Announcing TermKit

Having looked into the implementation a bit deeper, I have to say two things. First, I love the concept. This is what the shell I run on my desktop should look and act like.

Second, the implementation is an abomination. It's at best a neat mockup of what the shell _could_ be, but very little of this implementation is actually usable or desirable for a Real Shell Replacement.

The protocol between applications needs to be defined in a way that seamlessly integrates with native, non-JavaScript tools. e.g., perl could be able to be used without changes; output from a previous command is just read as raw bytes and the Perl output woudl be automatically tagged as untyped data. Any common reusable code needs to be in a nice C library that can be easily reused in non-WebKit-based implementations, e.g. a TTY-friendly shell that can still use fancy text markup to give the user extra information even though it can't display icons or images. The WebKit UI needs to be a shell on top of an enhanced UNIX environment, not a view into a server process that only knows how to communicate with a browser.