Interactive Shell

Project Goals

• Research for Oil: How Interactive Shells Work
• Testing the Interactive Shell -- for Oil Releases
• Alternative Shells -- a big list
• Headless Mode

Other Collections of Links

• http://evmar.github.io/smash/related.html

Rich Command Shells

• Rich Command Shells (Hacker News Comments) -- Nice article with screenshots!
• pigshell (Github repo) -- "unix the web". Type "cat /usr/doc/README.html" there. Pretty interesting.
• Xiki / https://github.com/trogdoro/xiki -- nice screencast. You can interactively navigate the output of "ls". This project actually had a Kickstarter campaign, although some people seem to complaining about the lack of status updates.

Rich Terminals

• https://domterm.org/ -- A terminal emulator based on web technologies. Beyond solid xterm compatibility, it supports powerful features for REPL (read-eval-print-loop) consoles: Application output can have images, rich text, and links, with structure-based line-breaking (pretty-printing), and folding.
• hyper (https://github.com/vercel/hyper) A Terminal Built on Web Technologies. Built with Electron.
• TermKit -- Interesting but defunct project that makes the Unix paradigm graphical.
• Terminus: A Terminal Supporting Inline HTML
• Schirm -- nice screenshot / animation
• Rat -- Compose Shell Commands to Build Interactive Terminal Applications. Uses git log as an example.

Models for Integrating Commands and Graphics

• repl.it: CLUI: Building a Graphical Command Line (Comments) -- decision tree of commands, autocomplete, auto-generated UI, construct commands with mouse too
• Oberon -- An operating system that more tightly integrated text and graphics
• A Tour of Acme -- Acme was inspired by Oberon.
• Integrated development window manager -- A simple shell script.
  • https://github.com/andrewchambers/godothecorrectthing
• guish - Write shell pipelines at the command line with a GUI editor - HN comment

Writing User Interfaces in Shell

• The Ultimate Guide to Terminal User Interfaces in PowerShell
• ble.sh from How Interactive Shells Work

Non-ANSI Terminal Emulators

• saneterm - Modern line-oriented terminal emulator without support for TUIs.
• Similar to using an Emacs buffer as a terminal emulator

IDEs

• RStudio -- Has a REPL and different types of panes for displaying an interacting with data. Notably, the entire IDE runs on the desktop and it runs in a browser. I think this is done with Google Web Toolkit.
  • Oil will borrow the model of R data frames (as well as borrowing from enhancements like dplyr, data.table)

Protocols

• List of Jupyter Kernels -- how do they work? There is a bash kernel. How does it do completion? What hooks does oil need to support kernels?
  • IBash Notebook -- Has the ability to display images inline with the display command. Two problems: buffering, and interacting with REPLs you spawn. These seem like pretty big problems.
• Microsoft's Language Server Protocol
  • Protocol History -- Is this suitable for shell? Oil will have functions, so at the very least we want to complete function arguments, as well as command line arguments. I think common queries are for declarations and uses, which apply in big shell programs as well.

JavaScript Libraries for the Browser

• TerminalJS -- Terminal emulator in JavaScript

Implementation Issues

• Two Types of Command Line Interfaces by Thomas Ballinger
  • Richer Terminal Applications
• Buttery Smooth Emacs -- nice observations about legacy architectural decisions and fixes for them!
• Adventures in Terminal Emulators -- terminal emulators involve parsing, keyboard/graphics, and Unix/libc interaction
• Typing with Pleasure -- Nice article about typing latency. I can feel the difference in typing latency when I hit Ctrl-Alt-F1 for a text mode terminal vs. when I'm in an Ubuntu desktop, and especially a web browser.
• Terminal and Shell Performance -- Latency distribution for different terminal emulators. How did he measure it?

Essays / Articles

Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces -- I agree with almost all these ideas. Current UIs are bloated and slow. Terminals are good but limited. They need graphics, images, tables, mouse interactivity, etc.

Projects

• haberman/vtparse Terminal Parser

• AWS Shell – An integrated shell for working with the AWS CLI - Hacker News

  • I'm not sure if this particular tool makes use of it but saws uses the python-prompt-toolkit - https://github.com/jonathanslenders/python-prompt-toolkit
  • This is interesting, although shoul should interactivity be built into the shell itself. Programmability of Python is a plus.

• tmux-xpanes - Awesome way to create multiple tmux panes. - Interesting idea. Like a graphical xargs.