| "I can't even count the number of times I wanted to pipe an output of one program into multiple others ... " There's nothing stopping you from doing that. Back in college I wrote a Unix shell (as part of a class project in Unix Systems Programming) that, in theory, could do that but I lacked a decent syntax for doing so. Perhaps that's an argument for a GUI, but what you ask for is certainly possible (although the semantics of piping multiple programs into one is hard to resolve, at least in my mind. Do you interleave by characters? By line? User specified? How?). Also, writing an "ls" that output "objects" is also quite trivial, but the tooling required to convert (or write from scratch) existing command line tools is large. Also, the semantics can get quite rough. "There shouldn't be any ASCII flags or switches-those (if really needed) should be an array of objects ... " Again, I can go back to the shell I wrote in college. The arguments to a program were stored in an array. In fact, that's how you had to specify the arguments, as an array. It was an interesting shell, enough to get me an A in the class, but I never used it as an interactive shell. Typing commands (which were first class objects, by the way) was a pain. But boy could I sure could pipe stderr to more and stdout to a file. Perhaps what you need to do is try to implement your own shell that works the way you think it should work. You could be the one to implement a sane CLI ... |