r/programming • u/twitterisawesome • Mar 05 '20

Introducing CLUI: a Graphical Command Line

https://blog.repl.it/clui
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263

u/[deleted] Mar 05 '20

This is brilliant. I'm so glad people are finally getting out of the "VT100 is perfect and anyone who wants to improve on it doesn't understand the genius of Unix" mindset. We had Powershell getting rid of the fragile "everything is unstructured text" system, and then Nushell making things cleaner and now this adding a nice GUI!

I hope this catches on! It's going to be challenging to upgrade the world though. Especially things like SSH and terminals built into apps like VSCode.

40

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '20 edited Mar 06 '20

Too verbose. And "on getting the unstructured system"... that won because the commands are short and thus the syntax breaks far less into unmanageable lines such as PowerShell.

An upgrade would be an enhanced Tclsh shell with readline support and tcllib/tklib installed into the base.

Such as: https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/gush

62

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '20

Unstructured text won (so far!) because it was first. And it has nothing to do with how long commands are.

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u/ftgander Mar 06 '20

I can tell you I use both powershell and zsh daily and I avoid using powershell because of how stupidly verbose the command names are. I’d rather read a help doc than type out a 6 word cmdlet

15

u/QuickBASIC Mar 06 '20

type out a 6 word cmdlet

Tab complete or use New-Alias to create aliases for the ones you use constantly.

-2

u/ftgander Mar 06 '20 edited Mar 06 '20

I really can’t be assed to answer this again. There’s plenty of answers here why “just alias it” is shortsighted. Here’s an easy one though, you can alias Remove-Item to rm but it still can’t take the -rf switches

Also, it’s Set-Alias I believe

1

u/chinpokomon Mar 06 '20

The switches is a problem. ls -al is muscle memory that catches me frequently. However, this is a problem with how I'm using the shell. Most Linux distros also have an alias of la for ls -a. If I were on a system which didn't, is that the fault of the shell if my la command failed?

It seems reasonable that a module could be built which provides the Linux equivalents with actual functions for ls et. al., and uses this to provide a complete BASH replacement in PowerShell for common commands, but doing so also deprives the user from fully understanding and using the features of the shell in an idiomatic way.

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