Greetings. Connor Lane Smith wrote: > On 22/10/2011, Patrick Haller <201009-suckl...@haller.ws> wrote: >> Hickey kicks unix because although pipes = composability, output and >> input = free-form text. We combined data exchange with user interface, >> and user interface usually won that fight. >> >> Say data exchange won; would it help us to rewrite our programs to >> output JSON and our shells to pretty-print* JSON? > > You pretty much just described TermKit [1]. I think there is something > wrong with the shell paradigm, but I'm not convinced JSON-structured > IO is the right approach. My suggestion in the earlier mailing list > discussion was to allow programs to draw directly to the terminal, in > little Xembedded frames, but of course that change only improves the > interface: to avoid "let's all write parsers" you'd also have to come > up with some kind of typing system like TermKit's MIME headers. Also, > the representation of data would be a concern of each program, not of > the terminal, which would probably result in ugly.
There were escape codes that allowed drawing basic things in a terminal. Another example how to do it is w3m[0], but this requires too much legacy code. It's still less than having more than one parser and a whole VM for the description lang- uage, like the web would require. Sincerely, Christoph Lohmann [0] http://w3m.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/w3m/w3m/w3mimg/
