Hotwire: a combined terminal/GUI for GNU/Linux (Free Software Magazine) [LWN.net]

Hotwire: a combined terminal/GUI for GNU/Linux (Free Software Magazine)

Posted Jun 25, 2008 9:45 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Hotwire: a combined terminal/GUI for GNU/Linux (Free Software Magazine) by walters
Parent article: Hotwire: a combined terminal/GUI for GNU/Linux (Free Software Magazine)

But anyways, so the basic idea is that now we have these libraries, what if your shell was more of a *direct* interface to those libraries, and what if it made it easier to transition to using those libraries, just like how you would in a real program?

Aah, right, so rather than writing little tools that just consist of a library call, we can turn it upside down and write tiny library functions that do little more than run a tool :) I suppose that works just as well: the hard part is getting there from here ('cos a lot of stuff, especially older stuff and the filters that are most useful on the command line, are *not* wrappers around libraries --- yet.)

Transitioning to a more widely used VM with Python support seems like a good idea. I suppose the historical problems with using the JVM, at least, aren't so significant anymore (the historically enormous JVM startup times are much smaller these days, and it doesn't matter so much because you only take that hit when you start Hotwire as a whole).

Your Hotwire-specific decorators are nice enough that expecting people to produce them doesn't seem incredibly harsh: of course it's generally the people who write the language bindings for whatever-library in (Python|Java|C#) who'll need to do that.

Regarding ps(1) in particular, it used to be a pain in the butt to handle in days of yore when every system had a radically different ps(1), but even if you have to be portable to systems without libproc, a combination of 'ps -o' and a small wrapper function allows you to inspect output really quite easily. (I long ago wrote a C wrapper which allows you to feed I/O in and out of pipelines directly from functions with persistent state, generator-style, and I'd be amazed if others hadn't written similar things. I should make it public, I suppose, but it barely seemed worth it, and the code, well, it still looks like it was written by a fifteen-year-old).

(hotssh looks really quite neat as well.)

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