there, for remotely managing boxes. Why couldn't the output of ls be linkable like a webpage? Think of this, issue ls and get a list of folders and files. Right click on a file and launch the application to interact with the file. Click on a folder to open the folder, right click on the folder to get a list of subfolders.

The application could be setup to login to multiple servers at the same time, and could report back the status of each issued command. [There is pssh, but we're not talking about what program had what feature first.]

It's an interesting concept. It's not wholly original and kind of a band aid when the userland tools should probably rewritten instead, but it's still interesting.