Re: Command-line completion

[prev] [thread] [next] [lurker] [Date index for 2005/02/02]

From: peter (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: Command-line completion
Date: 13:20 on 02 Feb 2005
> Personally, I'd like an interface environment for CLIs that wasn't
> already outdated by the end of the 1970's. Why can't it, for example,
> overlay a temporary window on the shell (which you can even do in
> ANSI, for fuck's sake, so it's not like it'd break SSH) or would that
> be too cutting-edge?

I wrote a screen-mode shell in 1979. It ran on a PDP-11 with 64k
of address space. To make room for the display, it saved the
environment to disk and used the 1k of extra space it recovered by
overwriting argv/envp.

The code's long lost, alas.

The best screen-mode shell I ever saw was by Tektronix (I think).
It was kind of like the DOS screen-mode shells, but it incorporated
a command line interface and whenever you did anything through the
curses interface it showed the command equivalent, so you could
learn the shell through it.

Despite all that, I found the shell more useful. I have never found
command completion worth the break from the shell to bother with.
I have aliases that use find and grep, and they are much more
"rekeyable" in history.

In fact (to stay on topic) I hates all these user-coddling shells,
they get in my way, and annoy me. Thank god you can still turn all
the options and flags off.

Oh, and "color ls" delenda est.

There's stuff above here

Generated at 23:00 on 03 Feb 2005 by mariachi 0.52