Comment by Tycho | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tycho | Hacker News Reader

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I find Unix usability standards generally pretty insane. Funny he should post this, as on the train today I was thinking of making a program I'd call 'SmartTerm' or something which would basically be a more usable, graphically augmented terminal for beginners (or people who just can't stand interfaces which depend on memorization and patience).

Some things I find nuts about the current terminal is OS X (at least the default behaviour) are:

- half the line which you need to write in is taken up by repetitive info like User, Time, and Directory

- put the currend directory somewhere useful like the title bar

- when i start to type a command, give me graphical autocompletion automatically (unless i switch it off), along with a note/tooltip explaining what the command does

- after i've typed command, give me a pane somewhere which explains what all the stupid flag options are and what they do

- give me another pane with an audit trail in plain english of what my commands have accomplished, and then give suggestions on how these could be accomplished using simpler shortcuts (especially in something like Vim. give me some help to learn the shortcuts as i work, FFS. on a GUI you look at the keyboard shortcuts beside the menu items, and get to know them naturally. this would also give you some confirmation that your command worked as expected, rather than just a blank prompt staring back at you

- let me highlight text with shift and arrow keys

You can edit the user prompt[1] in most shells as well as the window title[2] in xterm. There's also a command-line editing mode in bash[3].

   [1] http://www.linuxselfhelp.com/howtos/Bash-Prompt/Bash-Prompt-HOWTO-2.html
   [2] http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Xterm-Title-3.html
   [3] http://www.catonmat.net/blog/bash-vi-editing-mode-cheat-sheet/

> especially in something like Vim. give me some help to learn the shortcuts as i work, FFS. on a GUI you look at the keyboard shortcuts beside the menu items, and get to know them naturally.

This. I hate both vi and emacs for not having a usable menu system that lets me browse through and learn the commands as I go.

I also think bash-completion, while a huge step forward in usability, really should have focused on integrating command option help from the beginning. So, in addition to a man page, each command line utility would need to bundle a machine readable key-value list of (option, help string). Then when I type <command> -<TAB>, it would show me that help.

Pretty sure Emacs has menus:

http://jrock.us/emacs-menus.png

It does. The problem is, the terminology in the menus is completely inscrutable (i.e. many commands are named unintuitively), the menus are poorly organized, they have a small subset of all the commands, etc. I've never been able to learn any of the shortcuts from the menus.

In the end, it's your fault because you don't want to learn. Emacs does not have "cut" and "paste", it has "kill" and "yank". They are different terms because they have different semantics.

Enjoy programming in Notepad.

I've always wished the terminal would be upside down, so that new typing would happen at the top. Then you could put a bunch of descriptive info in the title bar and still wouldn't have to move the eyes much.

This is why I placed my xterm title bar at the bottom and it works like a charm.

- you can edit your bash prompt and clean it completely if that satisfies you, - I have no problems to remember exactly where I am the most of the time and if I forget I can type pwd - graphical autocompletion is useless in keyboard controlled interfaces as it hides part of the screen and takes the same number of keystrokes to reach a result - we call it man and if you are late for your date, -h - you are in front of a tool, not a teacher, rtfm - no comment

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