| > 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. |