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Whipping up a new Shell – Lash#Cat9 (arcan-fe.com)
86 points by JNRowe on Oct 18, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments



Great to see someone rethinking what running command line programs could look like! Too often the shell or terminal is just replaced with a reimplementation of roughly the same thing.

Warp seems to be the most serious attempt in this direction but takes a more conservative approach and doesn’t reinvent as much.

I can think of a couple of interesting possible variants of a shell such as this:

1) The text grid is probably not necessary for the shell itself to use, so you could have the input box be a normal text editor with mouse support for instance. You could even potentially manage running and completed programs via a more conventional GUI.

2) I often deal with remote machines, it would be nice if the shell had support for running commands on remote machines (reconnecting if the connection is dropped, running the same command over a set of machines, etc)

Great work on this new shell!


> A big change is that it is communicating with the display server directly

I'm curious how you imagine using this over SSH. With X forwarding? Or you'd run SSH inside "Lash#Cat9", and revert to a traditional shell on the remote machine?

There are some very interesting improvements in here. I especially like keeping the output of each command in its own buffer, and separating stdout from stderr. I quite frequently need to re-run a command, except pipe its output through some sort of filter. With "Lash#Cat9" I imagine I'd run the filter on the in-memory buffer instead, which could save a lot of time.

I'm not sure hiding the commands that give no output is helpful. It's quite often useful to be able to see exactly what you've done, so that you can maintain a correct mental model of the state of whatever you're doing. I suppose the "Lash#Cat9" answer would be to have the computer expose its state explicitly, rather than have the user maintain it privately.




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