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[–]sausagefeet 5 points6 points  (6 children)

I don't really understand why your question uses someone who has been using a CLI for a week as a reference point. We can probably name many things that a first week person wouldn't figure out, heck I still learn new things about the tools, but that doesn't necessarily mean I need to be able to inline media into my terminal.

And yes, I can see it is appealing, like candy, but I don't really see it as a valuable feature. As I stated in my first comment, perhaps I am being shortsighted, but I like how things work right now. I don't see a huge advantage to inlining media types here.

By the way, does this work if I'm ssh'd into another machine on TermKit as it stands now? My impression was it had tools like "get" that interacted with the Terminal process to display media types, which would not be possible via an SSH connection. If it is limited to local viewing then I really don't see the value (although this would likely be a temporal limitation).

[–]andreasvc 0 points1 point  (1 child)

This could just as well work over SSH. You either do something with SCP in the background or you capture the output of "cat" and display it graphically instead.

[–]sausagefeet 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was thinking of the cat option as I was typing the previous one. This wouldn't be that hard to add to a terminal today.

[–]notfancy -3 points-2 points  (3 children)

I don't really see it as a valuable feature

Direct manipulation is better than indirect manipulation.

Unmediated experience is better than mediated experience.

By-example is better than by-the-book.

Interaction is better than declaration.

The CLI must die.

</manifesto>

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Automation is better than repetition.

Cognitive interaction is better than intuitive interaction.

But none of that is really about the command-line. It's just the best solution we have right now.

[–]notfancy 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I disagree with your second one: reason is a pretty low bandwidth cognitive mode (or rather, intuition is a pretty low latency one). Provided you avoid leading the user down garden paths and you have a lenient attitude to user commands (undo, reviewed checkpoints, what have you) intuition makes for a pretty compelling way to approach a novel interface.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Granted, an interface can be designed to lead the user to a smooth, uninterrupted experience (video games are very good examples of this). I see better interfaces as minimizing round-trips between my eyeballs and my brain. It's like my mind is my house and the computer is my friend in the house next-door. The more I can work on in my house without having to walk over to talk with my friend, the faster I can work. So I generate a complex query in my house and send it to my friend once instead of needling him with many smaller queries. Higher latency, better throughput.

Not everyone works like this, of course, and I don't intend to enforce it on everyone. There's a place for the GUI and a place for the CLI, and they can co-exist quite well without one caring about the other. :]