Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it) [LWN.net]

Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it)

Posted Feb 18, 2012 5:54 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it) by tshow
Parent article: Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it)

Congratulations, you've just described PowerShell. Oh, there are differences from you description, but the end result is mostly the same.

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Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it)

Posted Feb 18, 2012 20:42 UTC (Sat) by tshow (subscriber, #6411) [Link] (2 responses)

Not really. There are some similarities with PowerShell, but (to me, at least) PowerShell doesn't go nearly far enough. From what I can see, it's just a REP loop front-end for the .Net framework, with some shell functionality worked in.

Which is better than cmd.exe was, but it's not nearly enough.

I should write the whole thing up properly and put it on a web page.

As an example, I don't believe you can use PowerShell to create widgets that sit inline in the terminal. It's .Net, so you can presumably create windows with things in them, but you can't (for example) create a scrollable list or a progress bar inline in the terminal text.

I don't believe PowerShell has screen-like functionality, though I could be wrong.

As far as I know, PowerShell has no equivalent to the named buffers scheme I'm proposing, beyond possibly being able to hamfist it through global variables.

As far as I've seen, PowerShell is still expecting to run on a terminal running a monospaced font, and has no way of breaking out of that mode.

I could go on. And I'm not saying PowerShell isn't a step forward in some ways. But I think we can do way better.

Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it)

Posted Feb 18, 2012 21:40 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

>Not really. There are some similarities with PowerShell, but (to me, at least) PowerShell doesn't go nearly far enough. From what I can see, it's just a REP loop front-end for the .Net framework, with some shell functionality worked in.

And very powerful introspection capabilities.

>As an example, I don't believe you can use PowerShell to create widgets that sit inline in the terminal. It's .Net, so you can presumably create windows with things in them, but you can't (for example) create a scrollable list or a progress bar inline in the terminal text.

You can, by working with the terminal directly. But it'll be more like ncurses programs.

>I don't believe PowerShell has screen-like functionality, though I could be wrong.

I've seen utility which allows to detach and attach to a running PowerShell server. Essentially, the 'screen' utility but with some missing functionality.

>As far as I know, PowerShell has no equivalent to the named buffers scheme I'm proposing, beyond possibly being able to hamfist it through global variables.
?

>As far as I've seen, PowerShell is still expecting to run on a terminal running a monospaced font, and has no way of breaking out of that mode.
Not really, posh can be run just fine in complex GUI. It's mostly output-agnostic.

Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it)

Posted Feb 20, 2012 6:15 UTC (Mon) by alecs1 (guest, #46699) [Link]

Please do create that page. I would expect that companies that try to make money out of Linux should pay for the kind of work that could advance Linux to new grounds. Ubuntu has finally come up with something very interesting, HUD; but I'm expecting more from them :) (maybe something like you describe).