[gravypod]

What is this intended on fixing?

I don't think the solution to anything is to make the shell more user-friendly. The only solution is to make the graphical user-interface more user friendly and feature full.

The only time it should be acceptable to be forced to use a shell, in my opinion, is if you are swapping out your desktop environment.

Until that happens, Windows and OS X will rule the desktop and PC market.

I'm fairly certain that Linux-based distributions will win out in the end if we can overcome this clingy gravitation to a command line. It's already happening already. Android is already winning against all of the major phone platforms and it's not because of it's award winning terminal emulator.

[regularfry]

> The only solution is to make the graphical user-interface more user friendly and feature full.

There's only one feature that matters here, really: composability. Provide an environment in which I can compose simple tools into complicated workflows I can fling data through, and we might have a winner.

> The only time it should be acceptable to be forced to use a shell, in my opinion, is if you are swapping out your desktop environment.

Why should that be true? It's not at all obvious to me. I have yet to see a GUI that lets you express something like `grep '^127' /etc/hosts | awk '{print $2}'` in any sane fashion. The closest you get is something like LabView, but that's counted out here because it's a general purpose(ish) language.

If your response is that this type of task is artificially skewed towards a text-based, shell-centred environment, then you don't have the type of problem that this shell is intended to fix.

[gravypod]

> I have yet to see a GUI that lets you express something like `grep '^127' /etc/hosts | awk '{print $2}'` in any sane fashion.

I think we are in a very interesting time in computer science history where he have a huge slew of technology that solves a large set of problems that no one wants to exploit.

I could easily see an "assistant" type window being created in a desktop UI. Since we don't need a "windows" key in the linux world, I'd assume that would be used.

My ideal system would allow me to go into a text document, click the windows key, and say "grab me every line from /etc/hosts that starts with 127"

When the job would be completed, I'd see a check mark or something and the result would either be pasted to my cursor or, if my cursor wasn't in a text box, copied into my clipboard or something.

While this might sound like magical science fiction, it isn't. Neural networks, NLP, and HCI fields are doing some amazing things. The only problem is these are harder to implement then a simple terminal and pipe.

That is a sane way of interacting with a system that is user friendly.

In the same way, it could also handle other complex things. IE: "open my browser", "open the Internet", "list all the things connecting to the Internet", "open the last document I was editing in my text editor"

This is doable, albeit extremely difficult to implement well, but doable.

[regularfry]

I think you might have missed the subtlety here. The interesting bit isn't `grep '^127' /etc/hosts`. It's `|`. There are umpteen ways to launch individual applications, but nobody's yet come up with quite such a flexible, simple and expressive way of getting them to communicate as streams of text.

[JdeBP]

... although that is a canonical Useless Use of grep. (-:

* http://porkmail.org/era/unix/award.html#grep