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Comment by mprovost | Hacker News Reader

It feels like we're in a third wave of innovation in Unix CLI tools. The first was from BSD in the late 70s/early 80s which considerably improved the original Unix utilities, then the GNU tools rewrite in the late 80s, then there were the dark ages of System V. I give ack (and Andy) credit for starting this latest wave around 2005 but it's really taken off lately with tools being rewritten in Rust and challenging the old status quo.

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The only way for 3rd wave to work is if multiple distros agree to adopt it. Since these tools don't even agree on an interface, IMHO it wouldn't be much different than what we have. I also don't like the fact that some tools native skip things like what's in ".gitignore". I don't want a tool that does that by default. If there was a consortium to standardize a new *nix CLI, then maybe it could get some traction.

There was a consortium, and it did standardise Unix, and that's when everything stopped moving in the 90s. Standards are compromises and so all the commercial Unixes had to implement the lowest common denominator. Thankfully GNU didn't care, and the BSD tools were already better.

What was the consortium? I'd like to read up on it. LCD isn't always a bad thing, as it tends to weed out the niche one-offs.

Pick one... during the Unix Wars [0] there was X/Open [1] vs Unix International (aka AT&T) [2] and the Open Software Foundation [3] (which eventually merged with X/Open to form the Open Software Group). And then the IEEE got involved with POSIX which ultimately "won" as the lowest of the LCDs. [4]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X/Open [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_International [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Software_Foundation [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX

Thanks! Once I moved from University to corporate america, I never looked back at the history of *nix standardization. And looking at these links, I feel awfully naive suggesting another consortium.

Well, like zsh, and many other improvements on the shell, and gawk and other tooling that doesn't match other awk engines and so forth... you end up having two parallel realities. One for scripting, where you use the bare minimus that is acceptable to run on any server and it's guaranteed to be there, and then your user env where you have all your fun tools.

The cool part is network transparency and forwarding environments and other things that plan9 plays with so that you can work locally, remotely.

I know it's asking for the world, but some way to do better "built in modularity" would be great. Like "whatever new shell" plus a standardized "plugin system."

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