[arh68]

> In your program's design, the 'cat' program would handle all kinds of file i/o, provide some kind of ncurses text GUI to select a file, a progress bar for the progress of text flowing through it, sending errors to a logging subsystem

Not at all. cat wouldn't have a ncurses GUI, that doesn't make sense. My point is that 'cat --verbose' should be an option, where the stdout doesn't change but extra crap is sent elsewhere, and probably just dumped on the terminal like stderr. I sometimes want to see extra context and line numbers in my grep searches (grep -nC 3 ..) but I might want the stdout to remain clean. This makes programs more composable. Right now it's like we've got stdfmt permanently redirected towards stdout.

In practical terms, vi does its own paging. It's not a wrapper over echo | ed | less. One giant monolithic subsystem. Perhaps vi is the exception. But dd offers a progress bar, but only if you send it a SIG of some sort. wget offers a progress bar by default (silence is golden? not so much). ls yields differently columned outputs to ttys or files. I suppose this is the simplicity of Unix that I shouldn't touch.

Some unix tools work really well already, and I'm not suggesting destroying tar or xargs. I'm not sure how systemd works into this, but I'm not really a fan of that.

I guess Plan9 wasn't Unix, either.