Sometimes it seems like I'm the only person that doesn't feel like they need "a better shell". This topic comes up a lot on HN.
Maybe if a better shell came along I'd be surprised, not knowing what I was missing. Perhaps I'm just in the dark or not imaginative enough to conceive of what one would look like.
With that said, whenever the discussion comes up, it seems to revolve around user specific workflow cases and "do what I want you to do, not what I tell you to do" design patterns, that would (from my perspective at least) feel hard to get right for everyone. As a result, we have lots of different shells now that make different trade offs and take different design approaches. That's great, right?
I don't know -- I'm rambling I suppose, I just don't ever really feel like Bash (or fish/zsh/whatever) is holding me back or making my work more difficult than it needs to be. We can argue about the esotericisms of shell scripting and how it's silly to emulate old terminal escape sequences in virtual terminals, but I feel like it misses the point.
I don't know, I'm certainly willing to change my mind here, it's just that for all of the problems I have day to day in sysadmin/programming job functions, the shell is the least of my worries most of the time.
Have you tried magit? Not a serious user myself, but for many, many folks it is way better than using git on the command line (or via any GUI). When he says he'd like that type of interface for all command line utilities (like tar), I can appreciate what he's referring to. Much more discoverable than reading man pages.
Thanks for the reply.
I do use magit, daily, and I really enjoy it. I think what I don't understand about the OP's point is that, why is that the shells problem? Tar is a utility that works great, and is typically pretty easy to use on the CLI. If however, I don't particularly like it, or would rather use a GUI that's totally understandable.
The OP could even implement one in elisp for emacs.
I guess my thought is that, why is the burden on the author of this magical new shell to write a piece of software that can GUIfy tar, than the user of tar who doesn't like it's ergonomics? Maybe that's not what the author is saying, but to me it just seems like something not really related to the shell, or a discussion on shells.
If you like using GUIs, find a GUI for tar, or write one. I don't say that to be flippant, but more to reiterate my misunderstanding of how this relates to a discussion on shells.
> I think what I don't understand about the OP's point is that, why is that the shells problem?
I think to understand his point, substitute "universal text interface" with "shell".
What he really is describing is something very Emacs-like, but with a better config than you normally find in Emacs. He'd like most command line utilities to automatically have a magit-like interface through some universal spec/language (i.e. so that each utility doesn't have to create the interface independently).
Tar is one of those utilities that many people, including me, can never remember the options. I can relate to him on that one. If I had a magit like interface for tar, I'd be really happy.