Author: David O'Toole
Updated:
Universal shell
This is a Universal Shell inspired by the Symbolics Genera operating system. In designing ushell I started with what I could learn about Genera from the various manuals I was able to get a hold of, and also watched a fascinating video (link below) of a user playing with Genera. I'd like to extend it with a few ideas of my own, and hopefully the result will be something unique. You can see a 20+ minute video of Genera at http://www.lemonodor.com/archives/misc-gems/lispm.mov.gz My first thought after seeing it was "I just saw the Emacs of the future." Some old Genera manuals can be found at http://www.andreas.org/genera/Programming%20the%20User%20Interface.pdf Features of ushell: - A mega-extensible self-documenting command-line interface for absolutely everything---Emacs Lisp, Common Lisp, UNIX programs/shells, etc. inspired by Symbolics Genera - Comprehensive mouse support - Generic data presentation UI makes different interfaces possible - Interactively construct calls to any function/command/UNIX program/whatever, by choosing arguments with keyboard/mouse - Command output can be plain text like a normal shell, or clickable text (such as a pop-up menu for every file that appears in a directory listing), or a picture, or an interactive dialog box with options and a "go" button. You can save the entire log as a sort of history, and save commonly-used forms for later re-use. - Integrated event notification and logging system. - Undoubtedly boatloads of other stuff.