@mrseeker i don't wanna scroll up and down through a wall of text just to use a computer program, it's not 1970

@jk I don't like to scroll through a book either... But having to press "next" multiple times is not funny either...

@mrseeker well i mean it wouldn't be designed like THAT obviously, because that's also bad. i'm talking about designing something good rather than bad, if i wasn't clear!!!!!!

@jk You mean something like Microsoft does with writing code, where it automatically predicts your next command?

@mrseeker not really, that kinda thing never really worked for me!

^^ the thing is with this whole idea, and maybe something that's readily misunderstood by computer-programmer-type-people, is that it's not about "Creating A New Paradigm", "Devising An Elegant System", etc.

it's about taking things we already have and improving and refining them based on how users actually use them. going back to things we rejected in the past and retrying. working hard & iterating on an existing design to make many small improvements - something that nobody ever wants to do!

@jk thank you for saying this, that's a thing about computer programmer type people that I've lost patience with (as a lapsed (okay, failed) programmer person myself)

@jk I think it's simpler than that and you're just undervaluing the complexity of a terminal input
the lexer can expand certain commands to recursive sequences, and that's something you can never do with any kind GUI

@Efi yeah i just want something in addition to the terminal input for when the terminal input is not enough! i don't want the most powerful thing in the world, i want the thing that's the most useful to me, because i never end up USING any of the features of the most 'powerful' or elegant systems

@Efi generally the more powerful any kind of interface to a computer is, the more you have to do upfront inside your brain in order to use it. i'm personally not that interested in power and elegance for its own sake, i want the computer to be transparent to me, and help me as much as possible, because i am dumb!!!

@jk then why are you using the terminal in the first place???

@Efi the terminal looks nice to me, it's unadorned and functional, works well for keyboard-only input, and using it is pretty much the only way to do many Mid-Sized Computing Tasks (like: more than you can get done using 'windows explorer' or 'notepad', but smaller and more informal than writing your own script or piece of software)

@jk so what you want is a semi-terminal that can run commands on complex objects in an smart way...
maybe there's a way to do that, but it sounds like a very big task

@Efi semi-terminal is exactly how I'd describe it yeah

@jk that is a big problem to solve, because as you increase the complexity of a tool, the complexity of its explanation grows exponentially
look at sed, it's a very simple tool, it takes a <text thing> and returns a <text thing> modified with a regex pattern substitution
it is unscrutably complex in what it -can- do

@jk i've wanted a standard machine-readable interface description for CLI stuff for ages.

i think people have done interesting things with parsing manpages (explainshell?), but it all feels a bit ad hoc.

anyway: when i think about early text interface models that worked well, it seems like a lot of people have forgotten how much we used to rely on menu systems, and how generally useful they actually are because human memory is pretty crappy.

@brennen exactly! What I want is a Discoverable Shell, something more than just "a regular shell but you hit Tab sometimes and suggestions come up"

@jk one thing i've been fiddling with is this idea where cumulative shell history would be used to build up a per-directory menu of past commands and oneliners.

in practice there's a bit too much noise in "commands i have run in ~/code/foo" to just make for an immediately useful menu system, but i think combined with annotation / tagging of history, there's something there.

@jk i wrote https://github.com/brennen/commandlog as a start on this, and have been experimenting with RASH - https://p1k3.com/2017/1/24/ - which is featureful but also kind of buggy.

also sorta interesting as a piece of plumbing is https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

@jk @brennen
It might be possible to produce theme tagging for commands with something like word2vec: creating a base model based on all the man pages in man3, then creating models for each individual one, determining command similarity via semantic distance, and then using another language model based on all documentation to expand the set of tags.

That way you can build a thematic search into the shell the same way you have a history & path search.

@sanspoint yeah, those kinds of systems were probably going in the right direction (i think quicksilver still exists, there's a few others now)

@jk It does, but I'm all in on LaunchBar. I prefer how it handles iTunes libraries.

@sanspoint when i was using OS X more i used Alfred, which was nice given that you could set up custom stuff quite easily! although all I really used it for in the end is to launch apps and occasionally "kill all running apps" when the desktop is looking too stressful

@Efi i mean that's the idea, to defeat the command line, to destroy the command line, to go beyond the command line!!!!!! (for tasks that are appropriate, obviously. the command line is good for a lot of stuff)

@Efi @jk * #Xenofeminism voice* If The Command Line Is Unjust, Change The Command Line.

@lain I've wanted to try it for a while!

@Dex as usual with powershell, it's "really cool feature that's super powerful, implemented in an extremely ugly way that fails to convince people that it's as cool as it really is"

@theoutrider fish is a lot like this idea, except adapted to a regular shell interface so that it seems a bit more 'normal' to people, and with less discoverability etc