Ted Leung on the air
Ted Leung on the air: Open Source, Java, Python, and ...
Tue, 23 Nov 2004
Room for command line improvement

Michael McCracken is interested in a shell with better auto completion functionality. I use zsh because it's had super auto completion functionality for a long time. At the hackathon, someone, Ben Laurie, I think was recommending the "new" bash-completion, because it would help with all those gpg commands. The zsh autocompletion for gpg can also complete people's user id's which goes beyond what bash-completion does (today, at least). I've been impressed, though, with how fast the bash project is improving. I'd love to see a similar thing for zsh.

In any case, neither of these will produce a code completion style of UI for the command line, which seems to be at the heart of what Michael is asking for. It seems like it shouldn't be that hard, since zsh can already do incremental-search through its history, so it seems like it would be a matter of gluing the appropriate code together.

At the hackathon, Ben Hyde showed me McCLIM (I think) running under OpenMCL, which would be another source of good ideas for improving the command line experience.

Thinking about shell improvements inevitably led me to thinking about the new MSH that will be part of Longhorn. Jon Udell had a great introduction which demonstrated some of the nice features of the shell. I'm glad to see Microsoft taking a new approach to the command line. Most of what we have is many years old, and I can't believe that we've exhausted all the ways of making command line interfaces better.

[22:25] | [computers/programming] | # | TB | F | G | 1 Comments | Other blogs commenting on this post
You can subscribe to an RSS feed of the comments for this blog: RSS Feed for comments

Add a comment here:

You can use some HTML tags in the comment text:
To insert a URI, just type it -- no need to write an anchor tag.
Allowable html tags are: <a href>, <em>, <i>, <b>, <blockquote>, <br/>, <p>, <code>, <pre>, <cite>, <sub> and <sup>.

You can also use some Wiki style:
URI => [uri title]
<em> => _emphasized text_
<b> => *bold text*
Ordered list => consecutive lines starting spaces and an asterisk

Name:


E-mail:


URL:


Comment:


Remember my info?


twl JPG

About

Ted Leung FOAF Explorer

I work at the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF).
The opinions expressed here are entirely my own, not those of my employer.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Now available!
Professional XML Development with Apache Tools : Xerces, Xalan, FOP, Cocoon, Axis, Xindice
Technorati Profile
PGP Key Fingerprint
My del.icio.us Bookmarks
My Flickr Photos


Syndicate
RSS 2.0 xml GIF
Comments (RSS 2.0) xml GIF
Atom 0.3 feed
Feedburner'ed RSS feed

< November 2004 >
SuMoTuWeThFrSa
  1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
282930    

Archives
2006
2005
2004
2003

Articles
Macintosh Tips and Tricks

Search
Lucene
Blogs nearby
geourl PNG

Categories
/ (1567)
  books/ (33)
  computers/ (62)
    hardware/ (15)
    internet/ (58)
      mail/ (11)
      microcontent/ (58)
      weblogs/ (174)
        pyblosxom/ (36)
      www/ (25)
    open_source/ (145)
      asf/ (53)
      osaf/ (32)
        chandler/ (35)
        cosmo/ (1)
    operating_systems/ (16)
      linux/ (9)
        debian/ (15)
        ubuntu/ (2)
      macosx/ (101)
        tips/ (25)
      windows_xp/ (4)
    programming/ (156)
      clr/ (1)
      dotnet/ (13)
      java/ (71)
        eclipse/ (22)
      lisp/ (34)
      python/ (86)
      smalltalk/ (4)
      xml/ (18)
    research/ (1)
    security/ (4)
    wireless/ (1)
  culture/ (10)
    film/ (8)
    music/ (6)
  education/ (13)
  family/ (17)
  gadgets/ (24)
  misc/ (47)
  people/ (18)
  photography/ (25)
    pictures/ (12)
  places/ (3)
    us/ (0)
      wa/ (2)
        bainbridge_island/ (17)
        seattle/ (13)
  skating/ (6)
  society/ (20)



[Valid RSS]

del.icio.us linkblog

www.flickr.com

Blogroll

java.blogs
Listed on BlogShares

Locations of visitors to this page
Where are visitors to this page?


pyblosxom GIF