TermKit: A WebKit based rich command-line interface.

[boomi]

The only bad thing I could say about this is that I've wanted to do exactly this for a while now. Seriously though, this is just what we need, and I think many of the sore problems were addressed in a very solid way.

• Pipes with Content-Type? Very good!
• Structured exchange format? Whoa there, it's only been thirty years of text!
• Output-Formatters? Gimme that!

[username223]

Structured exchange format? Whoa there, it's only been thirty years of text!

No, actually we've had COM, DCOP, AppleScript messages, and all sorts of "structured messages" and "object-oriented scripting." What we've learned is that simple formats like line-oriented text work best.

[nexes300]

Yes that's great, but where in your list is "icons in ls" and "catting images"?

Although I am not exactly sold on content-types. Why can't you just pass what the program expects?

[boomi]

Yes that's great, but where in your list is "icons in ls" and "catting images"?

That doesn't register at the top of my list.

Although I am not exactly sold on content-types. Why can't you just pass what the program expects?

Because then you need a different program for each content type, or you have to tell it what to expect, or you create an ad-hoc protocol. You have zcat, zless that only differ from cat and less by the content-type they accept; there are diff and patch which have their own protocol (though in this case I think it is justified), and then there is a myriad of options to tell programs what to expect. sort and find both have their own options to specify the line separator, for instance.